Yeah. It's really insulting to even jokingly self-apply a "PhD". People spend 8 - 10 years studying intensely to earn their doctorates and hone their basic skills. You have no formal education in the birthing process. Experience, and reading birthing books, do not count. I don't even get the impression that you have CPR training- [PSA]which, by the way, I recommend everyone take. It's extremely simple: it's a quick, single class but it's invaluable in case of emergency... either cardiac, or in the case of choking/airway obstruction. (PM me if you need help finding a CPR trainer in your area)[/Public Service Announcement]
The fact of the matter is, modern medicine is why neonate deaths are so low (as compared to the entirety of recorded past, and in current third-world countries). Your individual personal experience matters fuckall in the grand scheme of things. Just because you, Madame Consumer, didn't get perfect nutritional and/or prenatal care, and weren't informed that you can ALWAYS specify the level of your medical care as it pertains to medical intervention (up to where the fetus' life is in peril, meaning that you can specify that you do not get a c-section unless absolutely necessary) doesn't mean that your anti-medical-establishment rants are justified. It means your personal experience sucked ass, and you believe that it's a systemic issue rather than a specific one.
Medicaid pays for prenatal care. People with no insurance and no money in general get professional medical prenatal care and nutritional advice. This availability helps to stem trends in populations of low economic status such as premature birth, low birth weight, and complications due to malnutrition/drug habits (including alcohol and tobacco) of the mother. People with no money and/or less education have access to appropriate medical care that will help to ensure the birth of a healthy baby.
Myself personally, as someone who
does have formal education in the birth process, I'm shocked and dismayed that you actively profess that modern medicine is useless and out to kill your baby. It's just asinine. Reading birthing books is all well and good. Having enough babies to qualify your vagina as a human clown car is not education. It's experience.
Your
experience is meaningless when compared to formal medical
education- you insist otherwise, and that's frankly insulting.
You hold no formal training in nutrition in general, prenatal nutrition and care, or the ability to diagnose any medical condition, but proclaim infallible superior knowledge without any substantiative information, let alone proof.
A consortium of midwives hell-bent on home birth? Well excuse me, but with all due respect to midwives, midwives' collective
opinions on the care of pregnant women are meaningless when they buck against all established medical knowledge as practiced by
doctors and without any research or data to substantiate their very contrary claims. When you're trying to effect change on a medical standard of care, you need to have lots of research and hard data to prove the benefit of changing. I have seen nothing that even glances in the direction of "research" or "data".
I hate to throw it around in this way, but in my professional opinion as a person with formal education in the field which is under discussion, which gives me credible authority to make the following statement against your debate, I have the following to say regarding your overall position:
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh................