There is no room at the proverbial inn these days.

This is because many doctors, midwives and women are jumping at the chance to have an induction of labor, not for medical reasons, but for a variety of seasonal reasons, including these holiday top 5:

1. I don’t want my baby born on Christmas.
2. I want to be home in time for Christmas.
3. My baby is my present this year.
4. I don’t want to be in the hospital for Christmas.
5. I want my doctor to be the one to deliver my baby.

Seriously, the hospitals are perfectly prepared if you have your baby on Christmas.  It won’t shut down.  There are a full complement of staff and services available.  In fact, if you’re planning for an epidural, you’re less likely to have to wait for it given the demand on hospital services this week.  One hospital here actually has had moms laboring in the halls waiting hours because their huge anesthesiology staff can’t really accommodate the laboring women as quickly as the women would like.  This is when a mom calls to get in for an induction and the nurses say, “Call back in four hours to see if there is an open bed…”

Are you hearing women talk about not being able to get into the hospital for an induction?  What’s your take?

_{Photo © iStockPhoto}

Screen cap of laboring woman being rushed to surgery

Transcript of an actual Angie’s List review:

At my 41 week appointment, my OB decided to induce me, but I guess I took longer than he expected because just as I went into hard labor, he told me he was leaving for an important meeting. On his way out, he said goodbye, dressed in his tennis clothes. One hour later, I was getting a c-section… while he was out practicing his serve.

From The Sun on May 15, 2009:

The video appears to have been filmed with a mobile phone camera to give an air of authenticity and had more than 1,000 hits before it was removed.

At first it looks like another sad example of happy-slapping featuring a gang of secondary school pupils crowding round in a school playground.

Excited children are seen running towards a crowd with youngsters egging on what seems to be a fight.

A girl in the centre is seen screaming while another has blood on her cheeks.

But as the camera moves in closer one of the teenagers can be seen on the ground in the middle of labour.

In explicit detail it shows the girl giving birth and the baby being delivered by a fellow pupil as other students yell and jeer at her.

The footage was intended as a shock tactic to highlight rocketing teen pregnancies by harnessing the publicity power of the internet.

But Leicester NHS did not anticipate YouTube?s stringent content rules and today their clip was replaced after less than a day online with a message saying ?This video has been removed due to terms of use violation?.

Renee of Womanist Musings has the video linked in her post ?Naughty Girls Give Birth in Public in Great Britain.? Please visit her site to view the video which is no longer available on YouTube and read the rest of her sociological analysis of the video, some of which is excerpted below:

This little video teaches young girls that should they engage in sexual activity, the punishment for their behaviour is a painful labour. It is very reminiscent of the punishment assigned Eve for giving Adam the apple in the garden of Eden. The father is quite typically absent from this scenario mirroring the privileging of masculinity in our social discourse. It is women that are constructed as ?controlling? sex and therefore the abandonment of men of their parental obligations is rarely a subject that receives much discussion. Note that this ad is supposed to serve as a warning against teenage sex and yet it is aimed solely at girls as though she became pregnant by herself.

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This advertisement teaches young girls that pregnancy is a punishment rather than a natural outcome of sex, this further supporting the idea that unless conception occurs inside the patriarchal family it is a sign of lasciviousness whereas; a man is not stigmatized for participating in pre marital sex. Though this ad is projected to teach kids to act responsibly when it comes to sex, it comes across as highly sexist in its determination to make women responsible and produce fear about a natural biological process.

From a birth activist perspective, this campaign?s premise is extremely troubling. Many women experience psychologically and emotionally traumatic births for reasons such as inadequate emotional support, a fearful birth space, a birth space full of strangers or care providers who resort to humiliation or bullying to gain compliance. In other words, the feelings that some women experience in a hospital would mimic the presumed feelings of this teenager giving birth while taunted by schoolmates.

The goal of this video was clearly to show birth as a humiliating, painful and scary consequence to bad behavior, which is one of the reasons that Catherine Skol is suing obstetrician Scott Pierce. Pierce allegedly told a nurse that Skol deserved to feel pain for not calling before coming to the hospital and that sometimes ?pain is the best teacher.?

So where will teenagers see positive birth videos? Unfortunately, they will not see them on YouTube, which routinely censors or removes birth videos or requires that viewers be 18 years of age. One of the many negative consequences of moving birth from a home model to an industrialized hospital model in the last 70 years is that birth is that the birth process has become unfamiliar to most people. This goes for all mammalian births?how many of our parents or grandparents moved away from rural areas where they regularly saw animals give birth?

Internet birth activism and flooding social media outlets with positive and realistic images of normal birth have never been more relevant or necessary.

Several of her commenters mentioned ?evidence-based medicine,? and she replied with the following:

I would have to disagree with your statement that no one has taught about evidence based medicine much less evidence based OB. On the contrary I consider evidence based medicine daily. However I also consider the standards put forth by authorities like the American College of Gynecologists to be important. I realize an appeal to authority is a logical fallacy but as aforementioned by deviating from practice guidelines I put myself at risk for litigation. Right or wrong I am made to follow those guidelines. I obviously wasn’t taught about “physiological birth” because generally that does not involve a doctor. Why would a doctor be taught a process that they are actively excluded from? Think about it.

You cannot expect to condemn medical standards & cut doctors out of the care of a patient then expect them to know what’s going on.

So I did ?think about it.? And I?m a little bit confused. Physiological birth is an expression used to describe birth with no unnecessary intervention. In Pushed, Jennifer Block interviews Vancouver physician Andrew Kotaska, who states, ?An unmedicated birth in an environment where a woman feels comfortable, where she?s adequately supported, where she has a degree of privacy that allows her brain and her uterus to do the dance that we understand very poorly called labor, is physiological birth.?

Doctors should still be learning how a normal birth unfolds in the absence of medication, regardless of whether they are ?actively excluded? from it. What really sat with me, besides seeing the seeds of the ?I must obey or I will be sued? mindset and the repeated mentioning of pelvic inadequacy was that this student doctor attended her tenth birth ever recently. The attending didn?t show up on time and she flew solo with just one nurse at her side. It was her tenth birth ever and she was alone.

Granted, it was an error that she was alone, but if hospitals are being billed as the gold standard of safety and there isn?t even another physician nearby to back her up, something is amiss. My midwife, a home birth midwife, has attended almost 900 births. The midwife at the birth center where I gave birth has attended more than 3,000. Their care is generally regarded as unsafe but anyone walking into a hospital in labor assumes that they are getting the very best.

So who is catching your baby? Do you know?

See you in the Comments section!