Hospital Board
Dear Editor: Baby Boomers should not be Baby Booers.
Mark Twain once joked that there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
This letter is not about any kind of lying; it is about differences of opinion between honest people who mean well. But statistics do play a role in the discussions.
One of our Sitka Community Hospital Board members has stated publicly that the main issue facing us regarding obstetrics service is simply demographics – that “we’re getting older” and there’s nothing we can do about it. Better to let one health service handle all the births, is the argument. She went on to say that only a tiny percentage of the people in the community are affected, while aging affects a much larger percentage.
I respectfully disagree with both the conclusions and the mathematics being used to arrive at those conclusions.
First, the math. It is true that the Baby Boomers are the largest group in our population. We’ve always been a bulge. When we entered adulthood, we experienced a dramatic increase in crime rates – and many of us became conservative reactionaries as we watched with horror as the quiet childhood of our memories was being lost across America. But a few years later, the bulge in crime dramatically and mysteriously went away. Wow! What happened? The only explanation that has been found is that WE were the crime wave – once we had had gotten older, we slowed down in our criminal behavior! The crime wave of the ’70s and ’80s was almost entirely due to the bulge in demographics of the Baby Boom generation, born from 1945 to 1960.
So now we are in declining health, and need nursing home care. We are causing the demographics of Sitka, and most other communities, to skew older. But here’s where the statistics can be misleading: once the Baby Boom bulge has moved past, the curve will go the other way. And the “echo booms” – our children and grandchildren – will continue to have children. Even if birth rates (as a percentage of population don’t increase, we will see an increase in the number of births because more folks in that age group will come along.
Sitka is a community that in most ways is ideal for young families. The nature, adventure, schools, beauty, arts, community activities, small scale, safety – what could possibly be better? And we can solve the high cost of housing, which is the main reason, I think, why young families have difficulties getting started here. So let’s make sure do all we can to make new families feel desired and welcome.
Another “statistic” was cited – that the number of mothers who give birth each year is a tiny percentage. This, too, is very misleading. The percentage of women who give birth is indeed a tiny percentage in any given year, but I would argue it is the most important slice of our community. Birth rate is the most important measure of any community’s vitality. It is like the single living ring of every growing tree. Girdle that ring, and you kill the tree.
If we fail to provide the ideal environment for intelligent mothers to give birth to healthy children, we will lose those mothers, their husbands, their children, all the vendors they buy from, and all the old Baby Boomers whom they serve as nurses, physical therapists, bus drivers, motorized wheel chair mechanics and grief counselors.
What I am learning about Sitka is that we already have the expertise to follow a different model, right here among us. We have here a market for good, economical, healthful, sustainable nurse-midwives, and we have people who know how to make such a program a reality. At the moment both of our hospitals seem to prefer the old AMA model of obstetrician-delivery. I am convinced that if Sitka Community Hospital embraced what the latest research has demonstrated would be safer and healthier for mothers and babies, there would be plenty of babies being born here well into the future.
Bob Dylan may be an old crotchety Baby Boomer like me now, but at one time he said some things that still ring true. And one of them was this:
“...he not busy being born is busy dying.”
Owen Kindig, Sitka
