Salon.com > Childbirth

The high cost of giving birth in the U.S.

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 15:30:00 +0000

Giving birth in the United States is far more expensive than in other countries, and the additional cost does not appear to come with additional benefits -- Americans do not have more access to care or better access to care than citizens in other developed nations, according to an analysis from the New York Times.

“It’s not primarily that we get a different bundle of services when we have a baby,” Gerard Anderson, an economist at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who studies international health costs, told the Times. “It’s that we pay individually for each service and pay more for the services we receive.”

This is an unusual model among other countries, as the Times notes:

Is my fiancé the right man?

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

I will be married in a few months. And until now I have this horrific, horrific doubt in my head. My fiancé is a wonderful man, Cary. He's kind to me, he has a steady job, and he cooks dinner for me even when he is tired. Also, I got attracted to his life story. He was married before, but his wife died during childbirth, along with the child. Yet when he speaks of it, I see no trace of bitterness or anger. Not even sadness. I got attracted to the fact that here is a person, who, through the bleakest period of his life, managed to keep his sanity, his faith and his humor intact. And I can't imagine a better partner to go through life with. He's also very funny and charming, and I feel that he truly loves me.

Here's the thing: I grew up with this idea of my future husband and he's just. not. it. I grew up thinking I'd get married to a man in uniform, maybe a doctor, or lawyer, what have you. He would be witty and brilliant and also cook well. I would be the supportive wife, the wind beneath his wings.

Alas, that doesn't seem to be the case now.

My miscarriages made me question being pro-choice

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A few hours after my doctor told me that my third pregnancy was going to end with a third miscarriage, I was standing in front of a class of college freshman leading a discussion about the ethics of abortion. I think there was a conflict of interest, pedagogically speaking.

The discussion prompts I prepared were politically neutral, meant to promote deeper thinking about all perspectives of the debate, but when I put it together I knew what side I was on. I’ve been pro-choice since before I even understood what was at stake. And yet, when I chose to have a baby while still in my allegedly fertile late-20s, all I could produce were the kind of clots sucked out during a D&C. I chose baby. Where was my baby?

I still don’t know. I mean, I know where my babies are. The end results of pregnancies No. 4 and No. 5 are now bounding preschoolers with scraped knees and very firm opinions about tomatoes (one for and one against). I am lucky among people who choose to reproduce in that I eventually got to. I would like to say that my son and daughter are the children always intended for me by some force that I don’t understand and probably don’t believe in; that those other pregnancies were just my real kids making RSVPs they couldn’t keep, but that’s just not how I feel. It doesn’t make any sense to me, at least not intellectually, but I feel like I have five children — two born and three who were not born, which is a point-of-view that is hard to reconcile with being pro-choice.

Waiting to love my child

Tue, 07 May 2013 23:45:00 +0000

The technician pushed the plastic wand onto my belly, and there on the TV screen were white blobs and filaments in a black cone.

“There's the cervix,” she said, as though I'd driven two hours to get the inside scoop on my cervix. “And there's the placenta.” She ran a computer curser over a fuzzy white mass.

But I wanted a profile or a full-body shot, some image that would tell my brain, Yes, there's a person in there, which would tell my heart, Yes, you can risk loving this person.

Right now it was still an it, and I still called it “Baby X.” Right now I still imagined a giant mathematical variable in my pelvis, offering a host of faceless unknowns.

But the tech held off on the print-worthy images and dwelled instead on organs. A flapping, four-chambered heart. A black marble of a spleen. Look, there's the brain: two hemispheres inside a globe.

Finally, the face. “There,” she said.

Except it was not the usual ultrasound profile of sloping forehead, dainty nose, and chin. It was a square shot, and I saw deep and ghostly eyeball cavities. The angular bone structure of the cheeks. A black opening for a mouth, gaping wide. It was a skull in my uterus. A Halloween icon floating in my womb.

