NEWSMOTHERHOOD

When Holly Yeager got the news that she was expecting her third child, she wanted to make sure that she could have the same incredible, safe birthing experience that she had with her first two babies. So, Holly contacted her new insurance company, Geisinger Choice, to find out if her midwives were covered by her plan. Geisinger Choice said yes, so Holly proceeded as planned with her pregnancy plans. Unfortunately for her, things were about to get very complicated.

At Holly's initial appointment at her preferred midwife practice, Birth Care and Family Health Services in Bart, Pennsylvania, she was asked about her wishes regarding where she'd like to give birth. She indicated that she'd prefer a home birth, but was willing to compromise and deliver at the birthing center, depending on what her insurance carrier allowed. Three days later, Holly received a letter from Geisinger Choice denying coverage for both options.

So, why would an insurance company who previously stated in covered care by midwives deny Holly these options? A call to the customer service department netted this response: while midwives as individual practitioners are covered, the actual spaces where they do their work (homes, birthing centers, etc) are not. The director of Birth Care and Family Health Services has been trying for years to get someone from Geisinger Choice to meet with her and visit the center without luck.

Last month, a midwife in North Carolina was arrested for doing her job. Amy Medwin, a Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) licensed in the state of Virginia, had been attending home births in North Carolina and the state was having none of it. They brought her up on charges of practicing midwifery without a license. A charge that might make more sense if North Carolina if the state in fact actually offered professional licensure for midwives, but it doesn't.

Apparently, the North Carolina government doesn't want its women having home births. Why they think it is the lawmaker's job to choose individual women's birthing experience is beyond me. Unfortunately, it isn't the only state that feels that way. Fourteen states currently fail to recognize CPMs.

Right now, despite the best efforts of midwifery advocates, Illinois women do not have access to state-licensed midwives. Illinois provides no certification for midwives, leaving the roughly 800 to 1,000 women annually who want to have a home birth to rely on an unlicensed, unregulated midwife. This creates a home birth situation without standardized care, potential difficulty in obtaining  birth certificates, and trouble getting smoothly transferred to a hospital in the event of a medical emergency. While there is still much work to get fully-licensed midwives in Illinois, in the meantime a new bill has been introduced that would address that would take their first baby steps to ensuring safe home births.

Imagine you are pregnant. You are now at full-term and it is time to give birth. The closest health care center with obstetrical services is well over an hour away and transportation is scarce. That might sound horrible, but such is the harsh reality for women of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota.

For approximately ten years, these women have made this so-called "hell ride." The lucky ones make the journey strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance; the others have to find private transportation, no easy task on the reservation, where the cars are limited and the poverty severe. A higher than average number women choose — or are coerced by doctors — to induce labor, in an attempt to avoid the hell ride altogether.

So what led to this hellish situation? It seems that the reservation and its 14,200 residents have been without obstetrical facilities since 2001, thus necessitating the over 90-mile trek to St. Mary's Healthcare Center in Pierre, South Dakota, whenever a woman needs to give birth. The overall situation on the reservation is so bad that Fordham law school professor Chi Mgbako compared it to that of women in developing nations.

Supposedly, a hospital and birthing center have been in the works for the reservation for a decade. However, when the ACLU asked the Indian Health Service (IHS) to reveal the plans for the project, they refused. Last fall, the ACLU sued under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Since then, only a few documents have been released to them.

The situation for the women of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe is unacceptable. They deserve access to comprehensive reproductive health care. Ask the IHS to turn over all documentation relating to the proposed hospital immediately. One hell ride more is one too many.

Photo credit: Neeta Lind

After hearing that Kelley Williams-Bolar, a single mom, was sentenced to jail for sending her kids to school in a safe neighborhood, Change.org member Caitlin Lord decided to take a stand on her behalf. And so far, over 6,000 people have stood with her.

Williams-Bolar received 10 days in jail and 3 years probation after found guilty of a felony crime: sending her children to school. As Carol Scott reports on the Education cause, the Akron, Ohio, mom registered her children as living with their grandfather because she feared for their safety, and wanted them to attend school in a more secure location. The school wasted $6,000 to bring the case to trial, hiring a private investigator to spy on and videotape Williams-Bolar's children to prove that they lived with her in a different district, although she maintains that they split their time between the two homes.

"I wanted to do whatever was within my power to ensure that this travesty of justice would not slip between the cracks of our fast-paced, 24-hour news cycle," says Lord of her decision to start a Change.org petition asking Ohio Governor John Kasich and officials in Williams-Bolar's case to reduce her sentence on appeal. "I am also a single mother, and can identify with Williams-Bolar's desire to do everything and anything possible to ensure that her daughters were safe and receiving the quality education they deserved."

As Cara points out on The Curvature, it's also impossible to ignore the fact that Williams-Bolar "a black mother who has been jailed for sending her kids to a white school district." She lives in a predominantly minority housing project, while Copley, where she sent her kids for school, is mostly lily-white and middle class. While the Copley school district screams about lost property taxes, the broader problem is that we've set up a fundamentally unequal education system in which it's a crime to send your children to a school where you can trust that they will be safe. The judge wants her sentence to send a message of deterrence. How about a message about the deep-rooted injustice of our educational system?

Back in October, I told you about the Home Birth Safety Act before the Illinois legislature. This act, so important for the women and families of Illinois, will likely come to vote this week. If passed, women of the state will finally have access to a safe birthing experience at home, if they so choose.

Right now, Illinois women have no such access. The state currently provides absolutely no certification for midwives. So the approximately 800 to 1,000 Illinois women annually who want to have a home birth have to rely on an unlicensed, unregulated midwife without any way of being sure she is properly trained. As I explained in October, this can lead a woman in desire for a home birth to a situation without standardized care, difficulty in obtaining a birth certificate for her newborn, or, in the worst case scenario, trouble getting smoothly transferred to a hospital in the event of a medical emergency.

