Awesome quote!

Having spent my junior year abroad and then two years of grad school in England, and fallen in love with NHS (because for once I actually got comprehensive health care, and I didn’t have to wait in a room with fifty or more other indigent or otherwise unlucky people and hope my number was one of the ones drawn out of a hat that evening, which was how the free clinic where I lived operated; I got better care at the student health centre on my undergraduate campus, but it wasn’t much point going there if I needed a prescription for anything more arcane than Sudafed or amoxicillin) my first incliniation is to say, Of course American hospitals can ban doulas. Doulas mean less epidurals and less c-sections. There is a conflict of interest between for-profit medicine and consumer rights in the medical marketplace, which is one reason why ACOG can run obstetric care like a cartel runs a monopoly on a commodity, and why making medicine entirely privatized with almost no regulation of payment arrangements or medical procedures is asking for trouble.

However, I have heard that NHS is not exactly client-centred when it comes to obstetric, either. I had great experiences with NHS for basic, non-specialty stuff – management of my migraines and allergies, antibiotics when I caught pneumonia, help determining why I came down with severe chronic fatigue symptoms in my second year at Oxford (turns out I caught mono at the ripe old age of twenty eight, and like chicken pox, the older you are when you first get it, the harder it hits you). Heck, I even had house calls. I loved NHS. Oh, and free birth control! Wow! But I never got pregnant while in England, so I can’t say much about the value of socializing medicine in obstetrics due to the lack of personal experience.

Certainly things seem to be better in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and some parts of Germany and France. Maybe it has more to do with a nation’s cultural perception of pregnancy and birth than it does with payment arrangements.

The Today Show–never a bang-up source of obstetric information, lemme tell you–covered this issue some time ago. The overall messages were 1) “buyer beware” 2) only rich people can afford doulas and 3) they can “get in the way” of the doctor, who is the “leader” in the “delivery” process. According to the report, it was the latter reason that compelled some hospitals to ban doulas altogether.