FEMINIST SURVIVAL KIT

PRENATAL HEALTH CARE What is a feminist pregnancy? Will our prenatal experience be fear, confusion and isolation? Or can it be hope, understanding and sisterhood? Until very recently, the chances of feeling hope, getting understanding or enjoying sisterhood were very few. We young "primaparas" (women having their first child) are especially cursed with an ignorance of our bodies and our natural functions; we are burdened with neverending myths and supersitions about childbirth and motherhood and we are isolated from other women who share our condition.

Amongst all of the burdens and pain there are glimmers of hope. Some of the old witchcraft has survived underground and is resurfacing in the new climate of fighting feminism. And some of the new spirit of motherhood is exposing and weakening the Big Birth Industry

Good witches are making a comeback as midwives. Mary Breckenridge founded The Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing in 1925 in the nearby hills of Kentucky. It has been struggling along ever since those first brave nurses got tired of going overseas for training in order to help rural women who have little or no access to doctors or hospitals. Maybe they are better off that way, because with the service of the Frontier midwives they now have a maternal death rate which is 1/3 that of the country as a whole. Here in the land of plenty, the maternal death rate has risen steadily since 1970. With only 12 schools of midwifery training 100 students a year and the use of midwives by doctors is actually declining precipitously yearly, we need more women like Mary today. Some of the Frontier graduates can be found working at Metro General Hospital but laws and hospital policy prevent them from venturing outside the hospital walls to practice the methods they have learned.

If we fail in our attempts to deliver within the hospitals we have to resort to cab drivers, police, firemen anyone except trained professional midwives. And if we deliberately choose a home birth well then we deserve to be denied competent medical care by the well-entrenched Bi Birth Industry. A few renegade bands of midwives practice home birth in California and New York. But there appears to be no one flaunting the law and the almighty American Medical Association in Cleveland. Perhaps one day there will be.

MESS

Peg Morse is heavily involved in making life better for women in Cleveland. As a medical social worker she has come to focus her activities on prenatal care.

And then, of course, there is our sister, Good Witch Adele Davis, may she rest in peace. She is the wonderful nutritionist who spent a lifetime debunking the drug madness of the pharmaceutical industry and the junk food industry. If you still believe that prenatal iron, geritol and twinkies are great for mama, you haven't read Adele.

Don't forget Congresswoman Griffith who is sponsoring a bill to force hospitals to admit fathers to the birth ceremony (you can write letters).

And what of the nurses who violate hospital protocol to practice medicine in the absence of doctors. Many a woman has been saved from bleeding to death in a drugged stupor by an attentive nurse. What about the women who are saying "no" to doctors, hospitals and families at the risk of their lives in order to change the way things are. And the women who, long after their own children are grown, carry on the work of the La Leche League to teach other women about breast feeding. They also gather stores of human milk for infants who cannot digest any formula and whose mothers cannot produce it for them.....and the women who train themselves to conduct the Lamaze natural childbirth classes. All these women are our sisterhood.

Continuing in this optimistic vein let us examine some of the avenues to change we find open and available now. Then as our foresisters have thought of us and planned for our well being, let us plan for the future progress of our sisters and daughters.

What can be done

There are two things a woman can do in gen-

KIT

According to Peg, who has a rather optimistic point of view, pregnancy is a crucial time in a woman's life for making changes. Changes which involve greater independence for her. self and a better way of life for the members of her family and intimate circle of friends. Pregnancy and preparation for pregnancy can be a time for breaking away from childhood training and conditioning, and establishing new patterns. For instance: completely Ichanging food and diet habits for the better, changing to roles which involve much more Iresponsibility and decision making, learning labout our own bodies and psychological strengths. But, she explains, we have to keep in mind that pregnancy is a time of severe stress, both mental and physical. And to cope with it she prescribes good nutrition and the help and support of good friends, professional and other. wise.

page 6/What She Wants/March, 1975

AND

eral: 1) strengthen her mind and body with knowledge and si terhood and food and exercise 2) plan to take cha le and control of her own pregnancy,

For your mind

You can read the good books reviewed on the next page. You can visit the Preterm Clinic or the Free Clinic for a self-examination lesson to learn about your own body. You should know the maternity leave policy of your employer and provisions of your union contract, as well as your health insurance plan. Foreknowledge is the key to control.

For sisterhood you can turn to the Lamaze classes (natural childbirth) and the La Leche League (breast feeding) groups where you will find other women like yourself. Someday, perhaps, there will be feminist mothers' groups here maybe you will start one.

Plan ahead

Perhaps the most meaningful take-charge thing you can do is to plan ahead. Don't be dependent on the prearranged course of action planned for you by a doctor, a hospital, a drug company, your mother, husband or other folks. Choose for yourself. But to do this you can't wait until you're on your back in labor. The sooner the better ideally around the third month when you are starting to feel really good but you haven't got much to do yet.

Choose your method of childbirth and infant care. There are many books describing them. You must choose now because you will find that some doctors and hospitals will not allow you to practice some of them, while others will.

Then choose a hospital which allows, or better yet encourages, the method you have chosen. Every hospital has written policy stating whether or not they permit Lamaze, the presence of the husband in the delivery room, having the infant room-in with the mother, automatic circumcision, breast feeding on demand, etc.

Once you find a hospital you can choose a doctor from their staff. (Every obstetrician is on the staff of some hospital and chooses that hospital according to its policies.) This is easier than searching at random. Or if you have chosen Lamaze, for example, a Lamaze trainer can refer you to physicians, or La Leche can do the same for doctors sympathetic to breast feeding.

RATIONS

Good nutrition is a hard thing to come by, especially in Cleveland. Doctors are not trained in nutrition-not even in advanced graduate work. Nutritionists are as rare as hen's teeth. Stores selling good fresh foods in a large variety are few and far between. Even hospital diets are dangerous to your health. One Cleveland hospital serves nursing mothers a breakfast con-

sisting of a sweetroll, butter and coffee, tea or milk.

Peg advocates "super nutrition" involving among other things, removing refined foods from the diet, such as white flour breads, sugar, sweets-and adding more liver, wheat germ. yogurt, fruit and fresh vegetables and cooking differently-steaming and broiling. She does

not feel that a lifetime of poor food habits makes you a hopeless case. She cites a doctor Brewer in California who managed in two years time to improve the obstetrical performance of a group of Mexican-American women who had had a history of high-risk pregnancies and poor nutrition, to a level above the national average. He did this simply by providing them with a few foods such as milk and oranges.

The problem is our problem-oriented approach to health, says Ms. Morse, We should be "promoting health" instead of only treating symptoms. Another problem is the rejection of teamwork by medical professionals (otherwise known as "creeping socialism") which leads to criminal underutilization of human skillsespecially those of nurses, midwives, nutritionists and other, mostly female, health workers.

Peg Morse and her colleague, Lynn Nori, an obstetrical nurse and Lamaze instructor hope to put their ideas into practice in Cleveland. When their project, still in the prenatal stages, is born it will be described in full for WSW readers.