Women; intelligent, sensible women, are starting to realize that the much touted benefits of prenatal care with a health care provider come with a high emotional price tag attached. Paying someone else to weigh, measure, test, advise and manage your pregnancy for you is globally advertised as the best, safest and only way to receive adequate care for yourself and your unborn child. As women begin to realize that this world wide media campaign is misleading them into helpless, fear-filled, disempowered births, they often begin doing their own prenatal care.
Who knows your body and your lifestyle like you do? Doctors and midwives know a great deal about how every human woman gestates and births but they typically know nothing at all about you. Women are supposed to provide every last detail of their personal information to the doctor/midwife whose job it is to process it all and predict which factors will cause problems during this pregnancy. But don't we already know which problems we have during this pregnancy? Don't responsible women who want to become mothers know if they're eating well or not? Do we really need to pay someone to dip a test strip into our urine? If you want to know how big your belly's getting down to the last centimeter, can't your partner wield the measuring tape?
Rejecting modern prenatal testing does not mean rejecting traditional prenatal care. Caring for yourself and your child is the cornerstone of empowered birthing. If you don't care, you give your power away. Only when you care about birthing at home will you make the decisions necessary in order to actually do it. Most transport situations like a prolapsed cord aren't the result of poor prenatal care anyway and emergencies crop up in fully managed pregnancies with hospital births too.
If your transfer is related to an actual lack of prenatal care the responsibility for that will be yours but, unless the condition is something that no doctor could possibly overlook and could always fix (can't think of any of these off hand but you never know...), you couldn't have guaranteed yourself a complication-free birth by seeing a doctor anyway.
If you transfer during labor and the hospital didn't know you were coming they'll be surprised, but maternity wards are always full of surprises. They are used to women coming in early in labor and needing to be processed and they are used to women showing up in emergent states of various sorts. Calling ahead is always a good idea. Explain why you need help and what kind of help you think you'll need. If your cord has prolapsed, they will prepare an OR with whoever happens to be around and the paperwork can wait. If you just want an epidural, you might need to wait around for a bit before they'll get to you. You might show up on the busiest night of the year and they'll still squeeze you in or you might breeze in on a light afternoon and get the royal treatment, you never know. You never know when you plan on a hospital birth either...
A bright, caring, informed, empowered mother showing up unexpected at a hospital in labor is often an educational experience for the hospital staff. Many women have been thanked by interested health care workers after explaining why they made the choices they did. The concept of empowered birthing is still new enough that many professionals don't understand it. They believed the marketing campaign too, "women who don't submit to the system don't care about their babies".
When you realize just how foolish that statement is you can heal your own births. When you can articulate your feelings without condemning the medical system you can heal the births of others too.
Yes, there are professionals out there who will feel challenged by your choices and want to condemn you for them. If you don't allow them you bully you by assuring them that you care very much about your child, you respect the advances of medicine that do save lives, and you've "learned your lesson" (whatever that means to you at the time) you can avoid the potential for abuse in the situation.
Isn't that what this question is, at the heart? "I fear the medical system will abuse me." How sad is that? The system we set up to heal lives is now so powerful that we fear not using it will result in our being abused. Don't accept abuse from the medical system as "the price of freedom". Abuse has no part in true healing and true healers would be ashamed to resort to it. Such things should outrage us as citizens of a "free" country.
If you have been abused in a transport situation you have the right to seek an apology and a policy change from the offending hospital and staff.
Prenatal care guidelines ~ This .pdf file from an American insurance provider contains a pretty good example of standard prenatal schedules.
Prenatal care guidelines ~ From The Center for Unhindered Living.
cbirth archives on prenatal care
Midwife archives on general prenatal care
