Poor Mr 3am
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Dynamic Dr 3am responds about his greatest achievement
Dr Pesce, self appointed arbiter for birthing women's and the unborn child's safety, has this to say in response to various letters in the Age newspaper after the article on his dynamic ability to influence the Federal Minister of Health, the Honorable Nicola Roxon. There is another letter following by someone else on the same issue.
Raising the bar
IT HAS been claimed that in an interview with The Sunday Age, I stated my greatest achievement so far as AMA president was to curtail a woman's choice to choose a home birth. This is not correct.
Maybe he hasn't read his own article.
I consider my greatest achievement thus far was promoting to Government a collaborative care amendment to legislation before the Parliament. This amendment underpins the importance of doctors and nurses and doctors and midwives working together to provide the best quality care for our patients. It confirms in legislation the recommendation of the Maternity Services Review.
The amendment does not impact in any way on the existing arrangements for midwives providing care for women who choose home birth. These midwives are exempted from the requirement to carry indemnity insurance, provided they inform their patients that they are not indemnified, and meet reporting requirements that will be overseen by the Victorian Health Department.
I assume that he is playing to the crowd here. We can't get on the register without signing a collaborative agreement, then we have to get insurance for antenatal and postnatal (by being eligible midwives, whatever that may be) before we can get an exemption. I can't for one minute believe that the head of the AMA doesn't know these basic facts.
Similarly, in line with the recommendations of the Maternity Services Review, midwifery care for home birth will not be funded by the Commonwealth, so the amendment in no way impacts on midwives who currently provide care for women choosing home birth.
Dr ANDREW PESCE, federal AMA president
At what risk?
PASSIONATE single-issue advocates have been hard at work flooding The Sunday Age with pro-home birth propaganda. But who is looking after the interests of the unborn child?
One, the mother is looking after the interests of the unborn child. Two,If unborn children were to get rights over and above that of the mother, it would mean that women are no more than incubators and the medical establishment will have the right to do whatever they want in the name of a fetus. Bodily autonomy is the single most important issue here.
One assumes that the statistics speak for themselves. In the 19th century, when home birth was common, the death rate was more than 1 per cent of live births, leading to the development of women's hospitals specialising in gynaecological care.
MMm No DR Pesce, the development of sanitation, the knowledge of hygiene (remember the doctors killing women due to their lack of hand washing) and improvement in nutrition. That's why sending an Ob into a 3rd world country doesn't help until they have clean water and sanitation.
While most home births are successful without intervention, so are births in hospital. (not true, check the figures, even birth centres are struggling)
However, when intervention is required, specialist help is immediately available. Women choosing home birth should be required to sign an undertaking recognising the risks that they are assuming on half of themselves and their unborn child, and to provide an indemnity to any service provider other than their midwife in the event of a crisis.
Dec 13, 2009
More Mr 3am
Dec 11, 2009
Submissions
Here is my submission to the inquiry. I am so over the whole thing.
I wonder what is left to be said in a submission that hasn't already been written more than 3000 times already. Why if nobody was listening before will this round make a difference? Is it possible that someone somewhere is going to put the rights of birthing women before the rights of the medical lobby to veto any woman in her desire to employ a midwife and stay at home? Lets hope so.
The international midwife community have a code of ethics that apply world wide.
Please find them attached. These are the boundaries that midwives work within.
It is vitally important for the ongoing health of the nation that these are taken into consideration and that the medical fraternity does not gain ultimate control of midwifery under the auspices of "collaboration"
Do midwives collaborate now? of course they do. Whenever the health of a woman is compromised assistance is sought by the midwife and discussion takes place with the appropriate specialist with full consent of the birthing woman.
A written collaborative agreement is seen by the AMA as cited on their website as a take over of care and the Obstetrician becoming the lead carer. Nowhere in their literature do women have the final say in their care or outcome.
In the community I work in as a midwife most general practitioners will not even provide routine health assistance like bloods or ultrasound referrals. Recently a client of mine had a threatening letter from her GP. This is not collaboration but coercion, control and harassment.
4 weeks ago I entered the hospital system with a client who needed some postnatal assistance. Her home born baby weighed 11 1/2 lb and although not admitted as perfectly well, was boarded with her overnight. During that time the Drs told her that her baby would die unless she entered into tests and gave her baby antibiotics. I was rung at home by the Professor of Paeds and told it was my job to persuade her into these tests that were mandatory due to her hospital stay. After reminding him that the baby was not a patient and that my role was information and support only, he went to her and once again said the baby would die. Although not accepting antibiotics but being too afraid not to agree, testing was done. The baby was of course perfectly well and a second opinion from a new consultant confirmed this along with an agreeance that going home asap was the best course of action.
This illustrates the dangers of a written collaborative agreement. Ultimate control by medics means that women have no opportunity for informed choice and can be forced into any form of care regardless to evidence or truth.
Midwifery is a profession highly regulated and respected in it's own right as is medicine. To give one control over the other is not only ethically unsound but also against any work place law.
I have been taken to the Nurses board after an anonymous report from an Ob (later named) that had no substance but was purely malicious with the intent of causing distress to both myself and my client (who had a successful homebirth) because of his anti homebirth stance. Even after it was proven that I acted appropriately it is likely to happen again.
