There are many opportunities during pregnancy, birth, and post-partum recovery period for disagreements or disappointments to arise with your care provider. BIRTH now has a resource that can help resolve these complaints. By making use of this resource, you can help improve the care you and others will receive from health care and birth support providers.
The resource is a committee that BIRTH (Bringing Information and Resources To Houston) has formed to hear grievances against Houston area providers of obstetrical and midwifery birth care and provide mediation in an attempt to resolve each complaint to the satisfaction of all involved parties. Use of the committee is voluntary and the committee is comprised of a variety of community members including an obstetrician, attorney, parent, consumers, doula, and midwife whose goals are to find resolutions to grievances in our community.
To reach the BIRTH grievance committee, please email birthcare@aol.com.
Message from founder of B.I.R.T.H.:
"I believe that women are empowered through the pain and joy of childbirth. Birth is a mirror inside a woman, allowing her to see her vastness and her limits as no other experience can.
Birth is a spiritual event for me which I experience as a miracle every time. Over and over, I am involved in situations which seem to be constantly reminded that we are in charge of nothing and that everything happens truly in divine order. The respect in which we treat newborns comes in part from our humility in the face of this divine order and in our service to the great unknowable rhythms of life. This gift is a healthy baby who arrives through unity and self-discovery into a loving world, a baby about whom deliberate, empowering choices have been made from the beginning.
Surely this first knowledge of the world will influence a child's life. To have felt a powerful flow of love, never abating, for those critical first hours and days must give one's character an underpinning of confidence and self-worth. Does not society also benefit? I believe that as more people are born with such harmony and deep sense of value in themselves, so the chances for harmony among people and nations will improve. I believe the work I do contributes to world peace."
Pat Jones, CNM
Founder and President of B.I.R.T.H.
