len wrote:
I am confused about the point you want to make. The stories you cite are women with wanted pregnancies who died during childbirth. Sometimes in rare cases these things happen despite all the right things being done. In those cases where they happen because of inadequate prenatal care or sub-standard care around childbirth the solution would seem to revolve around providing better care.
It should be a relatively rare situation where someone has to consider childbirth as a very high risk situation.
The point I was trying to make was in relation to the quote that we can now get virtually any woman without a life threatening disease through pregnancy safely- which while not related to the original abortion debate- does not really seem true in our country. Many of these women had “top” care but basics were missed.
People act like birth is this walk in the park- and we seem to be making healthcare decisions based on it being statistically very safe- and as we make decisions based on it being statistically safe more and more women are slipping through the cracks and the statistics are going the wrong way. The maternal death rate in our country has doubled
Birth is a major medical event. While most women get through it fine it can go very, very wrong. This attitude that problems are very rare is killing women. As someone who was belittled by my doctors as having normal pregnancy pain and not taken seriously as my kidney was failing and had pain for years afterwards- yet would be classified as a normal uncomplicated birth in the happy statistics- we are doing a disservice to women when we assume all births will go fine.
You need to advocate for yourselves and your family as the patchwork system of medical response (since it really seems more like response to problems than actual care) in this country does not seem to care much beyond limiting legal liability and making a buck. Yes there are doctors that are exceptions- but very rare these days where many obs use rota schedules where you rarely see the same doctor at subsequent appointments and they generally act like they have never read your chart before popping into the exam room to check fetal heart rate and send you on your way for their next appointment in fifteen minutes.