On being a woman in a hospital

Birthing and shaming

By the time I learned about the term “birth rape,¹” I was so exhausted by my thus-far motherhood experiences that I decided to let that one go even though by all the definition it happened to me. My cup of badbadbad runeth over. By the time I learned about “birth rape,” I’ve dealt with traumatic pregnancy and my son almost dying after birth, and postpartum blues and pinks, and then my relapse – but also subsequent recovery – and I just decided I had no more room for one more thing to be upset about. So I never was. (As an aside, this is an interesting finding because since I had made a decision not to be upset about it, I had been able to distance myself from it enough to never let it affect me. I mean, sure, maybe subconsciously I had some sort of mental and emotional consequence related to it, but similarly to how I dealt with the first time I had sex, just because what happened was traumatic, it didn’t mean I experienced trauma. Not that I think we can pick and choose what we let affect us but to some extent we actually do especially when we adapt a positive, or rather, resistant mindset.)

Recently, a friend posted something on social media about the medical system that brought back that memory and once I thought about it, I realized how steeped in shame my birthing experience was and how lucky for me to ignore what happened long enough that it no longer had any hold on me.

I started hearing the term “birth rape” when my son was a few years old and it was through a friend whose baby was born under similar circumstances, same year as my baby. The actual experience where “birth rape” occurs most often is known as emergency C-section, which is when the medical team and the delivery doctor make a split decision to cut into a woman’s body to get the baby out because the baby and the mother are in medical distress and possibly about to die. There’s no preparation, no consulting, the time is of essence and in my case, this decision was made within a less than 30-minute window when my son started going into respiratory distress after being stuck in my birth canal. They don’t talk about emergency C-section during your birth-prep classes or they didn’t back then, although they do spend some time telling you about preparing a playlist and adding it to your Birth Plan² – mine was crumpled into a ball and thrown out by a no-nonsense Czech nurse who later bullied me into an epidural – it said “no epidural” on my Birth Plan – which is when I stopped pushing, which is when the baby started getting stuck.

I don’t know the exact reasons why we got to the point of no-return but I suspect some of it had to do with me giving birth in a teaching hospital and having too many cooks in the kitchen, or in my case too many doctors with too many conflicting ideas of how my son was going to be born. When told about the C-section, I was given a form that said a side effect was “paralysis, and/ or death.” I was exhausted by their constant indecision and the rotation of dictator nurses (turn the oxytocin up, turn it down, turn it up, turn it down, la la la, turn it up, turn it down), I had my water broken by an inept Edward Cullen – whom I forgave because he was Edward Cullen – it was 21 hours of legs in stirrups and my spine breaking and, well, the baby was no longer having fun either. The Czech nurse asked me if I wanted my baby to die when I froze briefly trying to comprehend the “side effect” listed. Of course not, I probably croaked, and signed. At that point I’d carve him out myself if they asked me to.

I was wheeled into the operating theatre, and given a nerve blocker which essentially made my body from the neck down feel dead. I sensed its led weight and its uselessness and that’s it. It was surreal and terrifying on top of being terrified about the baby dying – on top of already being scared about the severity of his expected disability³ – while also having the same baby extracted from my corpse, on top of seeing my own entrails reflected in the glasses of the doctors doing the extraction. It was an utterly violating experience.

But all of that was soon overshadowed by the euphoria of meeting my son for the first time, with his imperfect-perfect hands, and like every other mother in the world, I told myself it was all worth it and didn’t think about it much, except in the following days when I passed out on a walk, from overextending myself and the pain of unhealed 18 staples in my belly (we were given no aftercare instructions and I know this for a fact because my partner was a very, very diligent person who I’m sure asked a million times). I remember waiting for my son in a recovery room forever and then once he showed up, I placed him on my breast, and the world stopped, the cosmos opened up, and a whole constellation of lifegivers held me in that moment – all of my dead grandmothers who live in the stars and who have been waiting for this exact alignment.

(Years later, I learned about another disturbing fact, which was that before reuniting with me my baby was taken away to lie in an oxygen tank – I had lost a track of time – because he, like many other babies from around that time, was struggling with respiration because the doctors refused to take me off of Prozac during my pregnancy, which later turned out to cause those sorts of situations. You see what I mean about too much bad?)

There is no moral to this story because there isn’t anything that I have done wrong. Like I said, I didn’t let it traumatize me, I did not feel raped although I did feel completely disregarded and unlistened to during the experience. I felt coerced and intimidated. The questions along the lines of whether I want my baby to die or having a nurse ostensibly throw out my Birth Plan, were nothing but shaming.

Years later, when doing research for a story, I started to investigate how women are treated in the medical system. I’ve written on this subject before, and I’m sure I will write about it again. I know you know or maybe you don’t so if you don’t that means you’re a man and you do need to educate yourself about it — for your mother, sister, wife, daughter, female friends. What I keep coming back to — what haunts me, quietly — is how simple it would be to do things differently. To treat women not as problems to be managed or vessels to be monitored, poked, cut into, extracted from, but as full human beings in moments of fear, pain, and power. That was the most powerful moment of my life and it was brutally stolen away from me. Compassion isn’t a luxury; it doesn’t slow things down. It could be built in, as reflex, as baseline. It could be as natural as breath.

1. "Birth rape" is often associated with obstetric violence, which encompasses various forms of mistreatment during childbirth, including performing medical procedures without informed consent, coercive or forceful interventions, verbal abuse or intimidation by healthcare providers, neglecting the birthing person's autonomy and dignity. Such experiences can lead to birth trauma, a psychological response to the events during childbirth that are perceived as traumatic. This trauma can manifest as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), characterized by symptoms such as flashbacks, nightmares, and heightened anxiety. Emergency procedures, like an unplanned C-section performed without proper communication, can exacerbate feelings of helplessness and violation.

2. Birth Plan is a list they ask you to make of how you would want your ideal birth to happen so what music you’d like to listen to, who you want in the room with you, what position you want to be giving birth, whether you want a shower, and, most importantly do you want an epidural. I believe now the Birth Plan is just some sort of decoy, maybe to make you have positive thoughts about the upcoming experience, I don’t know, but mine was completely ignored and although that most likely didn’t happen, in my memory Birth Plan appears next to an evil nurse laughing at it mockingly, at how ridiculous my requests for classical music and giving birth naturally are.

3. We knew that the baby was going to be born with something called “Complex Syndactyly,” a congenital genetic disorder that runs on his father’s side. This disorder can be quite mild — a couple of fused fingers and/ or toes — or quiet severe when it affects the person’s spine and causes other deformities. Even when it’s mild, some babies have to have surgery — that might involve amputation and breaking of bones — and corrective footwear in order to be able to walk. We were able to see the baby on a 3-D ultrasound and were reassured by what we’d seen but it wasn’t until the birth itself that we would know the severity of his condition. Needless to say, this was an unnerving thing to have to think about on top of everything else. (Luckily, my son’s condition is mild. He has a 50 percent chance of passing it on.)