Finally a direction: Legal & Ethical issues in Midwifery

This is my newest grandchild due 12 July 2008 - 20 week scan.

I have been bloging for about 10 weeks now. During this time I have experimented with different topics and I have not had any clear direction, except that I wanted to share knowledge with women and midwives regarding pregnancy and childbirth. I have read many other blogs from both midwives and women, some of them have a theme and others do not. I also enjoy having a commentary regarding the subject material. At this point I would like to acknowledge the support of fellow blogers Carolyn McIntosh and Sarah Stewart who have been good mentors. I do find it frustrating sometimes when I do not have the technical / computer skills required to do the things I want to do with my blog. This then entails reading pages of material trying to put a link on the blog. Despite these challenges I do enjoy bloging and find that it is quite contagious even though it can be time consuming. However, I have decided that as an educator it is important to focus on a particular area within my scope of practice. My passion is “law” and “ethics”, to get the message across to midwives the importance of professional practice issues; these being; Legislation that governs our practice, ANMC Competency Standards, ANMC Code of Ethics, Code of Conduct and Nurses & Midwives Board requirements, negligence, confidentiality, consent, documentation, Scope of Practice and any other topic that may come under this heading. This means that this blog will now specifically look at legal and ethical issues (women's rights vs fetal rights) relating to pregnancy and childbirth, of which there are many. If you as a reader of this blog have any questions or issues that you would like to discuss and or cover please just leave me a comment and I will follow it up. Each month I will cover a legal or ethical topic relating the subject to legislation and midwifery practice. If you have any burning issues please ask the question or share the experience so that we may all learn from it.

Caesarean section rate on the rise!

We all know that the caesarean section (C/S) rate is on the rise, currently in Australia it is at 29%, it is interesting to note that in 1993 it was only 20%. Some statistics show a dramatic rise among low-risk women within the private health care sector, an increase from 10% to 19%. The public health care sector was less, from 6% - 8%. So why is there such a disparity between the private and public health care sectors? And what can Midwives do to help stem the rising rate of C/S?
Are women aware of the implications of such a rise in the caesarean section rate and the possible complications for further pregnancies?
One of the complications are placenta accreta which has gone from being a rare occurrence to frequent one. The Sydney Morning Herald viewed this interview: see link below: http://www.smh.com.au/multimedia/2008/national/caesareans/main.html

Its time we worked collaboratively to reduce the caesarean section rate and informed women of all the complications of a C/S, it is not just a simple operation, it is major surgery which will affect them for the rest of there lives, and yes there is a place for a C/S when it is an emergency. Please make a comment, what do you think?