Statistics don’t support home births
as being unsafe ADVERTISING Statistics don’t support home births
as being unsafe Here’s some information I gleaned online from the State of Hawaii Department of Health, which might bring clarity to the controversy about midwife birth safety.
Statistics don’t support home births
as being unsafe
Here’s some information I gleaned online from the State of Hawaii Department of Health, which might bring clarity to the controversy about midwife birth safety. The DOH does not give separate statistics for newborns, but for “neonates,” meaning babies from 1 to 28 days old. The mortality rate for such infants in Hawaii County is 2.8 per 1,000.
In 2013, there were about 2,400 babies born here, which would mean that each year around 67 of them don’t live past their first four weeks. A study by the U.S. Department of Health states that in Hawaii in 2006, the year of the study, only about 1 percent of births were home births. This means that the great majority of those infant deaths involved hospital births. Isn’t it a bit extreme to single out midwife-supervised births as deadly, based on these figures?
Heloise Lochman
Kailua-Kona
State DOT officials
aren’t serving the public’s needs
West Hawaii Today noted on Wednesday that county Water Board members last month expressed frustration with a lack of communication from the state Department of Transportation officials had been asked to come to the Water Board’s June 23 meeting to explain the proposed cost increase and give a status update on the project. They did not show up.
Water Board Chairman G. Rick Robinson is quoted, saying, “I’m extremely disappointed the Department of Transportation is not here. … It’s an affront to our board that we make the time to come but they don’t make the time to come,” Robinson said of the volunteer board.
Volunteer members of the South Kohala Traffic Safety Committee know how Robinson feels. They could give you similar and identical remarks based on similar and identical incidents.
Dealing with the public in an open and forthright manner continues to be a very large problem for the Hawaii Department of Transportation. If there is information the public is lacking that would foster understanding, it is never forthcoming.
The impression is of a department that wants to make grand gestures and complete huge projects for personal glory in future Honolulu politics as the players move back and forth between higher and higher levels of state and Honolulu government. They are building their careers with our money and by putting people at risk of traffic accidents.
Anika Glass
Waikoloa
