casm's blog

April is International Cesarean Awareness Month and ICAN are offering reduced subscriptions to their organisation for the month of April. In addition they will be offering three fantastic webinars, all of which are free to ICAN subscribers:

A new prospective Canadian study has found that homebirths with registered midwives are just as safe, if not safer than hospital birth and guess what, women with one prior caesarean were included in the homebirth cohort and there were no uterine ruptures in either cohort. Women in the homebirth group had significantly better outcomes in terms of intervention. Check out the study here: http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/rapidpdf/cmaj.081869.

UTSpeaks: To Push or Pull?
Do women choose or consent to caesarean delivery?

CANA's US-based sister organisation, the International Caesarean Awareness Network (ICAN) has established a new forum at their website: http://ican-online.org/forum. The forums are in addition to ICAN's email lists and they are moderated by members of the ICAN Board of Directors.

The recent report Mental health aspects of women’s reproductive health: a global literature review has highlighted issues related to the development and onset of depression and other mental health disorders that are related to reproduction. This review is probably the most comprehensive literature review on this topic to date, covering available research from developing to developed countries, examining the different challenges and research gaps in each setting.

You may have heard about the Federal Government's 120 million package to improve maternity services. These changes are set to make a huge difference for women birthing after caesarean by improving access to private midwives in the hospital system. However, not all choices have been supported. Despite the fact that a woman can get a funded, indemnified practitioner for every other choice, including elective caesarean for no medical reason, homebirth has been left out of the equation. CANA supports a woman's right to choose where, with whom and how she births.

ICAN, CANA's sister organisation in the US are hosting new webinars on caesarean prevention. See message below:

 As a consumer organisation, CANA supports that every woman, has every choice when it comes to where, with whom and how she births her baby. As such, we include below a very important message from Homebirth Australia regarding the campaign to prevent legislation that will effectively make homebirth with a registered midwife illegal. CANA supports this campaign and many of our members will be attending the rally in Canberra on September 7th to stand up for a woman's right to a qualified registered practitioner if she chooses homebirth.

I've been campaigning and lobbying for maternity services reform for the past seven years so to hear tonight's budget announcement that Maternity Services was going to be given a 120million boost by the Federal Government was food for my weary soul.