Birth: The Conference in Romania in 2019!

Birth: The Conference in Romania in 2019!
I've been invited to address an audience of young families and professionals in Romania this coming summer. I am reprinting my earlier article about them here to bring you up to speed on who these amazing people are:
I have dedicated my next book called, PUSH! The Sequel to the brave, revolutionary young families of the Muntele Rece district of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Against all odds they are taking back control of their lives and the lives of their children after Communism all but dictated their very existence. They are choosing to have their babies at home, later home schooling them, and discovering autonomy for themselves.

  It reminds me so very much of the 1960s and ’70s in America when radical hippies like Ina May and Stephen Gaskin began to question the status quo. They deserve our deepest respect and support. I can only guess that the advent of the Internet in their little villages found a willing audience in these young people. They are educated, seeking souls, so very ready for change, and when they discovered what the rest of the world has been up to until now, they ran with it. But I am curious: why weren't they attracted to our materialism, or our free market economies and consumerism instead?

 I have gotten to know many young immigrant families over the years and many of them want everything and anything that smacks of America, even at the expense of forgoing their forefathers' traditions and way of life. They strike me as even more American than we are, in a way, hankering after the very arrogance we enshrine. But this is different. The Romanian revolutionaries are peacefully considering all their options and the direction they will choose for themselves. I wonder how do they choose among all of the innovative movements they encounter while being inundated with  the glut of information the Internet has to offer? This is epic, in my eyes.  

    

I have only the highest respect and regard for this tiny movement among them. They are slowly winning midwives, doctors, and others over to their side. Their network spans the whole of the former Communist bloc countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, whose foreign policies often depended on those of the former Soviet Union.

Birth: The Romanian Conference 2019

This is a rough draft of the proposed conference:

Introduction: A Revolution

 In this talk 1970s and '80s in the US when there was a resurgence of midwifery and many felt that birth belonged in the family, not in what had become doctor and hospital models of care, essentially leaving the mother out of the process, and especially taking control of a natural process and turning it into an illness that needed to be managed medically. We will discuss what is possible in Romania today.

History of home versus hospital birth

 A look into Western allopathic medicine and our attitudes concerning alternative approaches. Many countries throughout the world have not turned to this philosophy and continue to trust Nature and what humans have successfully done for millenia. 

Maternal and infant deaths world wide

 Statistics continue to prove to this day that despite the advancements in medicine and the sciences, the outcomes of managed births in comparison to an uniterrupted natural process have not born better outcomes. The US and other so-called First World Countries actually fall at the bottom of the list for maternal and infant morbidity across the board. The US stands at the bottom of the list as 48th at this time.

Education & Training available world-wide

 We will discuss the pros and cons for training and/or depending on practitioners in your own countries. There are many schools of thought in this sphere, but I will try to give an unbiased look into all the choices out there that you might want to access. 

Creating protocols

  Are protocols needed? They just might earn you the respect that you might want from within your local medical communities. How can you work together? Is that possible? How do you draw up protocols unique to your situation? Legal issues concerning home birth.

Resources

There are thousands of books, videos, papers, studies, statistics and information on the Internet. Who do you trust? How do you find strong evidence for sane choices? I will try to consolidate the best of all this information and make those resources available throughout the conference.

WHO World Health Or and human rights--an in-depth look

     We can learn a lot from WHO, Save the Children, Unicef, and other international groups who have already been disseminating much of this education around the world and by tapping into their experience--their failures and successes--we might learn quite a lot and avoid wasting valuable time and energy. 

  

Natural birth vrs medication

   A look at what drugs are being used, what helps, what doesn't, and what are some of their properties. A study of the interventions and what they mean. We will also look at the evolution of the sciences of testing newborns and what does bonding look like in light of these so-called advances.

Perceptions of success vrs failure: realistic goals

 Again, learning from others who have been there like Ina May Gaskin, what do our goals look like? What does a successful birth look like? What are some of the very real dangers and how can you be trained to see them before you are in trouble? How can you avoid them? I was trained first, intentionally, to know what normal birth looked like, over and over and over again. Only then, when I could do it in my sleep, was I introduced to problems that might arise during pregnancy and birth. So, when my brain signaled that this was a yellow or red light, that what I am seeing now is not part of that normal, then I was trained in what to do, if I needed to actually do something, if I needed help or some maneuver I had been trained in. And, how can you learn this where you are now?

To leave comments at this blog, please email me at: ssskimchee@gmail.com

Stay tuned for my next books, PUSH! The Sequel: 37 more true stories from midwives and doulas, and Stone Age Babies in a Space Age World: Babies and Bonding in the 21st Century.