Many women do not want or require the input of a surgeon or a specialist in complex pregnancy. Why do the government feel it necessary to force every women to have it?
You cannot allow this bill to go through without women's right to bodily autonomy remaining in place at all cost.
Thank you.
Please go and read Janet Frasers Submission on behalf of Joyous birth
Dec 3, 2009
The real birth wars
Please put in yet another submission to the senate to ensure that We remain a force that can't be ignored. Even though the government is supposed to be the voice of the people. Looks like they are working to a different agenda.
If you want to see the full version you can go to the montage site
Nov 29, 2009
Meet Mr 3am -PUKE
Meet Mr 3am is an article about the president of the AMA. They did say that if it looked like the amendment was voted down they would pull out all the stops to ensure that midwives, women and homebirth were totally pulverised in the popular press. I think it's started already.
The caption for the above picture was "Keeping vigil: AMA president Andrew Pesce checks on the progress of a baby at Westmead Private Hospital". Photo: Steven Siewert. Surely nobody believes this crap. Why would he have any need to go into the nursery. Paediatricians look after this area.
This Little quotation puts paid to the government position that it they didn't realise what all the rhetoric meant. It also makes a mockery of the senate inquiry. Why won't the government be more up front with the public about what is going on here?. Why can't people like me get a fair say?. I'd love to go to the senate inquiry. I'd even put my dreads back into a pony and wear smart clothing. I couldn't quite do court shoes though. The truth is that nobody would take me seriously, although I have an IQ which I'm quite sure is higher than Dr Ps. I'm well qualified, have more than 20 years experience and talk all over the world, I do not look acceptable to the people at the top. These people make judgements not on what is being said, on the rights of the general public, or the facts and points, but on who weilds the most power, money and can look important. Oh well their loss.He successfully lobbied Health Minister Nicola Roxon to make amendments to home birth legislation, ensuring that midwives would be denied Medicare payments unless they could prove they were working collaboratively with doctors.
The home birth lobby claimed the changes curtail a woman's right to choose how she gives birth, but Dr Pesce cites it as his greatest achievement so far as AMA president.
''There is an article to be published soon in the Medical Journal of Australia which is a 15-year review of 1150 home births and it shows there is a seven times higher risk of a baby dying during home birth than a hospital birth,'' he says.
There has been many rumours surrounding this 15 year review. Lets be clear even before we see it that it won't be anything that has been properly looked at. Where the medical establishment would usually want double bind randomised like for like trials, when it comes to homebirth they will look at a retrospective anecdotal unsubstantiated biased and badly turned out piece of literature that for the next 15 years they will bring out and quote even if it is discredited. Exactly like the Bastien debacle.
The last published figures for 2007. (2008 will be out shortly I think) showed in SA one still birth attended by a midwife and 3 stillbirths from unassisted clients , one of which didn't even know she was pregnant and they weren't sure of how or why the baby died or if in fact it had been born alive. There were however plenty of written up incidence of deaths at the hospital in the same year that were obviously hospital related. This is easy to get hold of and care providers like myself are sent booklets containing all the perinatal data every year.
Every time a baby dies at home (Don't forget death is part of life and someone will have their baby die) it it splashed everywhere, the police are involved and the care provider vilified. If this happened everytime a baby died at the hospital there would have to be a 24 hour news service dedicated to it. Why do we have to try and pretend that a baby will never die just because dickheads like Pesce try to make us sound like baby killers.
''We feel that if we're not listened to then the safety of the maternity system can be fundamentally compromised.''
When The Sunday Age visited Dr Pesce this week in his rooms at Westmead Private Hospital, in Sydney's western suburbs, his patients were keen to point out that his new responsibilities have not compromised the quality of his care.
But the two worlds do occasionally collide. A few weeks ago, he had to cut short a live interview on breakfast television to deal with a patient whose labour was so advanced the baby's head was crowning as the car screeched to a halt outside the hospital where he was facing the cameras.
Surely this doesn't indicate that he is fab, it more shows that:
1. Obs are not the people caring for women.
2. This woman would have been safer to stay home and not birth in her car. She could have called her midwife who comes and keeps everything calm and helps hold the space for a women to gently give birth.
In the interest of collaboration Dr P should have consulted a private midwife for assistance with a specialist normal birth advice.Indeed, Dr Pesce is a hard man to silence. But when Tarne Dirou enters his consulting room she proves it can be done. Due to give birth on Tuesday, she tells him she wants a silent birth, in line with her Scientology beliefs that words spoken during moments of pain can have adverse effects later in life.
Dr Pesce delivered Mrs Dirou's daughter under similar circumstances. ''All the staff were happy to help out because it was such an unusual request,'' Dr Pesce said. ''I'm happy to help women have the birth that they want as long as it doesn't put the baby at risk.''
I assume that because he doesn't want to put a baby at risk that he won't induce a labour, rupture membranes, advocate epidural or narcotic drugs. Tie a woman to a bed with a ctg monitor or recommend that every 2 to 4 hours a stranger puts their fingers in the vagina of the carrying mother to increase the risk of infection.