Plastic surgery after the baby

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000

The sign on the wall pointed east to the Plastic Surgery wing, tucked like a secret in the far end of the hospital. I opened the door into the waiting room; a fountain bubbled in the background and Kenny G played from the speakers. Everything about the room was soothing: Relax. Your private affairs are safe with us.

The table next to my waiting room chair was littered with pamphlets—Botox, chemical peels, implants, liposuction, procedures that would either suck matter out or pump matter in. I picked up one entitled “The New You” and flipped through glossy pages detailing breast implants. I dropped it, face down on the table, disgusted with myself.

I was called back by a nurse named Linda, a middle-aged woman whose facelift had left her eyes pulled into an expression of wonderment, as though she held permanent interest in nearly everything I said. She asked me a few questions and then popped in a DVD.

“Just watch this, jot down any questions, and the doctor will be in shortly.”

Buxom blondes rode bicycles with—by the looks on their faces—orgasmic delight. Women played tennis in short skirts and bulging sweater-vest tops. They all confided how happy they were, how confident they felt, now that they were “fixed.”

Doulas can coach low-income women on childbirth

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Here’s a quick medical quiz: What’s the most common reason for hospitalization in the United States? Take a stab. Respiratory distress? Cardiac arrest?

Try childbirth. As researchers at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health observe, more than four million babies are born in American hospitals every year, and from maternal checkups to newborn care, moms-to-be rack up more charges than any other patients. In 2009, those costs totaled nearly $30 billion.

Maternal health care is a big burden on Medicaid, which pays the expenses of low-income patients and annually foots the bill for 45 percent of all births. What’s more, low-income moms have disproportionately high rates of complication and Caesarean section. According to the Minnesota researchers, Medicaid mothers are more likely to give birth prematurely, or to low-weight babies, than more affluent women.

Expectant parents die in NY car crash, baby survives

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 17:35:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) -- A young couple who had taken a car service to a hospital for the birth of their first child were killed en route in a hit and run early Sunday, but their baby boy survived, born prematurely, authorities and a neighbor said.

The driver of a BMW slammed into the car carrying Nathan and Raizy Glauber, both 21, at an intersection in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, said Isaac Abraham, a neighbor of Raizy Glauber's parents who lives two blocks from the scene of the crash. Both of the Glaubers were pronounced dead at hospitals, police said.

Their infant son was in serious condition at a hospital, said Abraham, and the driver of their car was in stable condition, police said.

Both the driver of the vehicle that hit the couple's car and a passenger fled and are being sought, police said.

Photos taken after the accident showed both cars mangled and the front end of the BMW crumpled. Issac said the Glaubers called a car service because they didn't own a car, which is common for New Yorkers.

My Valentine’s Day miracle

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:15:00 +0000

In September 2011, from the moment my wife and I found out that she was pregnant with monoamniotic twins, I made the decision not to talk about it online until — unless — we came out at the end of it with two healthy babies. The idea that I could one day share this story with the Pajiban community — whether you guys wanted to hear it or not — actually motivated me during much of what would be the most harrowing 22 weeks of our lives. It was an experience that’s more important for me to tell than for you guys to read, but since this particular occurrence is so rare, it may also be important story to put out on the Internet where I hope it may provide at lease some comfort to others going through the same ordeal.

Will I never have a child?

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

I'm heartbroken and frightened and it would all go away if I did nothing.

A year ago I met and fell in love with a man I met online after eight years of terrible loneliness. We were immediately attracted to each other but we decided to stop seeing each other almost right away. He didn't want any more kids and I was desperate to be a mom. We kept in touch and dated and broke up a few more times. I'd only known him a few months and I was already trying to convince him to have a child with me. That's something I never would have done in my easy-breezy youth, but I'm turning 41 and all my friends have kids (boy, do they ever, this peer pressure is worse than anything I ever felt in high school). He 'd just gone through a terrible divorce where his ex-wife used legal tricks to screw him good. Most horribly, she tried to keep him away from their 5-year-old daughter and he had to fight in court, deal with her calling the police, and move his life and his job so he could see his little girl again. So he's burnt. But he also says he never wanted kids in the first place. His ex-wife pressured him. He also never wanted to get married but she pressured him into that.

