Wow! Keep me out of there!

A girl I know had her baby at the local military hospital not long ago. It was a typical hospital birth story.... induction for no good reason, things "got complicated" (aka, the baby wasn't ready to come out, so he wasn't going to), and it ended in a c-section, and the baby being shipped across town to the NICU, where he stayed for a week.

You're not even going to believe why they did this. He inhaled fluid, and they put him on oxygen as a precaution. (The mom said they didn't suction him deeply enough, but suctioning in the way they do in hospitals is actually very harmful, and has been linked to speech and language delays, so honestly, they didn't need to do it at all, deeply or not.) They then sent him to the NICU for no good reason, and didn't denote that she had been treated for Group B Strep. (SEVEN DOSES of IV antibiotics!! HOLY SHIT, is that even legal?!!) So they treated this perfectly healthy baby for Group B Strep, which was a week long course of IV antibiotics. By the mom's account, he was perfectly healthy, and it was all precautionary.

What a bunch of idiots. First of all, it's been well proven in our very own country that antibiotics during labor have no effect on the transmission of Group B Strep during delivery. Furthermore, this was a c-section, so the odds of transmission were literally zero. What's more, IF a baby is born with Group B Strep, it is EXTREMELY obvious very soon after birth.

All this makes it so apparent what a bullet we dodged with Orren's birth. If I'd resigned myself to a hospital birth, as most women do, and done what I did, laboring at home until the very end, having no time for antibiotics (Why do you think I labored at home until the very end, when it would be too late to receive antibiotics? It was a simple way of not consenting to an unnecessary treatment. Plus, I just liked being at home better than being at the birth center.) So basically, Orren was born with no antibiotics, to me, a Group B Strep carrier. When he was born, Nancy told us to just watch him really closely for any respiratory symptoms. When we went home a few hours after he was born, Jill told us that pretty much if Orren had been infected, we would have seen some sign of it by now. We still watched Orren like a hawk for his first 24 hours of life, but he never showed a single respiratory symptom. He was fine. He was NOT the one baby out of 4444 who would contract Group B Strep lung infection during his birth. Even though this was abundantly obvious to our midwives right from the start, had Orren entered this world in a hospital, he would have spent his first week of life in the NICU, hooked up to an IV full of unnecessary antibiotics.

File that under, "This is why we homebirth."