- 35 weeks pregnant. It is time to order my birth kit, even though the thought fills me with all kinds of superstitious fears of committing an act of hubris. But yet? I am so relieved I can plan to labor in my own bedroom, in my own bathroom, my own little cave, and not have to plan going to the hospital except if truly necessary. (Sadly, I don’t think I could be a nice person to the doctors and nurses this time, like I was when Z was born. Because all that led to was both of us being, in a pretty real way, screwed by the system.)
- On that note, St. Vincent’s hopsital, the midwife and homebirth-friendly hopsital of New York City, is closed. That sucks a big one for our carefully laid plans, which are still carefully laid but now involve much less certainty. The hospital went bankrupt because routine care of emergency room patients or HIV patients or – for that matter – mothers who insist on giving birth with as few interventions as possible is, quite simply, not profitable. At least, that’s my (admittedly simplistic) explanation, though it’s roughly true. Now what WOULD have made St. Vincent’s some money is a lot of expensive specialized care (for which one did not go to St. Vincent’s because there are other hospitals around here that do it better), and in the maternity ward a more concentrated drive towards high end and high-tech interventions. Instead, St. Vincent’s overall intervention and c-section rates were relatively low and coming down. New York City moms-to-be, especially the not-so-well-to-do ones, now have a whole lot fewer options. Not good: though worldwide maternal mortality rates appear to be declining, those in the U.S. are on the rise, and it’s very possibly and at least partially due to the popularity (and profitability) of high-tech and high-cost interventions during hospital births.
- On a different note (and this is worth another bulleted list, which I will get to one of these days because it’s worth recording), my daughter is just beyond awesome. And so is A.
- In the weeks leading up to Csinszka’s birth (that’s the in-the-womb name of our next one), there is so much slated to happen that I don’t quite know where my head is. Our support system for the next few months is pretty much in place now, which I find very reassuring, but there is still so much to do and I’m becoming ever bigger and slower and more tired and I really just want to sleep a lot but – no time for that.
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