OBs looking to reduce a woman's right to choose
Image via WikipediaFrom the Huffington Post, we see a new battleground in reproductive rights and a woman’s right to choose. The AMA, decided to support legislation:
“that helps ensure safe deliveries and healthy babies by acknowledging that the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital” or accredited birth center.
So the AMA is against ANY women choosing to give birth at home, which appears to be based more on turf management than evidence.
Given that the human species requires birth as a requirement for survival, and given that for the vast majority of our existence, said births did not occur in a hospital, it seems a little far-fetched to me that the birthing process is a medical condition requiring the full resources of a hospital, especially when evidence exists that the process is safe for low-risk mothers and on the flip side, use of fetal monitoring has been shown to increase surgical procedures in low-risk pregnancies, without showing improvements in outcome.
This highlights the issues we face in helping consumers make appropriate health decisions. Under the guise of guidelines and professional expertise, we see all kinds of interest groups making broad statements that push their own agendas, rather than helping individuals determine the best course of action for them (will your doctor give you a personal risk vs. side effect analysis prior to putting you on a medication?)
Until we understand risks to the patients at the margins of the studies we’ve done, its irresponsible to default to more action/expense against the wishes of patients. Simply taking results in high-risk populations and generalizing benefits to lower risk is junk science and further reduces the credibility of our once proud profession.
