Saturday, December 1, 2012
Birth Center to Open In Youngstown, Ohio
I haven't blogged much lately because I've been working on a ton of new projects, the most exciting of which is a freestanding birth center in Youngstown, Ohio (What is a birth center?). Our goal is to provide an additional option besides hospital or home birth to women in the Mahoning Valley. We are starting the build-out now, and hope to be open very early in 2013. Please follow the birth center progress on our website!
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Rachel, There is a great article in the Wall Street Journal today (1/19/13) entitled:
ReplyDelete"Healthier Births and Babies—With Midwives"
Some really excellent reporting. A couple of quotes:
"The key was taking a more personal approach, with a focus on prenatal care, in the style of British midwives. While Americans treated birth as a medical event performed on the mother, British midwives learned that birth was a physical event, performed by the mother.
In 1923, Mary Breckinridge started the Frontier Nursing Service in rural Appalachia. At that time, nine women died for every 1,000 births in the U.S.—a rate 100 times higher than we see today. And in these deep hollows, where people were cut off from medical care, the risk for pregnant women was even greater. Breckinridge changed all that when her horseback midwives began riding out into mountain snowstorms to deliver babies by candlelight.
The women the Frontier Nursing Service cared for, who were desperately poor and usually gave birth at home, were 10 times less likely to die in childbirth than the average American at the time."