Homework 42 - Investigating Project

Christopher R

The main idea I wanted to focus on in this project was, being able to learn a lot more about hospital births. I noticed that while we were learning about midwives and home births, as an alternate to the dominate social practice which is hospital birth. I still did not know anything about hospital births. I learned that in hospitals Pitocin can be given to induce birth if the mother is not progressing on her own. This Pitocin causes the contractions to become more frequent and also causes harder contractions, which puts the mother into pain. The pain is cured by the epidural which makes the woman not feel as much of what is going on, and this can lead to different problems. More Pitocin can be used if the pregnancy slows down. In certain situations the child can go into distress because the contractions are so hard due to the Pitocin. Then a C-Section (short for Cesarean section) can take place to try to save the life of the baby, almost in a superman-like heroic way. This all seems very bad. A lot of what I was learning seemed to be that the alternative is a more natural and therefore better way. It was also a cheaper way. Then again I thought to myself how could I be able to make a good decision on my own if I didn’t know much about the hospital birth. For this project what I wanted to do was learn a little bit more about the hospital birth because there are different aspects to everything. It is possible that the scenario described is very frequently occurring. With the hospital being the dominate practice of people in the United States there has to be a reason that people are still giving birth in hospitals. I wanted to investigate why and how birth was done. Episiotomy is also something that is frightening about the birthing process. A cut is made from the bottom of the vagina to the top of the anus.


I wanted to execute was going to Harlem Hospital and talking to doctors and nurses based off of the information that I retrieved. This website that I found had information broken down from C-Sections to Natural births. It also had a lot of information about cost, and in how many cases medicine was used. While looking at this information I did remember when the midwife who visited class said some of these websites lie. The information has to be near accurate however because it is supposed to be credible information for the public and the government. During the research I found out that in the year 2009 there were 1,719 births delivered. Out of the 1,719 births 13 percent of these births were induced by medicine which is less than the state wide 16 percent. 5 percent was attended by a midwife which is less than the 10 percent statewide. Then 67 percent of these births were vaginal births (also more than the state). Episiotomy had a small amount of the percentage in the vaginal births and epidural was used in almost half of these births. C-Section was 33 percent of the births, and 14 percent of the people who had a cesarean section in 2009 had a cesarean section before. 30 percent of the people who had a C-section were given epidurals which are less than the 40 percent who gave vaginal births. This evidence goes against the idea that epidurals help contribute to the amount of people who have C-sections. However more than 50 C-Section had spinal anesthesia compared to the 2 people who had a vaginal birth and had spinal anesthesia.

I went to Harlem Hospital with Jasper Deitzer, and we went on a Sunday night without calling ahead of time. Knowing that babies were kidnapped from there a few decades ago I figured it highly doubtful that we would be allowed to go up and this was confirmed by the not attentive desk manager. She told us that the only way we would be allowed to go up is if we called one of the head managers in the birthing center. She supplied us with a number and when that number was called that also led to another number, which lead to another number and after a while it became less likely that anyone would actually let us go up. That day we walked to the Bronx and found another hospital at about 730 pm on the same night. After walking across a bridge late on a night where we had school the next day the hope was they would let us up. According to the security guard if we were to call earlier in the day then we would have been able to get a staff member to tell us about the hospital and labor unit.


Two days after with no work done the idea was to try to get some interviews from anyone because going to a hospital was a lot harder than anyone would have expected. It takes a few days of preparation and many hospitals just don’t have it so that people can come and ask questions. The first few interviews were from Babies R’ Us:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGqNiRWj_4k


The next interview was with potential parents:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKeEqRq9KX8

CHASED BY THE COPS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMJndw620lk

To top off some of the research I know a pediatrician who obviously is not an OB/ GYN but she is a very knowledgeable and well recognized pediatrician in New York City. I know her through her two children and I figured that she would know a lot more than a “common” person even if she didn’t go to school to be an obstetrician. At the beginning of the unit I asked her about her births and I also asked her about her point of view on C-Sections. She was very supportive of the idea of C-Sections and saw them as useful so I looked at this as an opportunity to get more “pro-hospital birth” information and it would also be from a doctor. Here’s my interview with Lori Rosello M.D.

My Email to her

Her Response