"Nothing, dear, you're NOT QUALIFIED."

Through most of human history, childbirth was kept strictly in the realm of women and the home: mothers and midwives working together in the same home the baby would grow up in. This changed drastically in the United States in the 20th century, as the perception of giving birth outside of a hospital setting morphed from the norm into unsanitary, unsafe, and unwise. In 1938, roughly fifty percent of American women gave birth at home, but by 1955 that number had dwindled to a shocking low of less than one percent. By the 1960s, homebirth and midwife advocates were staging a comeback, raising the number of midwife-attended births to over six percent of all U.S. births in 2008. However, a revival of home birth has remained dauntingly out of reach, as the percentage of women choosing to birth at home continues to hover around one percent of all births in the United States.

Why all the hate on home birthing? Partially, societal expectations can be to blame. Most people, upon hearing a woman announce her intention to have a baby in a non-hospital setting, denounce her as crazy and immediately set about to dissuade her from her dangerous decision. This line of thinking, though well intended, can fall victim to two very large flaws. First, most people currently living in the United States have been raised under a barrage of memes connotating the act of giving birth as not only excruciatingly painful, but exceedingly dangerous. Reality TV shows like "Birth Day" tend to depict the most dramatic, absolutely worst-case-scenarios possible. Fictional sources aren't much better. Think back to the last mainstream film you saw that depicted a birth (and no, "The Back-Up Plan" can't count). Most likely it was in a hospital and either depicted lots of painkillers, or lots of screaming, or both. Sound familiar? Now think about the last midwife-attended home birth you heard about. Drawing a blank? That wouldn't be surprising - as discussed above, home birthing and midwife-assisted births continue to be in the extreme minority in the U.S.

Another possible explanation for America's rejection of out-of-hospital births comes from the medical institution itself. The American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists both came out against home birthing in response to Ricki Lake's documentary, "The Business of Being Born," calling it a dangerous, celebrity-inspired trend that ignores the potential danger in birth. Despite these high-profile protests, midwife-attended home birth nevertheless continues to present itself as a viable, safe alternative to hospital birth. In 2000, a study conducted by Kenneth C. Johnson and Betty-Anne Daviss found the rate for successful, healthy deliveries for planned low-risk home births in the United States and Canada to be equal to that of hospital deliveries. However, home births come without many of the trappings - or burdens - of a hospital birth. Pitocin, epidurals, episiotomies, Cesarean-sections, etc. - all these things occur commonly in hospital births. Most notably, C-sections are currently performed in over thirty percent of American hospital births, a rate that falls far above the World Health Organization's recommended rate of five to ten percent of total births. In the case of a difficult or dangerous labor, these procedures can be positive tools that help women deliver their babies safely, but are they really necessary to have available for all births?

The home birthing movement has responded with a resounding "NO." Documentaries such as Deborah Pascali-Denaro's "Orgasmic Birth" and midwife communities like Midwifery Today explore the proposition that when it comes to normal, healthy pregnancies, less may actually be more, and the evidence appears to be on their side. The rate of safe vaginal delivery without pain medication is significantly higher in midwife-assisted and home births, and proponents argue that a natural childbirth allowed to proceed at its own pace outside of a hospital's time restrictions is ultimately better for both the baby and the mother. So why the hate by AMA and ACOG? Perhaps it is because, as the home birth and midwife movement grows in popularity in the United States and more women discover that their labor doesn't have to be a screaming pain-filled movie scene, they recognize a true threat to their financial and institutional stability and are unwilling to allow women true control over their birthing experiences for fear of the impact on their wallets.

This brings us back to Monty Python. Beyond its humor, it raises some very good points. The machine that goes "PING," along with the others, is really extraneous in this birth, but are used anyway because that is what is expected. The doctors, overly confident in their hyper-medicalized approach, ignore any possibility of the woman's participation in an event that ought to be most intimately of her body, and the result is a impersonal, overly-sterilized birthing nightmare where the mother no longer maintains an ounce of control and is left dazed and empty. Hopefully, through the work of midwives and home birth advocates, the American medical community as a whole will come around and realize that women need options that fit them, whatever their needs are, and that when it comes to giving birth, the mother really is the most qualified for the job.