If the Illinois legislature passes the Home Birth Safety Act, these problems would be addressed. The act would create a Midwifery Board in Illinois that would oversee the licensing of  and certification standards for professional midwives. Midwives would be required by law to consult with medical professionals, should medical complications arise during pregnancy or birth.

Have you ever visited a doctor for distressing but subjective symptoms -- maybe headaches or nausea -- and been told the problems would improve if you weren't so anxious/attention-seeking/over-achieving or otherwise emotionally off-balance? Did you think the doctor relied too little on science and too much on his psychic powers, but feel too intimidated to argue because of the embossed diplomas on the walls?

Well, imagine you do argue. No, you say, I'm not crazy, and I want proper care. The physician -- perhaps irritated or frustrated -- could then diagnose Munchausen Syndrome, the feigning of illness to get attention.

Now imagine your child is the sick one. The physician could diagnose Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP) and bam, you're accused of faking your child's illness, perhaps even poisoning or beating him to instigate symptoms. While such abusive parents surely and sadly exist, MSBP may be dangerously overdiagnosed, often at the expense of "uppity" women who challenge the male-dominated medical or legal establishments. Studies indicate that doctors tend to take female patients' complaints less seriously than male patients'; presumably this unfortunate trend would apply to a woman's complaints on behalf of her child.

An MSBP diagnosis doesn't necessarily require extreme behavior. The guidelines for diagnosing MSBP include situations that could apply to any concerned parent whose child has a puzzling or treatment-resistant illness. Several of the guidelines devalue a parent's (particularly the mother's) agency and attempt to pigeonhole her into a prescribed, acceptable -- and sometimes contradictory -- range of behavior, with no regard to the extenuating circumstances of her child's illness. For example: "A parent who appears to be unusually calm in the face of serious difficulties in her child’s medical course while being highly supportive and encouraging of the physician, or one who is angry, devalues staff, and demands further intervention, more procedures, second opinions, and transfers to other more sophisticated facilities."

Put down the poppy seed bagel ... now back away ... that's quite the harmful drug you've got there.

Wait, it's not? That's odd. Because Charles Davis reports on the Criminal Justice blog that one mother's bagel craving lead to her newborn baby being taken away.

Three days after Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez's baby was born, Pennsylvania child protective services arrived to snatch their child away. For five precious days, the panicky parents could do nothing to get their child back. All because Mort had failed an overly-sensitive urine drug test at Jameson hospital, a test that she wasn't informed beforehand was being administered, and had counted poppy seeds among her breakfast of choice.

The Jameson hospital standard for testing positive is less than a sixth of the level the federal government uses on its employees, meaning that any woman with a hankering for a poppy seed — or, oh walk on the wild side, everything — bagel could find themselves labeled a drug user and have their baby taken away.

New research on the "motherhood penalty" confirms that when poorer women have children, their careers suffer more than their wealthy counterparts'.

While studies have previously confirmed that women's wages and careers suffer when they have children, a new study by sociologists Michelle J. Budig and Melissa J. Hodges looks at the motherhood penalty for women at different income levels and stages in their careers. The higher a woman climbs, the less likely she is to be a mother, forced to make a choice between career and family that men don't generally have to. Women who do make it to the top of their fields and manage to have children benefit greatly from family-friendly policies (as well as the resources to hire a nanny) and their careers do not suffer. But for the bottom 95% of women, the opposite is true.

From who's suffering from the recession to who's dropping out of schools, the answer is always those who have less.  As the report states, women who are less affected by the motherhood penalty earn more, are farther along in their careers, and work at organizations with women-friendly policies that prefer to cultivate talent over high turnover. That's rarely true at the other end of the spectrum, where women are fired for taking too much time if they suffer medical complications or because they can't afford expensive childcare. This not a random cruel joke society is playing on the poor: it's a direct result of state and federal laws that allow employers to punish women, especially young and poor women, for having children. As economist Nancy Folbre on the Economix blog concludes, "More universal family policies, such as early-childhood education, paid family leave, paid sick days and paid vacation time could help most working mothers substantially increase their earnings."

This week, we saw a group of Chicago moms arising victorious over public school officials in winning a library for their children. As James Clark reports on the Criminal Justice blog, another group in California is putting their Supermom powers to work in fighting for another issue: marijuana legalization.

I'll admit: when I think California moms and pot, the first thing that springs to mind is Weeds, the T.V. series about a suburban mom who turns to drug dealing to pay the bills. But we're not talking fiction here. With California set to vote on Prop 19, marijuana legalization, these moms are speaking up in support for the sake of the children.

Okay, so maybe calling for a children's library seems more like a mom-esque activity than promoting pot legalization. After all, as Clark points out, three-quarters of a century ago, women were at the forefront of the push for alcohol prohibition, a failed amendment that was swiftly repealed. But these moms have learned the lessons of bootleggers and moonshine and realized that pot prohbition hasn't kept it out of the hands of children. It's just causing more problems for our nation's youth. And it's definitely a big issue for concerned moms to tackle.

Gretchen Burns Bergman, A New PATH (Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing) co-founder and executive director, points out that the extensive black market in marijuana makes it easier to access than regulated drugs. "If you ask any kid in high school what's the easiest drug for them to get their hands on, they're going to say marijuana. Easier than tobacco. Easier than alcohol." Meanwhile, money spent on pot fuels a solid half of the Mexican drug war, a cause of human trafficking and serious violence and instability over the border, when it could go to legal local growers and be taxed for the benefit of the United States.