Medicine for profit pushes drugs on women at childbirth

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14 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 1987 The medical system is intimately involved in women's lives, influencing such crucial areas of their self-determination as birth, birth control, and abortion.

In the United States, administering drugs to a woman during labor is standard procedure. But how many women are informed of the risks these drugs pose to the infant? Or how they interfere with the birth, making even more medical intervention necessary?

Only one in 10 women are allowed to refuse medications, according to author Suzanne Arms in "Immaculate Conception," a book about birthing practices.

In general, American obstetricians pattern their practice in normal birth after their practice in abnormal birth, forcing the majority of women to undergo procedures that are often unnecessary.

The result is that women give up their control during birth to the obstetricians, who treat the normal as if it were a medical emergency for the sake of "prevention." Risks may result that are greater but more predictable than the original problem the practice was intended to solve.

Contrary to what many women are led to believe, all narcotics and inhaled and regional anesthetics "readily cross the placenta and many produce clinical depression in the newborn." (Drs. Jeffrey Gould and Louise Gluck, "Maternal and Child Health Practices")

In his book, "The Safety of the Unborn Child," Dr. Geoffrey Chamberlain writes: "No drug can be completely cleared of a low incidence or association with By N.

The 1985-1986 Hormel Meat-Packers Strike in Austin, Minnesota, by Fred Halstead, Pathfinder Press, New York, 44 pp. $1.00.

This brief account of the Hormel strike, published under the auspices of the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, consists almost entirely of the factual record up to the time of writing.

The pamphlet by Fred Halstead, a longtime SWP member, is a barebones account of the events, strung together in chrono -logical order.

It includes the union's demands for safety on the job and for the restoration of wages and benefits taken away the previous year. It also documents how the 3000 workers at the old Austin, Minn., Hormel plant were reduced to half that number in the new plant, which was built in part with a $20million loan from the workers.

A brief, but valuable history of the classRadical memoirs Memoirs of a Radical Rank and Filer, by Ben Stone. Prometheus Press, Box 318, Gracie Station, N.Y., 188 pages, $7.95.

A long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has published memoirs covering the decade of the 1940s and 1950s in the history of the Trotskyist movement in the United States.

The book helps to fill a gap by giving a personal account of part of the all-too-thin generation that maintained the continuity of the American radical movement between the upsurge of the 1930s and the new waves of radicalization that began in the 1960s.

The book offers a number of personal portraits of rank-and-file activists, as well as of the leaders that inspired them. Stone also gives some interesting vignettes of circumstances of Jews on New York's Lower East Side.-Gerry Foley (from International Viewpoint magazine)

abnormalities in the unborn. We do not know the cause of most malformations, and until we do, every alteration of the mother's body must be suspect." struggle traditions of this union, starting in 1933, is also included.

The pamphlet serves a useful purpose in assembling the record of betrayal by the United Food and Commercial Workers top officialdom and in documenting Local P-9 leadership's fight for union democracy in the course of its valiant battle against Hormel.

But there is no analysis of the conduct of this strike. No proposals relating to what the strikers and their supporters should have done-or should do-are even suggested. And there is no explanation of the main lessons of so important a strike.

It is certainly a political pre-requisite of a revolutionary workers' party to stand unam -biguously on the side of the Local P-9 strikers and leaders, who did the best they knew to defend their union. This, the SWP pamphlet clearly does. But this is not enough for a party which considers itself socialist and hopes to offer political lead -ership to the working class.

The most important shortcoming of this pamphlet is that it presents the P-9 (now North American Meat Packers Union) leadership's strike strategy and tactics as a model for others to follow. Reflecting this conclusion, none of the facts pointing to mistaken strike policy at the Austin plant are even mentioned.

For example: No mention is made of P9's picketing policy which made no serious effort to organize an effective defiance of court injunctions that limited picketing and therefore crippled the strikers' attempts to close down the plant. Serious efforts to do this, unfortunately, were made mainly by rank-and-file P-9 members and by a few individual union leaders and supporters from the surrounding area.

Even the national mobilizations of supporters held in Austin on several occasions were not utilized to attempt to "A major obstetric danger"

Dr. Yvonne Brackbill, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, studied the effects of demerol on newborns. Demerol is the drug most often given to women for pain during labor.

Her study found that that there is "clear-cut evidence that demerol produces outstanding neonatal differences in ability to process information...a major obstetric danger may now be medication itself." Thus, the use of painkilling drugs during birth also makes necessary a series of interventions; all with their own added risks.

mobilize sufficient picketline reinforce -ments that could have closed the Austin plant and brought the company to terms.

