Laborist noun; from Louis Weinstein, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital 1.
(employment for
Generation X and Y): depending on the hospital for one's livelihood ~ income or resources 2.
( individual): doctors who work full time in the hospital, do only labor and delivery and work
shifts of no more than 12 hours (from Arnold Cohen, Albert Einstein Medical Center):
specialization,
predictability
Reliable Deliveries:
New specialty for “laborists” emphasizes maternity room work
(Philadelphia Inquirer, December 15, 2007)
This article poses Generation X and Y as the fall people for the economics of maternity care
being in need of enhancement. If we are to believe this then we are to blame this same
generation for assembly-line birth (start at induction and end your flow chart at
episitiomy+forceps/vacuum or cesarean), obstetricians requiring a greater number of births
in order to bill for and be able to pay for malpractice insurance (whether for poor use of
interventions or mistakes made by lack of sleep) and office overhead costs and the
dehumanization of birth. Those are some heavy charges to lodge against these young
people and on behalf of the many young and older parents who have come through our
birth classes we feel a need to set the record straight.
Parents are searching for “care” providers. Knowledgeable, skilled and normal birth
experienced men and women who still hold a baby’s first seconds and moments in our
world as being wondrous, joyful and sacred. Parents are searching for men and women who
refuse to work robotically pushing crowds of women down a birth chute without names,
identities or beliefs. Parents, who while appreciating the conveniences of technology for
things such as researching information, have never stopped believing that healthcare should
consist of nurturing the whole body and preserving whole health with invasive procedures as
a final option.
America may not rank up there with Cuba and other countries with better maternal and
infant mortality outcomes but we do not believe that Americans or parents around the world
prefer medical birth to normal, human birth.
The Midwives Model of Care, defined by the Midwifery Task Force, is alive and well, although
if journalistic pieces such as Reliable Deliveries continue to make it through the editorial
process it may be harder for the public to learn about it (and some might argue that the
dehumanization of birth will continue to rise as a fault of the media’s integrity).
Under the Midwives Model of Care, which is “based on the fact that pregnancy and birth are
normal life processes”, quality birth care includes:
• Monitoring the physical, psychological, and social well-being of the mother
throughout the childbearing cycle
• Providing the mother with individualized education, counseling, and prenatal care,
continuous hands-on assistance during labor and delivery, and postpartum support
• Minimizing technological interventions
• Identifying and referring women who require obstetrical attention
“The application of this woman-centered model of care has been proven to reduce
the incidence of birth injury, trauma, and cesarean section.”
Across all other fields of health care there is a return to patient-led
care. So we ponder what is going on behind the scenes that the medical schools
churning out obstetricians feel a need to keep women and babies in the operating rooms
but to pay med school bills.
