Holly Richardson left some comments on my last piece about her. Lets get the easy stuff out of the way, by disproving this bit that Holly said:
And ps: I have not hosted a “midwifery meeting” in almost 10 years. Your “facts” are, in fact, wrong.
whoops July 2013 was last year, not ten years ago. I have my own copy of the audio from the meeting from before UMO made their page private, I will upload it soon. Now that thats out of the way, we can move onto the comments with some meat to them:
While I’m flattered you want to highlight my campaign, your anti-midwife agenda will get you nowhere in this state.
I am not anti-midwife, I am anti-unaccountable medical practitioners. I am sure that the majority of people in utah are.
And really, you have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to Utah law, the process we went through, or the mood on the Hill.
Holly does not cite the portion of the law that would prove me wrong or tell me exactly where I made an error, I am very interested in knowing where I made a mistake. I will correct it if it is demonstrated to me.
Sadly, you’re not even brave enough to use your real name to attack political candidates.
I don’t use my real name because I blog about my abuse history, and it is humiliating to me to have anyone googling my name find out that it happened to me. Newspapers use this same standard in their reporting, and it is reasonable.
I am proud of my work on behalf of midwives in this state. We have a long history of safe midwifery care.
I linked to several stories of extremely dangerous breech, vbac, and twin births being presided over by utah midwives. Holly is already aware of how unsafe Valerie El Halta’s practices were, because they killed someone who did not have to die.
Dr Amy Tueter has a saying about home birth babies that die- they are buried twice. Once in the ground, and again by midwives and their advocates who don’t want the public to know about them. This is a prime example of being buried twice, pretending that there is a long history of ‘safe midwifery care’ when there was at least one high profile case of extreme negligence in the past two years. I am joining the skeptical OB in using the #notburiedtwice hashtag on twitter to make sure that these babies did not die in vain.
For those who practice outside their scope, there already are safeguards in place.
Oh really? Where were those safegaurds when I was pregnant, and my midwife lied to me about her qualifications and practices? Because I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, for over a year to get something done about the midwife I had that acted outside of her scope and abused me during my labor. If there is some resource I am missing I am very interested in hearing about it, but so far I’ve tried the owner of the birth center where the midwife worked (who blamed me for what happened), DOPL (can’t do anything about unlicensed people), the police (do not know what to charge someone with who pretends to be licensed but isn’t, do not have enough evidence to go to the DA with my other claims), Utah Midwives Organization (who I had to pester to get a response and ultimately rallied behind the midwife that abused me), and the Midwives College of Utah (who are putting a note in that birth center’s file for later- no idea what that actually accomplishes). Nothing was done. Valerie El Halta made the ultimate mistake, one that killed someone, and she got probation and a ban from attending other births in the state. She will probably just move again to another state where midwives can get away with being unlicensed.
We are a right-to-work state and we are predominately Republican, which means we believe in limited government and in people’s right to make decisions for themselves and their families – and those include healthcare decisions.
I am pretty sure that republicans also believe that little babies should not be killed because of their parents choices, right? Or are republicans pro-choice now? Because what I see is a lot of babies being sacrificed to letting parents decide to birth out of hospital, and in fact the states with the most restrictions on home birth are predominantly republican.
Although you refuse to use your real name, I am quite certain that you were never a part of the discussions to legalize midwifery in Utah, nor have you ever been involved in lobbying. It’s evident that it is difficult for you to read and understand the Utah code but I assure you, there are consequences for those midwives who practice outside their scope.
Once again, the consequences are not named and law isn’t cited, and I have first hand experience in trying to get something done about this and there isn’t any real consequence for midwives. There just isn’t. I am eager to learn of any new avenue for getting my situation resolved.
Believe it or not, midwifery is not my primary interest in running for office. It’s education and the economy.
It should be your primary interest because the state of midwifery in Utah is appalling and you had a hand in it. Take some responsibility and pledge to fix the law. I’m not going to stop my exposure of the deplorable practices of utah midwives in response to negligence.
You all are just one more tragedy away from this whole thing blowing up again. I can wait, but I wish I didn’t have to, I wish that someone with the power to change things before they get out of hand would do so.