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From: cm@unc.UUCP (Chuck Mosher)
Newsgroups: net.med
Subject: Midwives / Infant Mortality
Message-ID: <490@unc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 25-Jun-85 15:35:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: unc.490
Posted: Tue Jun 25 15:35:51 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 27-Jun-85 06:44:31 EDT
Organization: CS Dept., U. of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lines: 40

I was going to respond by mail to the physician who countered my
request for more midwives by touting statisitics on infant/mother
mortality but I lost the article, so ya'll have to suffer through
(but it will be good for you!).

The following is quoted from the book _Safe Alternatives in Childbirth_,
published by NAPSAC (National Association of Parents and Professionals
for Safe Alternatives in Childbirth), 1976.  It is actually a collection
of papers given at a conference.  The title of the article I am quoting
from is "Childbirth Alternatives and Infant Outcome:  A Pediatric View"
by Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD, ACHO.  He is a Professor in the Dept of
Preventative Medicine at U of I, and Vice President of the Society for the
Protection of the Unborn Thru Nutrition.  It is a great article and I would
like to copy it all, but I will include only that section that deals with
the subject at hand.

"Do doctors deserve the credit for the fall in infant mortality over the
 past 70-80 years?  Or perhaps, infant mortality was very low centuries
 ago when midwives delivered babies at home.  When the female healer,
 including the midwife, was eliminated through the witch hunts of the 17th
 and 18th centuries, male doctors took over.  They had one characteristic
 that midwives did not possess -- i.e. they performed autopsies.  And they
 had a nasty habit of going from the autopsy table to the mother in labor
 without washing their hands or, judging from old pictures, without even
 changing their bloody gowns.  Is it any wonder that childbirth fever -- 
 puerperal sepsis -- became the greatest killer of the times?

 Finally, of course, toward the end of the 19th century, Ignacz Semmelweiss
 told the doctors "wash your hands, you damn fools," for which his final
 reward was incarceration in an insane asylum.  And, as the male doctors
 began to wash their hands, childbirth fever began to disappear.

 Now, my concern is that modern medicine has taken credit for the decline in
 infant mortality, but understandably enough, has never considered assuming
 blame for its previous rise."

 It may also interest everyone to note that the Netherlands has one of the
 lowest (if not the lowest) infant and maternal mortality rates in the 
 world.  No, the US in not in second place, it is somewhere around 15th!
 In the Netherlands almost all births take place at home, attended by midwives.