I know someone on another board who bitterly regrets not pushing sexual abuse charges against her doctor, because he pushed her legs apart to look when she didn’t want him to for whatever reason. I thought this was unusual, until I found these. Not a happy birthday.
There have been several articles now, and my mothering message board is all a-buzz about whether or not this exists. It’s been an emotionally charged discussion, with either side pointing fingers. What do you guys think?
I, personally, can’t shake the feeling that this whole thing is preposterous. When you have a baby, your feelings and needs are important, but the fetus is the primary patient at that point, right? If a doctor treats you very terribly during the process, than perhaps that’s medical, physical, or psychological abuse, but rape? Just because it’s happening around your genitals doesn’t mean it’s sexual. I can’t help but think that a lot of women who are control Nazis about their “birth experience” will start using “Birth Rape” as a reason to cry foul about every little kink in the process, and the whole process will suffer.
While the psychological trauma involved in the experiences your link refers to parallels rape, I think it’s a disservice to both sides to refer to what happened as “birth rape”.
It’s not rape, not as we understand it. It is, perhaps, a type of malicious malpractice that hasn’t been discussed and should be. So long as a patient is competent, the doctor/midwife/whatever must have consent to perform any procedure. If the patient does not consent, then the doctor/midwife/whatever has committed a crime. By screaming rape, the patient loses sympathy from others. No wonder no one would take her seriously.
:sigh: this is just another reason why OBGYN is just not up there on appealing practicing fields to go into- so much drama and complications are associated with birth. I’ve never even heard of “birth rape” before this, but totally can believe that there are people out there who suddenly feel raped.
I’d rather chalk it up to malpractice or perhaps inadequate beside manners and stress rather than rape though. :shakes head: Wow.
When people talk about birthrape, they’re talking about having things shoved in you without your permission (vaginal exams you have already refused), having your genitals mutilated without your permission(episiotomy, which is having scissors or a scalpel cut your vagina open, and has been debunked as bad science except in true emergencies), being drugged without your permission (pitocin, painkillers, and other drugs stuck into your thigh while you are not paying attention, or in your IV where you can’t even tell what’s been given you), being strapped down for being “uncooperative” or “hysterical”, being “tied” to the bed (continuous fetal monitoring that has been proven to have an undesireable effect on fetal outcome, unwanted IVs that a nurse will hold your arm down for, even if you are screaming no, and “hospital policy”)and being minimalized in many different ways, both verbally and physically. Now, I’m not saying it’s common, but I’m saying that I can see why some women would associate that sort of experience with rape. It’s probably exceptionally rare nowadays. I have never experienced it, and none of my contemporaries have experienced it, but I do know that my grandmother talked about having “horrible things” done to her vagina while giving birth. My mother talks about how she was spread-eagled on a labor bed, tied to the sttirrups, and 15 trainee physicians walked into the room, shoved their fingers in her crotch, and left, all without speaking to her once. So for older women, especially, I wouldn’t necessarily discount the entire idea. I would hope that it’s completely eradicated by now.
I’d like to add that in birth, there are TWO patients, and only one of them is the baby. The mother’s health, physical, emotional, and mental, and the baby’s health, physical, emotional, and mental, should be in the top of the caregiver’s mind. The baby is not the end all and be all, the mother nothing but meat. They’re BOTH important. “At least you have a healthy baby” BAH. If I’m a mess, but the baby is healthy, that’s ok? No matter what condition I’m in? Even if I nearly bled to death? Even if I can’t walk, or have horrid headaches for months as a side effect of drugs I didn’t want? Even if they do procedures that are proven to increase maternal morbidity by 4 fold? How do I care for my newborn if I can’t pick her up?
I don’t think I’d call this kind of abuse birth-rape, but I do think it’s disturbing to view the fetus as the primary patient. The woman is just as important, if not more, than the fetus during labor.
I’d say the mother is more important, since she’s the only one of the two patients who can reasonably be expected to make decisions about what’s going on. She doesn’t lose the right to control what happens to her body the moment she gets on the table - and the mere existence of successful malpractice suits indicates the doctor is not 100% infallible, making the mother’s input on decisions that much more vital.
Being restrained and drugged against your will in a situation like that cannot be anything but traumatizing, and I find it perfectly understandable that women would liken such an experience to rape. I don’t think the birth process will “suffer” if expectant mothers have more input into the situation. A mother’s physical and psychological comfort is not incompatible with the safe delivery of a baby.
