on immersion

The announcement of midwifery legislation in this here backwoods province came with the inevitable essentializing cooing about “natural” and “home” birth…and such cooing does grate my nerves, oui, but the announcement was (pardon the pregnancy pun) overdue and is basically fantastic. Midwifery is a back up plan to the mature student academia-addicted drive I have to apply to medical school and become an ob-gyne by the time I myself would be of advanced maternal age. And it’s nice to know that the back up plan would at least be legal where I live.

Another recent and notorious legislative announcement, the eradication of our province’s treasured, flawed and still self-defining language immersion, was so cerebrally grating to one of our, ooh I don’t know, PAIR of high-risk pregnancy specialists that she is jumping ship and moving away, taking her kindergarten kinder with her.

Back in the autumn an ambitious childhood friend of mine was leading a call for applications to a provincial leadership program. The process involved submitting an essay about the applicant’s idealistic vision of the province in the future. I applied so that I could write about my vision of here as a place where women weren’t forced to carry pregnancies they did not want, weren’t subjected to the highest rates of episiotomies and C sections in the country, weren’t denied public sexual health care if they were over the age of 24…etc. It was not my friend who did the adjudication, but as you can well imagine, I was not chosen. But it is apparent that women will leave here if our needs- which include our need to not have children we don’t want, and our need to protect the children we chose to parent- are kicked at.

A bit of a game my essay might have been, but the vision is quite serious. So the midwifery announcement is a coup in that even if you wipe away all the essential oils and earth mothering of midwifery stereotypes, the presence of midwives will free up sparse obstetrical resources. With midwifery covering the uncomplicated labours, ob-gynes can focus on births requiring surgical intervention- not to mention a host of gynecological issues such as abortion. They won’t need to schedule a predictable regimen of C sections just to be assured every pregnant woman does get some attention during her delivery. (Of course I am exaggerating but that’s what I do). One step forward, two steps back…