When I find out about this type of news, I am dismayed to think of parents who have lost their baby or whose baby has been seriously injured due to bad birth practice. Of course, there is no millionaire compensation to pay.
Bad birth assistance is one of the medical specialties with the highest number of claims. On this occasion the result has been compensation of 1,073,990 euros required to pay the doctor for lack of monitoring of the baby's condition during delivery, system that allows to control the contractions of the mother as well as the heart rate, vitality and oxygenation of the baby.
The delivery lasted 12 hours and the baby was only monitored 42 minutes, so the ruling of the Provincial Court of La Coruña dictates that the “Monitoring becomes absolutely essential when there are risk factors, including the stimulation of labor and the administration of epidural anesthesia. Only in the case of low-risk pregnant women is it admitted in the 2004 protocol that intermittent auscultation may be recommended ”.
The news leads me to reflect on two things. On the one hand, how by misinformation and by the null participation that parents are given in childbirth, they blindly surrender to what doctors say, which, as we see, are also wrong.
On the other, because of the extreme medicalization (artificial stimulation of labor, epidural anesthesia), low-risk deliveries are becoming risky deliveries. In this case, the judge determines that stimulation at birth and epidural anesthesia are considered risk factors, making continuous monitoring of the baby essential.
Continuous monitoring involves belts connected to a machine and an electrode placed on the baby's head that control their condition during the entire dilation in case there could be fetal distress, but that at the same time prevents the mother's freedom of movement which helps favor childbirth There should be monitoring systems that allow both.
As Mireia told us, intermittent fetal monitoring can be performed every 20 or 30 minutes as long as the delivery is low risk. It seems that the more the deliveries are medicalized, the more need there is to interfere in the process.
