| json_metadata | "{"app":"musing/1.1","appTags":["health","pregnancy","baby","birth"],"appCategory":"health","appTitle":"Do you think delivering a baby is possible without going to an hospital?","appBody":"<p> Not only is it possible, for some people it is the only option.</p>\n<p>I was born in Yaguaraparo, a small rural town in the north-east part of Venezuela, 45 years ago. In that town most women depended on midwives to have their children. There were no hospitals and the small facility that eventually became the hospital may or may not have doctors available most of the time and those doctors most likely had neither the experience nor the equipment to properly assist a delivery.</p>\n<p>But, wait, midwives did not need much to help a mother deliver a baby. These women performed heroic feats on a daily basis. C-section was not an option. The woman had to deliver, even if it took her a week to do so. My mother alone had 8 healthy deliveries. Her first child died after birth. Most of her deliveries were very complicated and she tells stories of how she almost died in at least 5 of them, including mine, when she “died” for 18 hours or so and was resuscitated with homemade remedies prescribed by the midwife.</p>\n<p>There is the story of Beda, a neighbor I knew, who had 20 children, all of them delivered at home. The techniques and wisdom used by midwives is just beyond our modern understanding. How these women survived pain without painkillers, hemorrhages, infections without antibiotics and all kinds of complications without proper medical assistant is just amazing.</p>\n<p>Beda was actually quite a character. She and her husband, Hernan, were farmers and they had a big cocoa <em>hacienda</em> that produced quite a significant amount of cocoa. They would incorporate their children to the work as soon as they could pick up the fruits, ride a donkey or mule, use a machete, or climb a tree. You would see her pregnant in the evening, hear about her delivering a baby at night and see her next morning riding her mule loaded with sacks or grass for her animals. Some neighbors said she was her own best beast of burden. That’s how strong she was. And that’s actually how strong most women of that time were. </p>\n<p>Under the present crisis in Venezuela we see every day reports of women delivering babies in their homes, in the streets, on buses or subway trains. We have gone back half a century and hospitals now deserted by doctors who have left the country and poorly supplied are just eye-soring \"decorations.\"</p>","appDepth":2,"appParentPermlink":"pk27e6zaq","appParentAuthor":"bala41288","musingAppId":"aU2p3C3a8N","musingAppVersion":"1.1","musingPostType":"answer"}" |
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