In the US, anyway, I wonder whether the lawsuit potential associated with an unhealthy baby helps to drive this sort of approach on the part of the doctor or midwife. I think societal attitudes are such that a jury may be predisposed to assign blame for an unhealthy baby to the doctor or midwife (especially if it were shown that they held off from some sort of aggressive but invasive technique), while an unhealthy postpartum mother is just written off as “what can you do; sometimes a pregnancy is difficult.” I’m not suggesting that that attitude is fair or justified, only that it probably exists in a lot of people.
Shake a little harder, the fetus isn’t the one paying the bill.
Now that said, I think that using the term “rape” is preposterous, and I also think it’s worth noting that a person with acute appendicitis might well have a similar experience of being poked and prodded and drugged against their protests.
Agreed. A person has a reasonable expectation of professionalism from their doctors; and imho, that includes a certain level of empathy and consideration of the mother’s feelings. However, to liken it to rape is absurd and denigrating to victims of an actual sexual assault.
A doctor with whom I worked years ago said that the last straw for him was assisting with the deliver of an infant the parents of which wanted his 100% assurance that they would allow skin-to-skin bonding immediately after the delivery. He assured them throughout the course of the pregnancy that he would do whatever he could, but that there may be circumstances that would prevent that (fetal distress, for example).
Sure enough, during the delivery there was a problem (he didn’t say what) that required the newborn to be taken to NICU.
The parents sued him for alienation of affection, denial of their Constitutional rights to bond with their child, a whole host of other nonsense.
He left obstetrics.
Now, this is not to say that there aren’t times when procedures are performed in ways that may not be optimal for the process. I’m not conversant enough on birth procedures to effectively comment on that aspect. But I do have many friends in the alternative medicine/hippie/new age/woowoo movement, and they are all adamant that doctors, nurses and hospitals are the enemy. They all have an inability to see that there are times when medical intervention in a birth might actually be necessary to save lives.
I can see quite clearly where birth rape is a similar violation, that involves a similar exertion of power of one over the other. Maybe more of “I’m the professional, and I know what’s best,” and different from the usual exertion of power as part of random, date, spousal, molestation, or incest, but fits the category of rape as far as I can see and read from others. And IMHO/IME.
I don’t know. Sometimes these mothers while in labor are not capable of making rational decisions.
My then wife made it a point to her doc that she didn’t want to be cut. (Sorry, I forget what it’s called when they cut the vagina to make a bigger opening?)
Well, when she went into labor she happened to be sick with the flu for a few days. She was already extremely weak. Add that to all the drugs she was doped up on she could barely function.
No matter how hard she pushed she couldn’t push hard enough to get baby’s head out. I know, I was there. So the doctor went ahead and cut her anyway and the baby came out. My then wife didn’t even know she was cut til after the fact.
She tried to give me shit for allowing the doctor to cut her. I tried to explain to her the reality of the situation. She capitulated but begrudgingly so.
I can easily imagine if this were another woman how she might call “Birth rape” which I think is rediculous.
I’m quite aware of that. However, rape implies a malicious component to the act. More specifically, it implies a malicious, unwanted, physical contact of a sexual nature. It does not mean that anytime somebody does something against your will you have been raped. A doctor is both a professional and a person. Like anyone else they can become exasperated with recalcitrant patients, or those who are simply so outside of the norm that they have to make a medical professional call.
Sorry, couldn’t get past the first three paragraphs; this is quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time. One enlists a doctor for his professional expertise and then questions and complains when he does the job he’s being paid to do? I can’t imagine too many experiences more fraught with emotion and pain than child birth and because of that I’m not really prepared to consider the allegations of someone in that state. Sure, there’s doctors who have the bedside manner of a hyena and sure, we’ve all had procedures that turned unpleasant and the first reaction is to struggle and resist. But the point is you’re seeing a doctor because you can’t do whatever procedure he’s doing on yourself. Also, referirng to it as rape is so asinine as to make me lose whatever shred of sympathy I might have had for these people.
Yeah, I’m with DianaG and Acid Lamp… and almost everyone else, really. It probably could be malpractice, it might even be assault in some cases, but I’d be hard pressed to call it *sexual *assault, and it sure isn’t rape.
I can absolutely see why it could feel similar to rape to the woman. But that doesn’t make it so.