So here is the table showing who tweeted and how many followers they had.

The Future of Birth 2010 conference was held in Milwaukee, WI September 30 - October 3 , 2010. this is a Twitter Map from www.connectedaction.net

You can see that this is a very interconnected group of twitterers and their followers. The big exception is @marchofdimes, who provides access to a new social network of folks who don't follow the 5 top key network nodes in this map: @robinpregnancy, @lamazeadvocates, @iceaonline, @midwifeamy, @unnecessarean. Follower count is not always the most relevant metric in determining influence in a community. Birth advocates will need to branch out to reach communities of interest.

Connections among the Twitter users who recently mentioned #futureofbirth when queried on October 6th, 2010 scaled by numbers of followers. Top between users are listed in a spreadsheet image that can be found here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5057219226/. I will attach in separate post as Blogger isn't letting me attach two photos!!

The book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is available from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon. NodeXL is available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl

What is the relation between these trends and phenomena? I'm working on the answer but for now, the question is sufficient.

Births to Asian, black and Hispanic women in the United States are on the verge of surpassing births to non-Hispanic whites and will likely pass the 50% mark this year.

Over the past two decades, the US has seen soaring rates of maternal mortality and pregnancy-related complications that particularly affect minorities and those living in poverty.

The US spends more money on mothers' health than any other nation in the world, yet women in America are more likely to die during childbirth than they are in most other developed countries, according to the OECD and WHO.

Nearly one in three women who gave birth in 2006 had only briefly (9%) or never met (19%) their primary birth attendant.

Here is another Twitter Map - of tweets using the word, 'cesarean' from 3/10/10.

The NIH Consensus Development Conference on VBAC has been big news in the Maternal Care Advocacy community. Was this the first NIH conference that alluded to the presence of bloggers? Amy Romano found that mention notable. Here is an interesting picture of the social networks between tweeters who have included #NIHVBAC in their tweets as of this morning, March 10, 2010. Made by Marc Smith, ConnectedAction.net, using NodeXL. Anyone can use this open source tool to make similar network maps.

Note the centrality of tweeters' networks in the NIHVBAC map, compared to a social network map of tweets on the key words "Maternal Mortality" done early last month. Patterns of social networks differ by topic and participants. More to come!

A few news items of note:

Great press coverage in the Seattle Times yesterday about a program near and dear to my heart -- the Birth Attendants of Olympia, WA, are a dedicated group of doulas and childbirth educators who provide education and doula support to incarcerated women who are pregnant and mothering their babies.

and from the CDC, we find that the increased cesarean rate is in fact, creating more preterm births. Here's the MSNBC link to the story and some selected quotes:

"Researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the March of Dimes compared single births — not twins or other multiple births, which are at an increased risk for pre-term birth — in 1996 and 2004. The rate of premature births rose by about 10 percent in that period, they said.

The number of premature births rose from 354,997 in 1996 to 414,054 in 2004, the study published in the journal Clinics in Perinatology showed.

"When one looks at the numbers carefully, there was an increase of 60,000 who were pre-term, and 92 percent of them were by Caesarean section," Fleischman said."

and

"The increase in pre-term births is really being driven by the Caesarean section rate, and really demands good research to sort out what percent of those are not medically indicated deliveries," Fleischman said in a telephone interview.

"My gut tells me its significant, but I can't give you an estimate and a percent," Fleischman added."

Finally, something you don't see every day: Photographs ofa woman's cervix every day through her cycle. It is an amazing sight. Check out My Beautiful Cervix

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