Book recommendations 70

Even in your capital city, though?

I wasn't actually thinking about home births. Home births in NSW last year were about 0.1% of all births -- to compare, 0.4% were in the didn't-make-it-to-hospital group. About 3.5% were birth centre births (remember that our birth centres are usually *inside* our hospitals). More than 95% of births were vanilla hospital births.

Are the nurses in US delivery units *not* midwives? What are they, then?

AFAIK we have no direct entry midwives; our midwives are all nurses who have done specialist training. Perhaps this accounts for the different relationships between mws and obs here. My previous pregnancy was handled through the midwives' program (ie, I chose to see mws rather than obs for antenatal care) and the first ob I saw was the bloke sbreastching me afterwards. However, my impression of my hospital this time around (when I am seeing obs) was that the mws would only call in the ob during delivery if a problem developed... and I'm a high-risk patient. That is, the mws steer everything, and bounce the complicated cases to the obs. The obs do not stand over the mws and tell them what to do.

I think a lot of Australian women would probably think an out-of-hospital birth unsafe too, but birth practices in our hospitals are (as I recently posted in response to Larry) much more "expectant" than they seem to be in the US. It is quite plain, for example, that women are expected and encouraged to move around in labour at my hospital, and that the baby is placed on the mother's stomach immediately after birth.

Dang, you foreigners are so... foreign :-)

-- Chookie -- Sydney, Australia (Replace "foulspambegone" with "optushome" to reply)

"In Melbourne there is plenty of vigour and eagerness, but there is nothing worth being eager or vigorous about." Francis Adams, The Australians, 1893.