Lamaze Conference

We're home, both kids are sleeping, and it's time to update about the Lamaze conference. I met several bloggers face-to-face for the first time, including Amy Romano of Science & Sensibility, Mom's Tinfoil Hat, and Reality Rounds. I also met some amazing LDS women at the conference. We had lots to talk about and I left wishing that we all lived closer. One of them had an idea for a book that I loved and now I have yet another project I'd love to work on--once I get my other ones done, that is.

Can I just say that I love Lamaze's focus and mission? The Lamaze Six Healthy Birth Practices, all based on the best available evidence, should be what every woman in labor receives. They are a great place to start in our efforts to improve maternity care: simple, clear, evidence-based, and universally applicable to all laboring women.

Dio was a real trooper and made it through almost the entire four days with very little fussing. By the end, though, I could tell he was really bored. He'd played with all of his toys, he'd been in the same rooms for days on end, and he was ready for it all to end! After the last speaker, we went into our hotel room and he had a nice long afternoon nap and we all felt better after that.

A camera phone picture of Dio on a makeshift "bed" (two chairs pushed together). He had just woken up from a nap.

Here are some things I noticed at the Lamaze conference.

• Widespread frustration with the lack of evidence-based care at hospitals
• Sentiment that often the only way to have a normal birth nowadays is to go to a birthing center or have a home birth
• Frustration that childbirth educators can talk to pregnant women, get them informed of their options and the best evidence-based research, help them make a birth plan—and then it all falls apart in the hospital and they keep seeing these “train wreck” births where the woman gets every intervention she didn't want and the woman seems stunned by how nothing she asked for happened
• A desire to have physicians working on the same page as them, but a deep cynicism that that would ever become a reality—sense of hostility between CBEs, doulas, and other birth workers and physicians/hospitals, even as they would like to work cooperatively, not antagonistically
  
• Frustration with hospital protocols, routines, and guidelines that hamper what women are “allowed” to do and often compromise good mother-friendly and baby-friendly care
• A sense that we’re still facing the same problems and frustrations we were 2 or 3 decades ago, that little has changed overall
• Agreement that many hospital-based providers have never even seen a truly normal, natural, physiological birth at all (and many of the attendees, themselves nurses, agreed on this one)

It's getting late and I feel like my brain is shutting down. Read more specifics about the conference by Mom's Tinfoil Hat's Highlights of the Lamaze Conference and Reality Rounds' Reflections.