Garth George: Rampant feminism drives GPs out of birthing business

By the time I'd finished browsing the first section of the Weekend Herald last Saturday I was relieved that I was no longer of an age to be a young husband with a pregnant wife.

I had been informed that there are just 15 GPs left in New Zealand who deliver babies and give antenatal and postnatal care, and by January their number will have dropped to 14.

It took me back to the days when I was a young husband with a pregnant wife. The family GP was indispensable to us, from the first examination and confirmation of the pregnancy to the delivery, to dealing with whatever problems cropped up in the child's first months and years of life.

Back in those days, as far as I knew, midwives were the nurses in the local maternity hospital who held that special qualification. My mother had been one for years and years in my grandmother's private maternity home - until my father rescued her from it.

And I remember to this day taking my daughter from the maternity hospital to my parents' house, handling her as it she were made of the finest glass.

My mother picked her up, bounced her about, turned her this way and that, unwrapped her and inspected her thoroughly - with the same sort of assurance and lack of concern that she would apply to preparing a roast leg of lamb.

When I commented on that, my father observed dryly: "You can take the woman out of the nursing home [which is what we called them then] but you can't take the midwife out of the woman."

Nursing home was a good name, as it happened, because it was there that new mothers learned properly how to nurse their babies and where they - and veteran mothers, too - were given at least two weeks to rest and recuperate away from the demands of husbands and the cares of a household.

They called the birthing a "confinement" and it was surely that. Husbands were seen as merely a nuisance, could visit only at certain hours, and if some matrons had had their way, wouldn't have been allowed within a mile of the maternity unit while our wives were "confined".

It is one of my very few regrets in life that I have never seen a baby born, for the arrival into this world of a new human being must be the most amazing and wonderful and soul-stirring experience known to mankind.

When my kids were born the very thought of a father being anywhere near the "theatre" would have given the doctors and nurses the vapours and marked the supplicating male as some sort of certifiable pervert.

I remember, however, with gratitude the regular visits of the Plunket nurse to our home, marvelling at ounces and inches gained, but particularly the tremendous reassurance that such regular care provided, specially for the mother but for the father, too.

I have to admit I was absolutely astonished to read on Saturday that more than 3000 GPs have given up obstetrics and that nearly all our babies are born with just the ministrations of a midwife.

I knew, vaguely I suppose, that midwives had come into their own and were much more numerous but I had always assumed that they worked only under the direction of a medical practitioner.

How on Earth it has come about that GP obstetricians have been supplanted almost entirely by midwives is quite beyond my comprehension, although Carroll du Chateau, the author of the Weekend Herald article, provided a potent clue to the reasons for the chaos in the birthing business when she wrote: "Problems go back to money and ideology."

I almost laughed. Don't nearly all our problems in most areas of our lives these days go back to money and ideology, be they problems in the health system, the education system, welfare, law and order, justice, the building industry, infrastructure - you name it?

GP obstetrician Dr William Ferguson, one of the subjects of the article, put it bluntly when he said that the system developed under the Labour-led Government drove a wedge - "an ugly thing with spikes on" - between the professions of obstetrics and midwifery.

Although it is not mentioned, the whole business reeks of rampant feminism. As Dr Ferguson points out, GPs practised the medical model: healthy mother and baby first, fulfilling experience second. Midwives aimed for natural childbirth: fulfilling experience first, medical intervention second.

The midwives, of course, have had it made easy for them with a woman as Minister of Health holding the purse strings and a female Prime Minister who, according to the article, at a midwifery conference in the late 1990s deeply celebrated the fact that GPs were back in primary care and out of obstetrics, and received a standing ovation.

I wonder what definition such people put on the term "primary care"?

I would have thought that no care could possibly be more primary than that given by a doctor to a woman before, during and after the birth of a child.

Or am I just old-fashioned?