Board index › Topical Discussion › Politics, Philosophy, and Religion

Should it be okay for women to smoke while pregnant?

Page 10 of 10 [ 153 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1 ... 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Previous topic | Next topic

ruveyn
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2008
Age: 88
Gender: Male
Posts: 31,502
Location: New Jersey

24 Nov 2012, 9:11 pm

YippySkippy wrote:
Having a home birth is like driving without a seatbelt while your baby lies unsecured on the passenger seat. Maybe you won't have an accident, but it's a crazy, pointless risk nonetheless.


A properly trained midwife can handle uncomplicated births as well as an MD. If the mother has had proper checkup it can be determined ahead of time if complications are likely. If they are, then momma should go to a hospital.

ruveyn



Awesomelyglorious
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 17 Dec 2005
Gender: Male
Posts: 13,157
Location: Omnipresent

24 Nov 2012, 9:15 pm

Ann2011 wrote:
Always so concerned for the unborn, but never for the living. What if the unborn potential person wanted to give birth to their baby at home? The individual's right to birth her children in her own way is her own business. You, nor the state has rights over a woman's body and her best judgement for her child.

I actually come out in favor of homebirthing as legal. While the risk is higher as a percent according to the information given to me, it didn't strike me as being very high in absolute terms.

You seem to have created a strawman of my opinion of things, but I stopped arguing against you because I didn't believe you were thinking so much as continually restating your position.



YippySkippy
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 26 Feb 2011
Age: 44
Gender: Female
Posts: 3,986

24 Nov 2012, 9:22 pm

Unexpected complications can occur in any delivery. When I was being born, the umbilical cord wrapped itself around my neck and started cutting off blood flow to my brain. Good thing my mom was at a hospital where a machine could detect my distress and an emergency c-section could be performed. Good thing she wasn't at home trying for a hippie "experience".



Ann2011
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Jul 2011
Age: 54
Gender: Female
Posts: 3,843
Location: Ontario, Canada

24 Nov 2012, 9:32 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
You seem to have created a strawman of my opinion of things, but I stopped arguing against you because I didn't believe you were thinking so much as continually restating your position.

Didn't mean to create a strawman, just trying to isolate ideas.
Quote:
While the risk is higher as a percent according to the information given to me, it didn't strike me as being very high in absolute terms.

Still have to disagree . . . it's a woman's business where she wants to birth her child. Your interference is not needed.


_________________
People are strange, when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone.
Morrison/Krieger


ruveyn
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2008
Age: 88
Gender: Male
Posts: 31,502
Location: New Jersey

24 Nov 2012, 9:47 pm

YippySkippy wrote:
Unexpected complications can occur in any delivery. When I was being born, the umbilical cord wrapped itself around my neck and started cutting off blood flow to my brain. Good thing my mom was at a hospital where a machine could detect my distress and an emergency c-section could be performed. Good thing she wasn't at home trying for a hippie "experience".


Certified midwives have a good track record, comparable to obstetrics MDs.

Proper home-birthing is done in clean conditions by qualified midwives.

ruveyn



AspieRogue

24 Nov 2012, 11:58 pm

LKL wrote:
Home births could result in a 90% neonatal mortality rate, and the population would still grow as long as each woman had more than two children who survived to reproduce themselves. It would mean that each woman had to basically spend most of her life pregnant or lactating, but look! that's basically what actually happened. IIrc the actual total childhood death rate (with most of it occurring peri-natally or in infancy) was closer to 50% before modern medicine: unimaginably high by modern standards, but still not enough to keep the population from growing in an era with no birth control. In addition, a lot of women died quite young, in childbirth; they might pop out half a dozen kids, three of which survived to adulthood, and then die trying to bith another one in their mid-30s, and the population would still grow.

Go to a pioneer graveyard sometime, if there is one near you, and read the inscriptions on the tombstones. There are an awful lot of 'died in childbirth's, buried right next to 'November 24, 1893-November 25, 1893.' Homebirth advocates will say that this is because 'doctors didn't wash their hands,' but a lot of these deaths occurred in areas where there were no doctors.



What about native Americans and other tribal peoples? From a biological standpoint this is quite curious: We are a species that appears to be so weak and fragile that half of live offspring cannot survive early childhood and at least half of adult females cannot survive giving birth without modern technology........ :?



LKL
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Jul 2007
Age: 48
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,402

25 Nov 2012, 4:18 am

AspieRogue, I guess I'm going to figure you just don't know a lot about biology. Female octopuses reproduce once in their lives, and they always die. They produce hundreds or thousands of eggs in that one event, and (unless the population of octopuses is growing), more than 99% of every single clutch will die. That's not frailty; that's one species' reproductive strategy. All that matters to the population as a whole is that the mother and father reproduce themselves before they die -that is, two of those eggs make it to be adult octopuses.
Deer, which have a strategy much like humans used to have, produce one or two fawns each year; again, most of those fawns will die before they reach maturity.
Kiwi birds are more like what humans are now: a single, large egg at time, with huge amounts of resources devoted to it by the mother and father. We love our children, and want to provide for them, so this 'naturally' seems like a superior strategy to most of us (especially us westerners) now.

None of these strategies is "weak," they're just different strategies that are based on differient environments.



AspieRogue

25 Nov 2012, 6:31 pm

LKL wrote:
AspieRogue, I guess I'm going to figure you just don't know a lot about biology. Female octopuses reproduce once in their lives, and they always die. They produce hundreds or thousands of eggs in that one event, and (unless the population of octopuses is growing), more than 99% of every single clutch will die. That's not frailty; that's one species' reproductive strategy. All that matters to the population as a whole is that the mother and father reproduce themselves before they die -that is, two of those eggs make it to be adult octopuses.
Deer, which have a strategy much like humans used to have, produce one or two fawns each year; again, most of those fawns will die before they reach maturity.
Kiwi birds are more like what humans are now: a single, large egg at time, with huge amounts of resources devoted to it by the mother and father. We love our children, and want to provide for them, so this 'naturally' seems like a superior strategy to most of us (especially us westerners) now.

None of these strategies is "weak," they're just different strategies that are based on differient environments.



LKL, I am perfectly aware that most female invertebrates die after laying eggs(including Octopi)and tend to produce thousands of offspring. However among vertebrates this is quite uncommon. Female placental mammals(and certain sharks that give birth to live young) generally can have multiple litters(or even multiple offspring if they can only bear one baby at a time) during their lifetime. Elephant infant mortality rates are much higher in zoos where there are vets on call to assist and help save the life of the baby elephant whereas in the wild 85-95% of baby and mother elephants survive birth. Historically, the mean postpartum mortality rate for humans was 1% of live births. However, with large populations as well as other environmental factors including diseases. I am not an expert but clearly humans are becoming biologically more fragile and reliant on medical technology.



LKL
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Jul 2007
Age: 48
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,402

25 Nov 2012, 7:45 pm

You're not getting it. We're not getting more frail, we're moving towards a different reproductive strategy. We used to produce many children, most of whom died, and die young ourselves; medical technology has enabled the shift towards producing few children, most of whom live, and to living longer lives ourselves. It's not weakness, it's just a different strategy.
In poor ares of the world, perinatal death is about 4%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perinatal_mortality
http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2 ... 06_eng.pdf
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/i ... 1002.shtml
http://www.phasa.org.za/articles/matern ... right.html

As you mentioned, this leaves out deaths in infancy and childhood.