For those paying attention I am now as of Friday in my 39th week of pregnancy. Ready to have this over with? Yes. Yes I am.
However this post is only about pregnancy in sort of a sideways manner. The bigger topic of this post is risk. Everybody knows that the world is full of people out there generating FUD (that's either Frequent Untrue Declarations or Fear Uncertainty and Doubt or both) to drive you to a decision they personally stand to benefit from. The real estate agent who tells you that you, the seller of a house, should take the first offer you receive so that they have to do less work even when waiting another week would probably benefit you, the pajama and crib manufacturers who want you to believe that unless you buy flame retardant on the one hand and NEW on the other you are Putting Your Child At Risk (your child and about 10 other kids every year in the US), the doctor who loudly and frequently uses the words Dead Baby when trying to talk you out of taking the chance of a (VBAC) Vaginal Birth After Ceasarean and actively rounds up his numbers so that it sounds like you actually have a 1% chance of killing or retarding your baby... these people have agendas.
Unless you bother to see the numbers from which the FUD distributors speak, you have no idea whether the risks they promote are legitimate. And to whom they are legitimate. Maybe you think you're safer sending your kid to the home of a friend with a swimming pool rather than the home of a friend whose parents keep handguns. (You're not.) But the risks are pretty low regardless of which house he's going to so maybe you should just let your kid have his or her friends and stop living with fear.
Anyway, someone handed me Freakonomics, one of those nutty books where someone decided to crunch a bunch of numbers and see what they demonstrated. Wandering through the numbers with someone else doing a guided tour anticipating questions and pointing out possible conclusions along the way was about as much fun as I've had since I got so huge I felt like my couch was eating me alive. Girl and sofa become one - news at 11.
Combine the book with the fact that I want to VBAC while the doctors in my practice have been everything up to and including offensive trying to talk me into a scheduled C section. I had to go direct to the numbers and the ACOG recommendations myself and do a little bullshit detecting to decide what agenda my doctors have that they either won't be explicit about or to be fair, aren't fully aware of themselves. (Short answer: they love controlling their own schedules, lowering the numbers of cheaper but more time consuming vaginal births managed by midwives, and being insulated from the barest possibility of lawsuits -- the last factor being their own biggest fear driver.)
I have this conclusion ready to hand. People who are unwilling to bother to understand statistics have handed themselves over body and mind to the FUD generators. It's our job as self-interested beings to understand basic accounting, economics, the principles of logic and statistics. If religious faith is believing in things without the ability to confirm or deny their existence and truth, most of us actually hand more power over to our church-less but agenda-laden shepherds than is good for us. There are things we CAN know when people try to make us afraid. Knowing just takes time and effort.
Posted by karen at June 25, 2005 03:43 PM