Midwife charged in DC? Karen Carr, CPM...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I had a planned c-section that went exactly as planned and resulted in a healthy baby and healthy mom. I recommend it highly.

Cannot imagine what is going through the heads of people opting for utterly untrained birth assistants, but it must be bad.

They know exactly what they are doing. And they pick Karen Carr specifically for her experience with high risk births that no one else will touch. The WaPo article was pretty disingenuous.

They don’t know what they’re doing. That’s kind of the issue.

[Anonymous]

I personally had low risk pregnancies, did research, and ultimately went with certified nurse midwives for two home births that went just fine. I wanted home birth not for crunchy granola reasons but to minimize unnecessary medical interventions; As far as I could tell at the time, if you were low risk and your midwife was a CNM, the home birth/hospital outcomes data seemed pretty similar, with fewer c-sections in the home birth cohort. My CNMs believed in judicious use of medical technology. No way would they attend breech or twin births outside of a hospital.

Reading that WP article, it appeared that the midwife (1) was not a medically trained nurse (2) took on high risk cases like twins and breech babies for home birth (3) at the very least failed to adequately document what was seen/done during a birth that was supposed to be low risk.

Breech and twin home birth seems really unwise to me. That said, I think it definitely should be legal for a woman to birth where she chooses, because of her right of body autonomy.

But should it be legal for a **licensed professional** to assist at home with what will be a high risk birth? I think that’s the tricky question.

If women are to truly have choice regarding their body and control thereof, would prohibiting a licensed midwife to attend high risk home births either (1) effectively negate choice or (2) result in more bad outcomes when women resort to unattended births? Say it is a mother who will refuse to go to a hospital for religious reasons, no matter what, is it not better for them to have someone trained assist than for them to try to “free birth” or have someone with no training?

The couple with the breech baby in that article were **turned away** by a CNM practice. They sought out another midwife who would do it and found Carr. If she had not agreed to help them, what would they have done? Go to a hospital maybe? Find someone with less experience? I don’t know.

I do think luv ensure should mean something. For example, I don’t think a licensed heating/AC professional or electrician should be allowed to help you set up some kind of electrical situation in your home that has a good likelihood of burning your whole house down. The whole point of licensing is to protect people by setting boundaries around what is acceptable professional behavior.

I don’t know the answer to these questions but to me it is complicated and the WP article didn’t really get at some of nuance here. I do think it hit the nail on the head with regard to the transparency issues. Although, in fairness, how easy is it to know the track record of physician ob/gyn?