Comments for Gloria Lemay

Comment on A Proven Method for Lowering the Cesarean Rate by gloria

gloria — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:55:13 +0000

Tina, thanks for asking. If I hadn’t save the information (above) it would have disappeared. It was on the internet (that’s how I snagged it) but is no longer. I have tried the same Google searches. Gloria

Comment on A Proven Method for Lowering the Cesarean Rate by tina

tina — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:08:56 +0000

would you please post more information about the original research regarding the “first births project” at BCW’s that ran in 1996?
i can’t find it anywhere on the web and the links don’t work.

Comment on The “Slow Birth” Movement by gloria

gloria — Wed, 16 May 2012 03:50:51 +0000

I often think, too, that it is so unnatural to have young mothers being the doulas. . . it’s so hard to be away from your own family for long births and still be patient. In other times, it was the grandmothers who became the birth watchers, women who had grown families and had given birth to babies themselves. Nowadays, many of the grandmothers are so traumatized by the way they birthed that they aren’t much use to the younger women. I give full credit to the young women who are stepping into the void but I wish they didn’t have that load to carry.

Comment on 42 Weeks and counting (loving overdue babies) by Berda

Berda — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:55:31 +0000

i’m going on 41 weeks and still haven’t dilated and feel comfortable. . . there are days that i feel like i can sleep all day but than there are the calls and texts asking if I popped yet and it gets annoying because both my parents told me my baby boy will come into the world when he is ready. My dr’s tried telling me that once i hit 41 weeks i have to be induced but when i talked to my previous dr from my other 2 pregnancies, she told me both my other sons were over their due date (my first son was 3 weeks over and my second son was 2 weeks over) and, when my dr read my medical records for those pregnancies, he told me that this baby will most likely be over his due date and i should be induced. That bothered me so much i quit going to my prenatal appointments but i go to the hospital to get non stress tests done and the nurses at the hospital laugh with me because I’m alright with waiting for my baby to be born because i know when he is finally born he will be a big healthy baby. I’m glad i found this site. i was feeling overwhelmed with everyone else’s negative thoughts and feelings about me being ok with being overdue, even my husband. lol He is right in there saying baby should come out already. I want to hold my baby but im glad to read everyone’s comments and know it’s perfectly normal to be overdue

Comment on The “Slow Birth” Movement by Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:23:45 +0000

Please view Failure to Progress, a 60 second short, a satire look at fast/slow labor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5J3o6AvSq4.

Comment on The “Slow Birth” Movement by Mandy Clare

Mandy Clare — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:21:19 +0000

I had a strange feeling that my labour with my fourth baby would be quick and it was, at about an hour for the whole process. It was incredibly intense, but nothing I could not handle, especially with the perfect, low key support I had from my husband. Midwife arrived just in time to catch the babe and pass him to me. I felt like this baby just knew what to do, and along with my body and my supporters, we just got on with it and it was perfecto! Anyway, I agree with your point though Gloria, we don’t need to encourage ourselves or others to rush such a perfect, wonderous process. In the right environment, with appropriate and loving support, most women and babies know what to do and how long to take, I’m sure.

Comment on The “Slow Birth” Movement by tristan

tristan — Tue, 15 May 2012 04:47:40 +0000

my birth was 1 hour and 36 minutes from first contraction to time of birth and it was brutal – way too fast! i would have loved a slower build, a calmer climb to my 10 cm, but this is the way my baby chose to come out – really really quickly – because he was being induced at 37 weeks due to my preeclampsia, and i had no control over any of it. i am grateful to him that he took the lead and moved things along so quickly, because that meant we managed to avoid the need for pitocin (only a servadil ribbon was used to induce) and there was no moment where anyone tried to drug me because before anyone knew it i had given birth to him without them even realising he was crowning! (my o.b. was asleep in the hospital somewhere, and slightly peeved about being woken up to tend to ‘all the noise’ i was making, and was in total shock when she ‘took a look up there’ as my husband put it, and announced that his “head was out” – yeah, it felt like it, but those nurses kept saying “oh you have hours of this, i don’t know why you’re making so much noise”, so what did i know?!).
HOWEVER, i would never brag about the brevity of his birth. if i had a do-over i would not have been sick, he would not have been induced, and we would have a nice, slow, calm build to his birth – not been strapped to a bed with a catheter inside me, 3 weeks earlier than ‘normal’, swollen to the size of the michelin man with preeclampsia – but that’s not how it happened for us.
a fast birth is NOT a better, or more efficient birth. it’s just fast. that’s all.

Comment on A Proven Method for Lowering the Cesarean Rate by Rachel

Rachel — Sat, 12 May 2012 19:52:24 +0000

Wow, amazing article:) I had no idea i should have tried to stick it out a lil and not get my epidural so soon. i got it at 4cm! With in five minutes my sons heart rate dropped and everything went wrong. i was rushed for an emergency c section. i feel like i missed everything:(

Comment on Are we getting anywhere with ending circumcision? by Roedy Green

Roedy Green — Thu, 10 May 2012 22:12:15 +0000

* In parts of Africa, it is a tradition going back millennia to attack young girls and cut out their genitals.
* In other parts of Africa, a wooden disc is used to stretch their lips grotesquely.
* In part of south east Asia young women have their rib cages collapsed with brass rings to create the illusion of long necks.
* In China, female babies had their feet bound to deform them and make them smaller.
* In Britain, people set dogs loose on bulls to kill them for entertainment.
In Spain, matadors torment bulls for entertainment.
Even today there are just as many people living in slavery as there were in the American civil war.
* In some parts of the world, women are still not permitted to vote, drive, go to school, show their faces in public or go out in public unaccompanied.
* In Calgary, Alberta Canada every year about half a dozen horses are killed in re-enactments of chuckwagon races.
* In the United States an ancient religious ritual calls for bullying homosexuals, denying them housing, denying legal recognition of their relationships, and is some cases beating them up and killing them.
* In Canada, parents snip the tips off their son’s penises without consent or anaesthesia.

Is tradition sufficient justification for blindly continuing all these practices? Or should they each be examined afresh on their own merits? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

Comment on Are we getting anywhere with ending circumcision? by Roedy Green

Roedy Green — Thu, 10 May 2012 22:09:21 +0000

If a blastula has the same legal rights as an adult human, then surely a male infant should have the implied legal right to stop his parents from cutting off the tip of his penis without consent or anaesthesia. If somebody opposes abortion without also opposing circumcision, they are a hypocrite.

It is also hypocritical to oppose female circumcision without also opposing male circumcision.