Birth: where culture and medicine meet

Martha Deed, PhD is a psychologist whose research in domestic violence, child custody and patients’ rights has been funded by the Violence Against Women Act, The Baldy Center at the University of New York at Buffalo, and the New York State Bar Association. As an independent researcher in the 1970s, Dr. Deed spent more than two years in Paris where she met Dr. Pierre Vellay, a leading proponent of the Lamaze method of ＂accouchement sans douleur＂ (painless childbirth). She attended Dr. Vellay’s childbirth education classes and interviewed 23 of his patients, accounting for 33 Vellay births. In addition, she interviewed more than 20 non-Vellay patients. Births took place in Europe and in North and South America. Dr. Deed served on the American Psychological Association’s Advisory Board for the Presidential Task Force on Family Violence, and more recently on the National Quality Forum’s Patient Safety Committee. She is a past President of the Clinical Division, New York State Psychological Committee and a past member of New York State Surrogate Court’s Medical Decision Making Committee and New York State’s Department of Health Medical Records Access Committee. She is a member of Consumer Union’s Safe Patient Project advocacy network. When not functioning as a patient advocate, Dr. Deed is a poet. She has published a collection, Climate Change (Foothills Publishing, 2014) and numerous chapbooks, most recently ＂We Should Have Seen This Coming＂ (locofo chaps, 2017). Her mixed genre examination of her daughter’s death from medical mistake, The Last Collaboration (Furtherfield and Friends of Spork, 2012), combines her work as a poet and researcher.