The pamphlet reports the first, very significant, mobilization in less than one paragraph: "On Feb. 4, a P-9 support group was formed in New York; it issued a statement signed by 48 union officials and promised to send a delegation to Austin. On Feb. 15, a rally of 3000 took place in Austin attended by 30 New York labor officials and 300 union representatives from around the country."

Completely left out are the politically significant statements made at the rally by Jan Pierce, international vice president of the Communications Workers of America, and other union heads, who pledged to join P-9 and go to jail with them—if necessary-should they decide to defy the picketing injunctions.

These pledges in support of the constitutionally guaranteed right to mass picketing could have been utilized to mobilize a sufficient number of reinforce -ments leading to a plant closure and ultimate victory.

Boston Socialist Action P.O. Box 1046 GMF Boston, MA 02205 (617) 391-7087 Chicago Socialist Box 80B, 2520 N. Lincoln Chicago, IL 60614 Cincinnati Socialist Actior P.O. Box 37029 Cincinnati, OH 45222 (513) 272-2596 Cleveland Socialist P.O. Box 6151 Cleveland, OH 44101 (216) 429-2167 Obstetricians, believes that induction of labor is unnecessary in 90 percent of cases. With the use of pitocin, labor contractions can cut off oxygen to the fetus, which can be seen on a fetal heart monitor in as many as 75 percent of the cases.

In 1978 the FDA came out against the practice of elective induction by pitocin. If induced labor is medically unnecessary in at least 90 percent of the cases, and is basically for the doctors' and hospitals' convenience, its routine use in the United States is unjustifiable.

Although many drugs have been proven harmful to pregnant women, doctors continue to use them routinely. The American Medical Association lobbies against stricter FDA drug-testing standards.

After the scandal surrounding the use of Thalidomide, a sleep-inducing drug found to produce skeletal deformities in fetuses, the Kefauver-Harris Amendment, passed in 1962, provided for stricter testing of drugs for their effects on pregnant women.

The giant loophole was that all drugs approved before 1962 were exempt-some 90 percent, Suzanne Arms states in "Immaculate Conception." And despite the loophole, the AMA wants the amendment repealed.

Why? The AMA's income in 1967 from drug advertising alone was $14 million, or 43 percent of its budget. Today the AMA is reaping about $9 million a year from the drug companies—which amounts to 27.7 percent of its income.

The collaboration between the AMA and drug companies to further their profit-oriented interests underscores the reason health services and the drug industry should be nationalized and run as non-profit public services.

The United States and South Africa are the only major industrialized countries without a national healthcare system. The need for good, affordable healthcare and safe, effective drugs cannot be met when healthcare is provided for profit. Institutions run for profit always put money first and human needs last.

Detroit Socialist P.O. Box:19613 Detroit, MI 48219 Grand Rapids Socialist Action P.O. Box 3505 Grand Rapids, MI 49501 Los Angeles Soc P.O. Box 60605 Terminal Annex Los Angeles, CA 90060 (213) 250-4608 Ainneapolis Socialist Actior P.O. Box 14087 Dinkeytown Station Minneapolis, MN 55414 counters drug standards But this opportunity to muster the forces capable of closing the plant was missed. Similarly, the P-9 leadership failed to appeal to the 5000-strong supporters at another mass mobilization on April 12 to march on the struck Austin plant or to help in a long-term campaign to beef up the picketlines.

Such an appeal would have helped focus attention on the elementary principle of working-class solidarity upon which the labor movement is based.

Another important omission of Halstead's pamphlet is an explanation of why American workers need their own party—a labor party. The Hormel strike gives many examples of why this is necessary. It was, in fact, "friend of labor" Democratic Party Gov. Rudy Perpich who called in the National Guard to crush the strikers.

The best efforts of any working-class leadership can include serious errors. In the case of the P-9 leadership, their key error was their inability to see through the myth invented and circulated by the labor bureaucracy that " the old tactics don't work anymore." For the SWP to be silent on this is false loyalty and a disservice to the Austin fighters and to workers everywhere.

The balance sheet of the Hormel strike presented in Halstead's pamphlet would be excusable if presented by the former P-9 leadership. But it is inexcusable when presented in this manner by the leadership of the SWP.

New York Socialist Action P.O. Box 20209 Ca. Finance 693 Columbus Ave.

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