Superbugs and birth

Second in an occasional series: What I’m reading while pumping breastmilk...

A recent article in the New Yorker about antibiotic-resistant infections and their prevalence in hospitals is truly frightening, and it prompted this thought: Birthing women and newborns should, wherever possible, stay the hell away from hospitals. And: C-sections, representing just the kind of surgical wound (an oft-infected one, I might add) that drug-resistant bacteria love to colonize, should be done as rarely as possible.

The tragic history of childbed fever, which proved to be a doctor- and hospital-caused epidemic, suggests good reason for worry about infection of birthing women. While discovery of the cause in the late nineteenth century—that doctors were moving between patients and from dissecting cadavers to delivering babies without washing their hands (ugh)—and introduction of antiseptic techniques dramatically reduced deaths from childbed fever, they weren’t eliminated until the introduction of antibiotics. But the bacteria that cause it were never eliminated—it's caused by the Group A and B strep bugs, among the bugs known to be developing antibiotic resistance. So the news that antibiotics are losing their effectiveness bodes badly for women birthing in hospitals.