Making Tough Decisions Without All the Facts: How Inadequate Informed Consent Puts Childbearing Families at Risk
WASHINGTON (March 10, 2009)—Imagine you are a woman in labor and your doctor tells you that electronic fetal monitoring is necessary to record your baby’s heartbeat. Without any further information about the monitoring or its risks, you are given a consent form to sign. Believing the doctor is doing what is best for you and your baby, you sign. By neglecting to tell you that electronic fetal monitoring can result in labor complications and increases the need for cesarean surgery, your doctor has not held up his or her end of the informed consent process.
This shocking scenario plays out nationwide thousands of times a day across a range of procedures. The purpose of informed consent is to ensure that before a health professional or researcher does something to a patient’s body, the patient must understand what is being done and give his or her voluntary consent. But in all aspects of medical care, informed consent can fall short of the mark. In the instance of childbirth, women and their partners may be asked to make decisions without being well-informed of the risks and potential outcomes that can affect moms and babies.
“The fact that health care providers, whom society has been taught to trust, are neglecting to fully inform parents about risks associated with various procedures and interventions during childbirth is inexcusable,” says Judith Lothian, RN, PhD, LCCE, FACCE, co-author of The Official Lamaze Guide: Giving Birth With Confidence.
A recent article published in The Journal of Perinatal Education reveals how sub-par information provided by health care providers undermines the purpose of informed consent. This results in parents having incomplete information when making decisions with potentially grave implications, such as whether or not to use medication or submit to obstetrical procedures during childbirth. The Milbank Report, Evidence-Based Maternity Care: What It Is and What It Can Achieve, found inadequate informed consent processes to be a major barrier to women benefiting from evidence-based maternity care.
Survey Shows Fear Motivates Women to Choose Cesarean Image via Wikipedia Article Source: Sciencealert.com “[The] findings of interviews with 210 women in Queensland and Western Australia ….revealed fear as the strongest motive for women to undergo caesarean section where there was no clear-cut medical reason for it. Professor Fenwick said that while the media liked to propose vanity or convenience as reasons for the deliberate [...] ACOG: Fear and Litigation Motivation It is interesting that on the same day ACOG (via help from NBC) tries to use fear to motivate moms to birth in hospitals they admit that fear of litigation motivates them to make decisions, rather than evidence based choices. Using Fear to Motivate Moms: NBC Today show and MSNBC showed a segment on Extreme Birth showing a [...]