The March Madness and a Midwife Post

 

I’m not a fan of basketball but I am a fan of google and I’ve been researching why and what March Madness is all about. I love saying ‘March Madness’ and wish the term applied to something I care about. I do like the way the way those words rolls off my tongue but getting excited about when the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournaments are held rates on a par with my upcoming endoscope and colonoscopy. March Madness, however, is the talk of my campus but no one here knows that in two weeks my personal plumbing is getting cleaned out from mouth to rectum. 

It’s interesting that the term was coined in 1939 and has stuck around ever since. Never under estimate the power of the written word. One little tiny title of an article for an in-house publication give birth to March Madness in its present form. I also think it’s pretty cool that Caitlin Clark made history on the basketball court during Women’s History Month by breaking a long-standing points record of 3,667 set by Pete Maravich to become the “all-time leading scorer in men’s and women’s division 1 basketball history.” Like I said I don’t follow or like basketball but there are plenty of fans here who talk non-stop about all the college basketball or football games going on in the country. Gag me with a spoon! No way out of those conversations if you want to eat. There’s an unwritten rule---but often vocalized rule---that no one eats alone in our cafe or main dining room. Trust me, I’ve tried sitting in the corner with my notebook writing like I used to enjoy doing at the Guy Land Cafeteria but no one would let me get away with that. Finally, I had to quit trying.

Change of topic: Would you go to a lecture in a Continuum Care Complex that was advertised this way? “Have you ever wondered about the process of giving birth in earlier centuries? Come and find out about the key role played by midwives in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and learn about their importance both for the well-being of the mother and the baby. We will explore the training and preparation of midwives and the challenges they faced in their work.” I went, as I usually do with most of the lectures offered here. But on the surface this one seemed like a poor match for a place where no one works in health care and everyone is well past the birthing babies era of our lives. And to the best of my knowledge none of us are writing the next greatest historical romance novel featuring the spare heir to the Kingdom of York and his sister-in-law’s midwife which I now know wouldn’t have been historically accurate because midwives needed to be much older than your typical heroine in a romance novel.

The lecture fell under the heading of Women’s History and since it’s Women’s History Month I’m presuming that’s why our Enrichment Director picked it. Maybe it was her sneaky way to bring the topic of reproductive rights onto a campus full Right-to-Life supporters. Or maybe she picked the lecture because she didn’t get her request for something women’s history related in soon enough to get the first draft choices. I'm betting the lecture circuit program is like our library's Book Club in a Bag program where we have to pick our books to read well over a year in advance and then hope we live long enough to see our choices get delivered.

I did learn my perception of midwives was totally all wrong. I didn’t know, for example, that in Europe they had to have training and be licensed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I thought a midwife was someone who took on the role by calling herself by that title. They also had to be older women without families to take up a lot of their time and they had to be trained to baptist babies who might not live long enough for a priest to get there. It was against the law for a midwife to aid in an abortion and they could also be charged with murder if something when wrong with a birth. A baby’s death in the presence of a midwife caused her to have to prove in court (or not) that the death didn’t happen from anything the midwife did or didn’t do. 

Those days were so long ago and yet our Supreme Court is putting us right back to where health care workers put their own freedom at risk to help a woman during a pregnancy. New anti-women’s health laws are being put into law ever day outlawing medically necessary abortions even in cases of ectopic pregnancies, placental eruptions, women carrying fetuses without brains or kidneys that are destine to die in the womb or shortly after birth etc., etc. and now at least one Republican run state is passing a law declaring that fertilized frozen eggs have the rights of a full, born baby! Have you seen any of the interviews of the senators making theses laws? They clearly don’t understand biology. I need to get off my soap box because the fallout from overturning Roe vs Wade makes me angry. So I’ll end my blog post here by declaring that the topics of March Madness and women’s health/midwives is one of the strangest pairings I’ve done in a long time. There, I said it first!

But then again maybe the fact that women like Caitlin Clark are proving that, when given on an equal playing field, women can do anything a man can do is the very reason why so many old men lawmakers are willing to peel back the reproductive rights of women. 

Until Next Wednesday.  ©