Reply to Midwife -- How does it work?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Also, to answer your other question, if you deliver in a hospital with a midwife practice, you will be able to have an epidural, just like with an OBGYN.

The midwife or the OBGYN doesn't administer the epidural, they will call in the anesthesiologist to do it.[/quote]

[i]Eh, not necessarily. Some midwife practices are very anti pain relief and will actively discourage and attempt to withhold it from you. [/quote]
[/i]
This isn't true at all. Stop fear mongering. [/quote]

This is entirely true of the GW midwives. They require you to be committed to natural birth (ie this means no pain relief) as a criteria for enrolling in their practice. And if you use homebirth midwives (which range from CNMs to CPMs to CMs—as there are several types of midwives with varying degrees of experience and training) cannot administer an epidural—only an anesthesiologist can do that. They also may not be able (legally) or willing (based on philosophy) to administer IV pain relief medications like fentanyl.

OBs have far more training that midwives. They are trained in physiologic birth like midwives are and can also fully handle all complications of labor and delivery—including operative vaginal delivery (forceps, vacuum) and perform C sections. Midwives cannot do any of these procedures. So if you deliver with a midwife and have complications you need to be in a collaborative care model so there is a plan to transfer care appropriately to an OB—but that means it is fully contingent on your midwife to make that call at the right time. Sometimes this works well, other times it does not, especially in cases when the laboring mother is at home and has to transfer to a hospital meaning precious time is lost. [/quote]

In my experience, although they did require a commitment to "natural" birth, they were also the ones to recommend an epidural when I had been pushing for hours with little progress.  Note, I am not promoting them--I actually had a pretty lousy experience with the GW midwives--but did want to offer a data point about their epidural practices.[/quote]

DP here (also with a not-great experience with GW Midwives, coincidentally), and unless I'm misremembering my first meeting with them, they do perform both forceps and vacuum delivery.  I remember I was like, "how is that a selling point?  that sounds terrifying" and the MW told me it was less scary/dangerous than a C-section.  I think the above PP might have more agenda than facts.[/quote]

I had a forceps delivery and would never say it was less dangerous or scary than a C section. It caused massive damage to me and injured my baby as well. I will have planned C sections for all future births and would not recommend forceps as being preferable. The injuries they cause are well known, which is why they are used in less than .5 percent of all birth in the US. [/quote]

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