The Medicalization of Childhood

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in children is one of the most widely-covered and controversial medical condition of the last thirty years. One of the things that makes it so controversial is that there is no test that can determine if a child has ADHD, in addition to there being no universally accepted symptoms that definitively classify a child as having ADHD. Still, there are some common symptoms usually considered: forgetfulness, distraction, inability to concentrate, constant restlessness, and excessive talking or fidgeting. However, all of these symptoms seem to me to be normal conditions that any human and certainly any child could have at any point. How is it that these symptoms have become the warning flags for a disorder requiring medication?

First, we must consider the "symptoms." All seem to fall under the umbrella of undesirable behavior for children, and it seems like a diagnosis of ADHD could provide parents with a quick fix for a "problem" child instead of taking the time with their child to understand and correct the behavior, or to accept that their child is just being a child. Children can be forgetful; they don't necessarily know when it is or is not appropriate to talk; if they are not engaged in their surroundings, how is it unnatural that they would become restless or fidgety? Meanwhile, by casting these symptoms as the results of a "curable" condition, pharmacological companies successfully create another disorder that they can make money off of through selling treatments to fed-up parents tired of putting their lives on hold to deal with their misbehaving child. Making up conditions is a dangerous thing on its own, but when the medicalization of behavior becomes specifically geared towards children it becomes even more dangerous. Under AACAP (American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry) guidelines, ADHD cannot be diagnosed unless a child presents symptoms for at least six months prior to the age of seven - which means that the majority of ADHD cases are diagnosed far before the child can contribute meaningfully to the discussion of their health. In these cases, children diagnosed with ADHD undergo years of treatment that they themselves have not sought out, for a condition that they have not articulated to be a problem. Instead, the current diagnosis by doctor at the request of the parent leaves the child out of the loop entirely - and to proceed with years of mind-altering medication for a condition whose existence is established on shaky ground at best seems to be no only an example of poor judgment but of grave medical risk-taking.

In an article publish in the British Journal of Psychiatry (2004), child psychiatrists Dr. Sami Timimi and Professor Eric Taylor both agree that ADHD is best understood as a social construct rather than a legitimate disorder in need of medication. The article provides some solid ground for the opponents of the recent rampage of ADHD diagnoses, stating that “there are no specific cognitive, metabolic, or neurological markers or medical tests for ADHD.” Nevertheless, when diagnosing children in the U.S. through the list of common symptoms, the number of affected American children falls at around twenty-six percent of the total child population. Conversely, when studies are conducted using the symptoms used to diagnose patients internationally, the number of affected children falls to less than one percent. This is not a difference that can be explained away by disparate cultural norms. Instead, it seems that in the United States certain behaviors have been identified as unwanted in children, and if those symptoms loosely match the symptoms of ADHD more and more parents feel compelled to rush to the doctor and get Ritalin to make their baby normal again.

In America's quick-fix, progress-obsessed lifestyle, we have gotten into the habit of throwing pills at a problem instead of trying to understand it. Rarely does it cause as much damage as when applied to children who fail to meet our definition of well-behaved, ultimately resulting in our refusal to learn how to better educate and stimulate these children and instead simply forcing more pills down their throat. When one takes into account that on average thirty to fifty percent of children diagnosed with ADHD in childhood go on to “suffer” from adult ADHD, a disease with an entirely different set of symptoms, it's hard to believe that the pharmacological promises of a cure are anything more than an inefficient band-aid, and probably much less. Instead, there is something else going on here. Many of the people diagnosed with ADHD, both adults and children, have been roped into a vague, fabricated disorder that requires them to take mind-altering medication every day of their life just so that they can “function normally.” However, it doesn't have to be that way. By recognizing as a society that not all children can be boxed into a single definition of "acceptable” behavior, and by taking time to better understand why some children have a hard time adopting certain attitudes and activities, along with how we can better stimulate and educate them, we will ultimately be better off .

Well, most of us would be better off - the pharmaceutical companies currently lining their pockets with the money taken under false pretenses would hurt a little.