re breech baby info needed in article apr trentu ca xtkmg trentu ca kate gregory writes in article apr cs rochester edu fulk cs rochester edu mark fulk writes another uncommon problem is maternal hemorrhage i don t remember the incidence but it is something like in or births it is hard to see how you could handle it at home and you wouldn t have very much time thing you might consider is that people s risk tradeoffs vary i consider a risk of loss of a loved one to require considerable effort in the avoiding mark you seem to be terrified of the birth process that s ridiculous and unable to believe that women s bodies are actually designed to do it they aren t designed they evolved and much as it discomforts us in humans a trouble free birth process was sacrificed to increased brain and cranial size wild animals have a much easier time with birth than humans do domestic horses and cows typically have a worse time to give you an idea my family tree is complicated because a few of my pioneer great great grandfathers had several wives and we never could figure out which wife had each child one might ask why this happened my great great grandfathers were by the time they reached their forties quite prosperous farmers nonetheless they lost several wives each to the rigors of childbirth the graveyards in spencer indiana and boswell north dakota contain quite a few gravestones like ida wf of jacob liptrap and baby may you wanted to section all women carrying breech in case one in a hundred or a thousand breech babies get hung up in second stage more like one in ten and the consequences can be devastating i have direct experience of more than a dozen victims of a fouled up breech birth and now you want all babies born in hospital based on a guess of how likely maternal hemorrhage is and a false belief that it is fatal it isn t always fatal but it is often fatal when it happens out of reach of adequate help more often it permanently damages one s health clearly women s bodies evolved to give birth i am no believer in divine design however evolution did not favor trouble free births for humans you have your kids where you want you encourage your wife to get six inch holes cut through her stomach muscles expose herself to anesthesia and infection and whatever other just in case measures you think are necessary my aren t we wroth i haven t read a more outrageous straw man attack in months i can practically see your mouth foam we re statistically sophisticated enough to balance the risks although i can t produce exact statistics years after the last time we looked them up rest assured that we balanced c section risks against other risks i wouldn t encourage my wife to have a caesarean unless it was clearly indicated on the other hand i am opposed on obvious grounds to waiting until an emergency to give in and bear this in mind my wife took the lead in all of these decisions we talked things over and i did a lot of the leg work but the main decisions were really hers but i for one am bothered by your continued suggestions especially to the misc kidders pregnant for the first time that birth is dangerous even fatal and that all these unpleasant things are far better than the risks you run just doing it naturally i don t know of very many home birth advocates even that think that a first time mother should have her baby at home i m no luddite i ve had a section i m planning a hospital birth this time but for heaven s sake not everyone needs that but people should bother to find out the relative risks my wife was unwilling to take any significant risks in order to have nice surroundings in view of the intensity of the birth experience i doubt surroundings have much importance anyway somehow the values you re advocating seem all lopsided to me taking risks even if fairly small of serious permanent harm in order to preserve something that is after all an esthetic consideration mark a fulk university of rochester computer science department fulk cs rochester edu
