Dear all: As I was skimming the articles, I found one comment in passing that I think most decidedly needs to be addressed. Along with all the other difficult areas of our work in a field where normal physiologic processes have been disrupted by the intrusion of marketing and misguided medical science, is the constant denigration of our profession by other health care practitioners. In this case, I am assuming that the person who said this on Lactnet wasn't really intending it the way it came across. But I want to Weissengerize the comment with an analogy. What if I said "birth is a normal physiologic process". Because birth is a normal physiologic process, perhaps we should leave women alone to do this by themselves and they would be better off without midwives or obstetricians. I think most of you would agree that midwives have a very important role in assisting the birthing process, and obstetricians in a well-designed health care system where they are called upon for medical emergencies also have a very important role in assisting the birthing process when it goes awry. While we may find that such services are in need of improvement in many countries, I doubt we would all call for the elimination of these two professions. In some cases, I do think some women are perfectly capable of delivering on their own and I have seen it myself on the side of the road in Buta in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in a little town in Ecuador and several moms here in Manhattan who gave birth on the bathroom floor. Yet, I still know that appropriate assistance from midwives and obstetricians is helpful. Yes, with any profession you can point to those who overintervene - I have stories about doulas, midwives, and obstetricians of individual cases where that has occurred. But I would never extrapolate that to their entire profession. I would, however, look at the system within which they work to try to determine ways in which the system could be restructured to reduce unnecesssary interventions. Best, Susan *********************************************** Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html Mail all commands to [log in to unmask] To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or [log in to unmask]) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet or ([log in to unmask]) To reach list owners: [log in to unmask]