31. Yeeska

November 11, 2008 @ 8:42 pm

I really think that those who find yourselves so dubious about this all-too-common occurrence might be very enlightened to lurk on this message board:
http://www.solaceformothers.org/forum.html

I do hope you will lurk and not troll.

Frankly, I think it should say something that there is an active message board for people recovering from a traumatic birth. In fact there is one forum entirely about birth rape, including a thread I started (before reading this blog) about the controversy of the term itself.

We’re almost always talking about women who go into the hospital with an attitude of teamwork with their care providers. They have doctors who have agreed to a birth plan and somewhere something changes. It’s very rarely the procedure itself that is traumatic, but the way in which it is performed.

For example, I recently had a client (I’m a birth doula) who had this doctor that was totally on her wavelength. Everything was awesome, things were rolling right along. I got to her house and things were moving really quickly. (Her labor ended up being 3 hours total) We left immediately for the hospital. By the time we got into her room, she was pushing. The nurse came into the room and was showing a lot of flexibility and support…until she realized my client was pushing and the doctor was nowhere nearby.

Things went really downhill from there. The nurse totally lost her cool and started screaming at my client to get into bed (she’d been in the bathroom). My client was trying really hard not to actively push, but her body was pushing involuntarily. At one point, the baby started to crown and the nurse reached down and held the head in. This is not healthy for the baby and very painful for the woman, and L&D nurses are trained to catch babies in an emergency. I know; my mother was one for 25 years and I spend many afternoons hanging out in the unit with her as a teen. There was no medical reason for her to do that.

My client starts screaming “Stop!”, but the nurse only becomes condescending and abrasive. She did not stop. Due to the fact that we’d arrived so late, my client had already submitted to several things she and her doctor had agreed she could skip, but there was still a complete disregard for her clearly telling the nurse to stop doing something that wasn’t advisable in the first place.

This caused my client to have flashbacks on a long past assault that she’d worked through well before having her first child, and this was her second. Up to that moment she’d comfortably and willingly submitted to countless vaginal exams, a slew of interventions, and birthed a baby. Although she assures me that the overall birth experience was very positive, this one extremely disturbing association to her daughter’s birth was unecessary, uncalled for, and wrong.

It’s really not that uncommon and I have no hesitation believing the original story either.

32. Sara

October 27, 2009 @ 11:43 am

I realize this is a terribly old thread, but I feel compelled to respond to what seems to be a lack of understanding about a particular issue.

In the case of obstetric practice - or malpractice, as it were - mainstream medical practitioners tend to err on the side of being over-interventionist. If a baby is born with challenges, or even stillborn, and the medical staff have not intervened, they will likely lose a suit. However, if the baby is stillborn via c-section after pain meds that were requested only after medically unnecessary augmentation to ’speed things up’ which induced fetal distress (synthetically induced contractions are both far stronger and far different in character from natural contractions), the doctor is likely to win the suit - there’s no way to ‘prove’ that a non-interventionist approach would result in a better outcome, even if the initial interventions were medically unnecessary. Even if mom volunteered for/consented to the initial intervention(s) (And how many women can give true informed consent? How many women are fully aware of *all* the consequences of various interventions - including the need for further interventions?), they are often not aware of the full ramifications of that choice - and some women aren’t given a choice. As others have stated, this is not applicable (not in the same way) to medically necessary interventions, e.g. needed inductions.

To go into the ins and outs, full consequences, and discussion of when an intervention is and is not truly medically necessary would require a book. Some women have read the books and understand the choices they have. Many haven’t - and mainstream medical professionals (in the U.S., particularly) aren’t always going to provide all the information in a way that makes all the pros and cons completely clear. The bottom line is that the action that covers a doctor’s ass legally and that which is best for the client - on the maternity ward more than anywhere else - are not necessarily the same thing.