The Factory

Last week, we visited our local hospital for a tour of their Maternity Center. We were excited to see it -- the place where Mango would be born! This is Dr. Wong's hospital, and he had told us that the center had been renovated just a few years ago.

When we arrived, we stood around in a hallway near the nurse's station, waiting for our tour guide. The hallway was lined with small patients' rooms [note: the rooms are small, not the patients, wiseacres], each shared by two mothers. NY Downtown is Chinatown's hospital, so all of the names posted by the doors were Chinese (I wonder where the rich white people from Battery Park City go). Oddly, though, we couldn't hear any babies.

After a while, we were told to go down to the end of the hallway and through some doors to the actual Maternity Center -- we'd actually been standing in the maternity ward. Our tour guide met us there and showed us a "birthing suite", which featured a crappy tile floor, an uncomfortable-looking foam fold-out couch for the father, a huge hospital bed, and lots of hulking medical equipment.

"How long do we get to stay in here?" I asked.

"You have to stay in the hospital for 48 hours after the birth," the nurse said. "You can stay in your maternity suite the whole time, unless we need the room ... if that happens, we'll move you to a room in the maternity ward as soon as your wife and the baby are stable."

"And what are the odds of that happening?" I said.

"Well -- it's been very busy lately ..."

"Can I get up and walk around during the labor?" Greta asked. The nurse looked at her like she had three heads. "Get up and walk around? Sure, if you aren't wearing the fetal monitor. We can't get an accurate reading off of the monitor if you're walking around."

"For how much of the time do most people wear the monitor?" said Greta.

"Most of the time," said the nurse.

Next we took a look at the nursery, where we saw a couple of babies in incubators, and a whole bunch of babies in the regular nursery. This solved the mystery of the quiet maternity ward hallway: apparently, few if any of those women had their babies with them.

The whole tour took less than twenty minutes. We left very dispirited -- or perhaps "horrified" is nearer the truth. We had hoped that the maternity center would be as nice as the one at St Luke's-Roosevelt, where Rowan was born. Instead, we saw a cold, hospital-like environment with strong suggestions of a pro-intervention, anti-natural-childbirth approach. (And no spiffy family-sized jacuzzis like at St Luke's.)

As you may be aware, the management of childbirth has been a political issue for a long time, at least for feminist/leftist/hippie-ish types. The most prominent current spokesperson for the hippie perspective is Ina May Gaskin, one of the founders of the Tennessee commune "The Farm". I'm currently reading her book Ina May's Guide To Childbirth. In brief, Ina May's position is that birth is overly medicalized -- that the relentless focus on intervening in labor with modern medical techniques to avoid problems is a "cure worse than the disease." The common approach to childbirth, she argues, is great for the very small percentage of women who do encounter serious problems during labor, but for the vast majority, it tends to lead to unnecessary procedures, such as inducing and c-sections.

The statistics from The Farm's midwifery program (and by the way, I love the fact that "midwifery" is pronounced as if it had two f's -- very Chaucerian) rather strongly support her argument. Their caesarian rate is only 1.4 percent! Every hospital in Manhattan has a c-section rate of over 20% (except, remarkably, New York Downtown, which is only 14% ... one of the reasons why we had expected to get a much better impression of their maternity center than we did).

Gaskin also believes that birth can be a joyous (though painful and arduous) and spiritual experience, and that this will usually occur naturally if a birth is managed by experienced midwives in an atmosphere of love and respect. As a lapsed Catholic boy, I am intrigued by the idea that birth can be a sacrament. Even us secular types need sacraments, I believe.

So ... we could try other hospitals, and we may wind up doing that, but this tour experience has pushed us more towards the Ina May philosophy, which holds that babies and mothers are both better off if birth takes place at home, attended by a midwife.

Of course, my primary concern is the safety of my wife and son ... a birth lasts only a day (one hopes), while a child is a whole lifetime. Also, pretty much every mother I've ever known, including my dear mother, has had "medicalized" deliveries, and the result has been healthy mothers and children. If we have to, I'm sure we can suck it up and deal with the New York Downtown Hospital Maternity Center experience. But if there's a better, less traumatic and more meaningful, way to bring Mango into the world, I want to explore it. And so ... tomorrow evening, we are meeting with a midwife who specializes in homebirth. She's been an R.N. for over thirty years, and a midwife for more than a decade. We will provide a full report! (I think it's Greta's turn.)