How much alcohol is safe for expectant mothers?

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 15:00:00 +0000

On the night of my 32nd birthday, my husband and I enjoyed a delicious dinner while on vacation in Orvieto, Italy. To complement my pasta, I enjoyed a single glass of red wine, my first since learning I was pregnant four months earlier. Even now my indulgence inspires periodic pangs of guilt: Did I stunt my son’s potential by sipping that Sangiovese?

Nobody questions the notion that heavy drinking during pregnancy is harmful. It can cause facial abnormalities, central nervous system problems and stunted growth. But evidence regarding the effects of light or occasional drinking is mixed. In five epidemiological studies published in 2012, medical psychologist Erik Mortensen of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues found that five-year-old children born to women who had one to four drinks a week during pregnancy displayed no deficits in general intelligence, attention or other types of higher-order thinking. On the other hand, in 2011 psychiatrist Nancy Day of the University of Pittsburgh and her colleagues reportedthat teens born to women who averaged more than one drink a week during pregnancy were twice as likely as those born to nondrinkers to have conduct disorder, a condition characterized by theft, deceit or violence.

My awesome C-section

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Five years ago, I prepared for the birth of my son like any self-absorbed, pampered mother-to-be in the city of Portland, Ore., might: I gave up hot tubs, sushi, stinky cheese, Tylenol, booze, wine and coffee, and I told anyone who would listen about my sacrifices.

I spent hours studying my baby’s development on a website called Babycenter.com, which explained that he resembled a sesame seed at week 5, a kumquat at week 10 and a bell pepper at week 18. Perhaps subconsciously inspired by their comparisons, I consumed so many raw vegetables and legumes that I walked around most days enveloped by a noxious cloud of gas.

I attended prenatal yoga, where the instructor encouraged us to gripe for a full half-hour about our blown-out backs and throbbing feet and constipation, and where the other women all pretended not to notice that I was the stinkiest among them, though they all sat at a respectable distance, having realized that downward dog tended to stir things up down there.

The power pregnancy exerted over my body and my brain freaked me out.

Weird news: Occubaby on the way

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:16:00 +0000

It was one of the first videos to highlight police brutality as a central issue in the Occupy narrative. Last September, three young women contained in NYPD orange nets on a New York corner screamed and cried, eyes streaming, as deputy inspector Anthony Bologna seemingly indiscriminately doused them in pepper spray.

Now there's a story twist begging for inclusion in any Occupy screenplays (no doubt being penned): one of the pepper-sprayed women fell in love with the volunteer street medic who helped her that day, and they are expecting a baby.

As New York Times CityRoom editor Andy Newman reported:

Can childbirth cause PTSD?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:00:00 +0000

It's the P in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that seems to trip people up. The idea that when the crisis has passed and you're ostensibly well and safe, you might still be jumpy and tearful, anxious and withdrawn. What's the matter with you, anyway? Everything is OK, isn't it? But post-traumatic stress doesn't work that way. The body doesn't care if the mind tells it there's no danger. The body doesn't care if friends and commenters on the Internet say that trauma is only for war veterans and violent crime survivors, not people who've endured otherwise survivable events. Or, as the marvelous writer Jessica Valenti explains in a heartening and incredibly brave piece about "Living in the shaky place" on Monday, "The funny thing about PTSD is that it’s a sneaky fucker."

Opening up about the PTSD that hit her after an emergency C-section and the premature birth of her daughter, Valenti writes: "The eight weeks that Layla was in the hospital – while the emergency was still in full force – I was fine." Only later did the flashbacks, the mini-blackouts and sleep deprivation kick in. Rare restful nights were no consolation, because that's when the nighmares arrived.