Friday 6 July 2001
MEDIA ALERT

ACT Maternity Coalition Presents
Host Lecture: Vicki Chan 'Birth Matters'

Sunday, July 8 2001
2.30 - 4.30pm
Forestry House, Banks St, Yarralumla

Vicki Chan is a Queensland midwife and mother of four children. She is on a crusade, travelling around the country speaking to women, men and midwives about her passion for birth and the need for change. Vicki says "The time has come for a serious shift in the way we bring our children into this world."

"The Travelling Midwife" aims of the "Birth Matters" tour:

To give women inspiration/direction/confidence to aspire to natural childbirth. (two good reasons why... Mothers who experience natural childbirth are much less likely to suffer postnatal depression, children who suffer perinatal complications such as a forceps delivery are more likely to be violent offenders as adolescents or adults)

To give childbearing women, their families and communities, the understanding of the importance for drug free, woman centred birth to be 'the norm'. ( eg. The administration of a narcotic during labour puts the baby at increased risk of respiratory depression in the short term and drug addiction in the long term)

To provide stimulus for the adoption of a system of maternity care that embraces the view that pregnancy and birth are, on the whole, normal and healthy life events, that respects women's central role in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of their care, and that observes the right to appropriate medical care that both serves and respects women. (Presently, one in three babies in this country are either cut or pulled out often at great physical and emotional cost to the mother, her child and the community and always at enormous economic cost to our country.)

To welcome the advances of scientific medicine, which on occasion, allow us to enhance the safety of mother and child at birth, but not to let ourselves be anaesthetised to the miracle of life.

To impress upon politicians and other powerbrokers who hold the purse strings to instil natural childbirth under the care of midwives, shown by research to be cheaper, safer, and more satisfying, as the expected 'cultural norm'.
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MEDIA CONTACT: MARGIE PERKINS : 62416031
For info on the event / Interviews for Vicki

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