September 8, 2008

Birth as Child Abuse

ElizabethPatriciabirth82
bonding_1

Sisters bonding or poor family values?

I kept postponing writing this post, hoping it wouldn't be necessary. But once again I read a blog post and got an e mail from an Obama group, using Palin's childbirth decisions in her last preganancy as proof she is a poor mother, lacking true family values. I loathe having to keep defending a right-wing fundamentalist, when I oppose all her public policies. But this obsession with Palin's childbirth is creepy destructiveness.

I had my last two children at home. The births were planned. My third daughter was delivered by a nurse midwife; my fourth by a family physicians. Both had admitting privileges in nearby hospitals. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists characterizes home births as child abuse.

So I couldn't run for assistant dog catcher, could I?

I don 't want to list the misconceptions and lack of information displayed in the obstetrician-for-a-day posts. That would be doing the same thing I am accusing other bloggers and the media of doing. Short of leaving a baby in the trash pr refusing to take her home from the hospital, what business is ours how a candidate or a candidate's spouse handles birth?

We have absolutely no information on the births of Obama's and Biden's children. We don't even know if they took the time to show up in the delivery room. We don't know if they attended childbirth classes. We don't know if their wives had unnecessary C-sections because they didn't help her research local hospitals or didn't advocate for her when she was in labor.

We have no right to that information, anymore than we need to know how often they make love, whether their wives have had abortions, what kind of birth control they use, whether they ever had an STD.

Some things are none of our business. As all semblance of privacy is stripped from our candidates, the talent pool for our politicians inevitably shrinks.

Obstetricians for a day are not effective Obama supporters.

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