By Marina Paar
Pregnant women on Whidbey Island shouldn’t be left to worry whether a trained medical doctor will be available should a routine pregnancy become an emergency.
But this will be a big concern after Dr. Kenton Sizemore leaves Whidbey in late September.
Those of us who don’t have access to the Navy hospital in Oak Harbor will have just one obstetrician left: Dr. Lucie Riederer.
Thankfully, Whidbey General Hospital takes this problem seriously and is actively seeking another OB.
Midwives, no matter how well educated, cannot perform emergency C-sections or other life-saving operations.
Nor can family practice physicians or other general practitioners. These valuable front-line doctors are medical school graduates but lack surgical training.
In fact, only a surgeon or obstetrician can do what must be done if a pregnancy becomes a medical emergency. Without these doctors, today’s pregnant women are left in much the same precarious position as their sisters of yesteryear, when many women and children died during childbirth.
Truly, there is no practical way Dr. Riederer can begin to meet the medical needs of every high-risk pregnant woman on Whidbey Island, let alone every woman whose seemingly routine pregnancy suddenly takes a dangerous turn.
In fact, it is this very risk that is fueling the region’s obstetrician shortage in the first place.
If every birth were routine and simple, then obstetricians likely wouldn’t be facing exponential increases in medical malpractice insurance. These rates are soaring into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with small clinics paying out huge sums each year in insurance premiums just to keep their doors open.
That’s the reason I’m supporting Initiative 330, which Washington voters will decide on in November.
The initiative places a $350,000 cap on non-economic damages (sometimes referred to as “pain and sufferingâ€) for those instances when a doctor is blamed for a baby’s injuries or defects. It also covers medical specialties beyond obstetrics.
Meanwhile, a competing initiative funded by trial lawyers would do nothing to stop what many in the medical community believe is a jackpot approach to lawsuits.
What is clear is that with medical malpractice premiums escalating, more obstetricians are moving elsewhere or retiring from their profession entirely. That, in turn, leaves fewer doctors to do this valuable work—even as the population rises.
The result is that women and their babies are less secure than ever. Doctors are increasingly stretched thin, perpetually on call, overworked and overstressed. Those conditions don’t help keep pregnant women and their babies safer.
Unless Washington residents insist on legal reforms, this downward spiral in doctors will only continue.
And then we will be left with alternative care as our only alternative.
Oak Harbor resident Marina Parr is expecting her second child in October.
