1 in 5 women experienced mistreatment from medical staff in their last pregnancy
npr.org
npr.org
Ideally, the wife is in a focused state of mind with as little anxiety as possible (and as much rest as possible).
We had previous births before at this hospital, but with midwives who were banned during Covid (they aren’t as profitable) - so not this time. Without the midwives there to block unnecessary questions, we were bombarded with so many questions and suggestions for interventions we weren’t interested in. Very distracting (everyone should count how many questions someone about to be in labor has to answer - even those with detailed birthing plan documents).
The strangest was my wife being woken at 3AM by someone asking for two more blood draws because they wanted to be extra certain they know her blood type. With our history at the hospital (multiple births, growing up in the town), this was probably going to be her 10th draw in history to answer that question.
Wide politely declines and the technician is shocked.
That’s when I realized that there is probably some actuary in Chicago or somewhere whose excel sheet says the risk of the wrong transfusion goes down by 0.02% if you draw blood before labor. Unfortunately the excel sheet doesn’t optimize for anything else.
My takeaway was that we need to change from saying “this reduces risk” to something with analogies. Risk reduction along one axis at the expense of all others seems to be a critical failure of the current western system.
“Drawing blood now is like wearing a life vest while you are driving a car next to a river” (or is it like BASE jumping without an instructor?)
1) For what it's worth, you don't know for sure why they wanted to draw blood again. There might have been some other reason, that they possibly didn't do a good job at explaining to you. I guess there's a disconnect between doctors who might order tests, and the people who actually draw blood, leading to bad communication all-around.
2) Like with most people, I think the medical profession as a whole is bad at sensible risk-management. I'm not a doctor, but I think they get a lot of training on what to do to avoid lawsuits, and this guides a lot of their thinking more-so than common-sense and sensible care. This probably guides a lot of unnecessary tests where a doctor might think something like "Yeah they don't really need to do that test again, but their insurance will pay for it, and I can eliminate the possibility of being sued if I play things by the book."
I hope it goes without saying that I don't want anybody to be mistreated or even to feel like they're not getting proper and supportive care, but I really wonder about some of these self-reported incidents.
Some really dumb people might describe a doctor saying something like "I told you this before. You say you want a healthy baby, but you need to quit the recreational drug use and drinking while you're pregnant" as verbal abuse.
You can come up with a million scenarios like this during the course of a pregnancy where an idiot might interpret a doctor's genuinely compassionate efforts to help them as "abuse".
This is taking about actual birthing.
There is little, if any, individualization at hospitals. It's a pretty horrible place to have a baby. Invasive care, constant interruptions, questioning decisions, sometimes IGNORING decisions entirely to do whatever the heck they want. Threatening to cease care if you don't comply, yep.
Honestly, I'm surprised the numbers are this low. Most people probably just comply with everything, that's the smoothest path through.
Please correct me if my interpretation of the article is incorrect, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
For what it's worth, the report mentions maternity care, pregnancy, and delivery care.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/s0822-vs-maternity-m...