More Than A Number

     As everyone in the homebirth debate knows, MANA released their their incredibly cherry picked numbers last month leading to tons of discussion about numbers for intrapartum mortality, c-sections, hemorrhage, early neonatal mortality, late neonatal mortality, etc. Great, we know that only 20-30% of your midwives are honest about outcomes. Homebirth is STILL riskier than hospitals! Big shocker!

However, there is so much that is needed in this discussion. People look at a number and say "Oh, that's small, it's insignificant and means nothing". This mortality rate is 2.06 per thousand. This means that 2 babies out of 1,000 are dying that shouldn't be. I can guarantee this number is realistically higher than what has been shared. That's not exactly where I'm going here, but I digress, higher chance of death every way you look at it. If I recall, a recent study said that there are more brain damaged babies as well. We have all of that to look at. So, keep it in mind. 

With all the discussion, we hear about absolute risk and statistical risk as though its small and insignificant. One huge thing is missing here. I think people are tending to forget that every number we see is someone's baby. I can look and see that although my child is "one of those statistics" (although not really because I know we weren't included in any MANAstats), she is more than a number. People see a number and that's it. There are no cares about WHO that number represents or what happened to that baby that caused it's demise. These are babies, not numbers. If you haven't been touched by loss, maybe you don't understand the impact that it has on all of those who loved that baby. As I see these higher mortality and morbidity numbers thrown around as not meaning anything, I see it as people telling us our babies really don't matter and their deaths are insignificant. That couldn't be any farther from the truth. Our extended families are fairly large (around 82 people) and our daughter's death impacted all of these people, moreso our more immediate families, but impacted nonetheless. If you add in friends, that's one loss that affects at least 150 people of varying ages and degrees. These babies, they're important to many people. I'm still close with many of the girls from my June 08 board and as birthday's start hitting, they all start feeling it. She's important and she matters. Seeing her as just a number dismisses the importance of her and what happened to her. There are many more just like her. 

Our babies are not a number, they are babies with names and families, who had tiny toes and fingers and sweet features that we had to memorize, whose lives were lost when they shouldn't of been.