Themed links, Part II

Brooklyn is the theme this time.

Interesting article about a typical day at New York Methodists Advanced Women's Imaging and Prenatal Testing Center.

Finally, a new New York cloth diaper service!! Much needed from what I've heard.
Diaperkind.com
Also, you can meet these ladies in person at the Brooklyn Flea on Saturdays.

A growing baby and blogs

The thing that these two links have in common is "series".

The first:
A series of photos of a baby's first year. Watch how long, chubby and toothy he gets!



The second:
A series of thought provoking and inspiring blogs:
Top 100 Natural Birth Blogs

Impact

Last Wednesday night was a full moon and boy, did I know it. As a fellow birth assistant said "It was a hot night". One mom even had her baby in the car! The Brooklyn Birthing Center was certainly a bustling place.

Once all of the business had subsided and all babies were on their ways home, I was chatting with a co-worker about the "Business of Being Born". She said that after the movie came out BBC surprisingly did not seem to have the same spike as New York home birth midwives. I mentioned Dooce. Alot of birth bloggers have been making a big deal of this "mommy blog" lately because of the recent telling of her birth story: Part I, Part II, and Part III. "Dooce" is one of Forbes magazine's "Most Influential Women In Media" for 2009. To make a long story short "Dooce" was convinced by reading "Your Best Birth" by Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein to have a natural birth.

Birth has always had trends. For example, chloroform became a widely used and popular from of pain relief after Queen Victoria used it. As Tina Cassidy states in her marvelous book "Birth: The Surprising History of how We were Born", : "Women on both sides of the Atlantic finally embraced what became fashionably known as chloroform a la reine".

I wonder what the impact of this very popular blogger will be on our current natural birth movement?

'Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.'

My dad was adopted. His birth mother was a young teenager when she gave birth to him. I think I remember hearing that the birth father was much older but, the details remain murky. She later went onto marry and had no other children. My father had three other adopted siblings, all were raised with happy memories childhoods of playing baseball on dairy farms, summers on Lake Michigan and finned, teal colored automobile- quintessential life in the 1950's. While I was in college my father decided to find his birth mother. He discovered that she was old stock American, her family having lived in America at least since the time of Lincoln. Although most of the rest of the details about her life were unremarkable, she did share with my dad that no one else in her whole life, except her and her mother, knew about her pregnancy. There is much to the story that I have forgotten, or didn't ask or wasn't told but my biological grandmother's life and decisions much more made sense after I read the book, "The Girls who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v. Wade" by Ann Fessler.

Please read this book if you have not already. I think it is fair to place this book in the category of "books that have changed my life". Not only did it make my own family history seem less strange but, it literally gives voice to those who had no choice and, for me, reaffirms why it is so vital to appreciate and continue to fight for our reproductive freedoms. Additionally, it explains away the rationale for why women should give their babies up for adoption rather than having abortions. Our physiological process of childbirth has evolved to bond a mother to her baby and visa versa. Deciding on adoption is an completely different kind of choice than choosing to not have a baby.

A quote from the book:
"The girls who went away were told by family members, social-service agencies, and clergy that relinquishing their child for adoption was the only acceptable option. It would preserve their reputation and save both the mother and child from a lifetime of shame. Often it was clear to everyone, except the expectant mother, that adoption was the answer...They were simply told they must surrender their child, keep their secret, move on and forget."

While on the topic of adoption, I'd like to mention a wonderful New York City program, The Doula Project. It provides doulas to those who cannot afford douals, doulas for women having abortion procedures and doulas for births in which the baby will be adopted.

And lastly, the title quote is from John Irving's novel The Cider House Rules. A novel that deals much with choices of abortion and adoption pre Roe v. Wade.

Maps

Hello friends, just peeking out from under my rock to share with you two excellent resources. I am an intensely visual learner and so, if you're anything like me, these two maps of our reproductive rights "landscape" will make good sense to you.

The Center for Reproductive Rights created this map in 2007 to illustrate the world's abortion laws.

Mapping Our Rights has an amazing interactive map that discusses, in great detail, each of our 50 stats laws and policies around sexual and reproductive rights, in particular abortion access.

Generic vs. Brandname

In college, I was introduced to the NuvaRing. I had tried birth control pills but, felt like they were making me moody plus, I wasn't always 100% consistent with taking them. The NuvaRing seemed to be exactly what I was looking for: low dosage hormones and no need to worry about taking something at the same time every single day. Another bonus was that my health clinic only charged $5 for birth control methods and often threw in free samples.

Once, out into the real world, I realized that I would have to pay a lot more. Even at Planned Parenthood, with their marvelous sliding income scales, it cost almost $40/month and my health care wouldn't cover it. Why? Because it was too new of a product and a generic version had not yet been created and supposedly can't be until 2018(!) Eventually, I decided to stop this method but, that had more to do with side effects (intense breast tenderness) though, than cost. All this being said, drug costs have much more to do with brand name than anything else (such as chemical composition).

Last Wednesday, the FDA approved a generic version of the emergency contraception pill, Plan B. I think this is wonderful news- now this already accessible option will be even more accessible:

"A one-time use pack of the brand-name product, Plan B, currently costs $49.99 through the online retailer DrugStore.com. According to Bloomberg, generic drugs usually cost 30% to 80% less than brand-name versions (Larkin, Bloomberg, 6/24)." From National Partnership for Women and Families.

Have you had ever had any experience with expensive brand name drugs?

How do we know?

In doing a few catch-up/clean-up Friday tasks, I came across this beautiful deck of cards. I can't believe that I had forgotten about them- they seem almost perfectly tailor made for me. Combo of crafty images and facts about reproductive health. This deck is comprised of twenty card with a question on one side and, the answer, on the other.

Just in case the bottom image is hard to read, the scrap of paper says:

"In the United States, about half of all pregnancies are unintended, and 42% of unintended pregnancies are terminate by abortion. Worldwide, almost two in five women who become pregnant have either an abortion or an unplanned birth."

From the Guttmacher Institute.