You know, people seem awfully hung up on the “sex organs” thing (in fact, tllde seems to insist that it’s the involvement of the “sex organs” that qualifies this as “rape”) when I’d wager that no woman has ever thought of her vagina as a “sex organ” while there was a head squeezing out of it.
You know, I’m all for a woman having as much control as possible over the birthing process. On the other hand, we pay doctors to know stuff we don’t, and act accordingly. It’s a bummer that you didn’t want an episiotomy and got one anyway, but IMO you’d have to be a special kind of crazy to decide that you were “raped”, and not that the doctor, what with his years of training and significantly better view, realized that NOT doing an episiotomy would result in tearing.
Bright, can you please cite where “the ability to enter, survive, and multiply in a living host” is the definition of an infectious disease?
Even if that is the definition, it doesn’t seem to fit pregnancy. Are you callling sperm the infectious agent? That doesn’t seem to fly to me, because in pregnancy, all but one or two of the million sof spermatoza that enter the woman are destroyed outright; and those that are not fuse with part of the woman (the ovum, natch) to create an structure that is of the same order as the sperm.
The mention of sexual organs in my posts is to differentiate birth rape from claims of “dental rape” upthread. Short of mandatory c-sections for everyone, you can’t avoid using your vagina during birth. Something put in there you don’t want or were coerced to accept is a violation. It is impossible to exactly quantify, or I’m sure it would have been already.
For some of us, pregnancy did bring on a special kind of crazy. Doesn’t discount the rest of us and our varied experiences.
The dental rape claimants, and the birth rape claimants are all free to do the legwork to get the legal definitions amended to suit their perception.
Agreeing partially with Ronald C. Semone, some examples of birth rape can lessen the impact desired in the use of the term birth rape. But what I am stating, and from what I’ve seen around and discussed with others, “rough handling” is not being significantly claimed as birth rape.
Pregnancy doesn’t really fit the bill of an infectious disease, more so of a parasite that embeds itself into the lining of the Host and derives its nutrients from the host. But that’s mostly just a joke, as in used in a joking manner by most people, though I’ve seen it as a term used by those who REALLY seem to hate the idea of children/babies and usually have an agenda to push.
If you REALLY want to see the Parasitic Pregnancy it’s aHydatidiform mole- THAT is a pathological disease of pregnancy caused by an egg and sperm, where basically something goes wrong and instead of a fetus, you’ve got basically a cancerous fertilized egg that attempts to obtain nutrients from the mother, and can even compete with a healthy child in the womb. That’s a BETTER example of a parasitic case of “the ability to enter, survive, and multiply in a living host” except for the fact that it’s not really alive. Well… It could be. IF you believe fertilization = alive, then maybe it’s alive. I consider it a cancerous mass, but :shrug: to each their own.
/hijack
I’m still having trouble getting a drugged up Betty Draper out of my mind.
I’m not sure ‘birth rape’ is the appropriate term to use when there are enough actual examples of OBGYNSassaultingpatients, but it stands to reason that, in a society where women have only been given a real voice in the past generation or so, especially when it comes to their health care and reproduction, their rights and decisions regarding childbirth should be re-examined.
People used to think that. AT least, the people with years of training thought that. Now after some research took place, nobody thinks episiotomy ought to be routine, and the research is all over the place but most people agree they can in fact make tearing worse. In the 70s there were 2 reasons to have one: that this was your first child, and that you had had a previous episiotomy. But when actual research was done it did not bear out what the people with all that training thought was true,
The numbers are dropping rapidly in the US – mostly as a result of people who were a special kind of crazy, to wit, feminists – but they are still a lot higher than other places. Not other places like Tanzinia, mind you, but places like the UK, Holland, and so on. This is true of many birth interventions, which can lead to a cascading effect resulting in more interventions.
Normal, sane people do not change the world. People who are a special kind of crazy do. Sometimes this means shrill language and unfortunate claims. But there has to be a dialogue and charged language is a result of that, usually.
Did I say that it should be routine? No, I pointed out that generally, the doctor is better equipped to decide whether it’s necessary in any particular case. That would be the doctor that you* presumably carefully chose when you first got pregnant, stuck with and presumably trusted for nine months, and for some reason have decided in the aftermath of your not-quite-storybook experience “birthraped” you.
Well, as you say, I chose a midwife, not a doctor, on purpose. She worked with a doctor in the event it should come up and I think I met him once for five minutes.
But I think the real storybook is thinking that the careful choice of a doctor, seeing that doctor regularly during your pregnancy, developing a relationship of trust with him or her, and then having that same doctor at delivery is a typical experience. Possibly there are places in the US that this is happening. But everyone I know who went with a doc saw multiple docs during their pregnancy and had no idea who was going to handle their next appointment, much less who would show up at delivery time – it was a question of which doc in the practice would be around, if any, and if none then you got whomever was available at the hospital at that moment.
Possibly this is an urban experience. But my understanding is that this is not typical.
In the 80s episiotomy rates in the US were near 80%. In 2000 they were closer to one in three. This probably did not happen because of individual judgment calls.
Excuse me? Being “unruly” gives someone the right to touch you and/or perform medical procedures on you without your consent? Patients are legally in charge of their own bodies, and yes, you can go to a doctor who does a specific procedure, and even consent to their care, then withdraw consent to further procedures. In some of these cases, doctors are performing surgery on people who specifically and clearly said they do not consent to that surgery! How is that justifiable?
I do think it is counterproductive to call this rape. And yet I can see it being more traumatic because it involves the genitals, so I understand the impulse. According to Kathleen Kendall-Tackett, many women who felt they had no control during birth and were traumatized described it as being similar to rape. I think that’s valid when you’re talking psychology, but legally I think I prefer going through usual assault and malpractice channels.
(By the way, when I was in the ER for appendicitis, the nurse did actually attempt to assault me, in a technical sense. Without informing me what he was doing or getting my consent, he started to hang a bag of mystery liquid and attach it to my IV. He seemed quite nonplussed at my “whoa Nelly” reaction. Turns out it was antibiotics, and I was totally fine with them doing it, but I did feel an urgent need to know what the fuck they were about to blithely pump directly into my veins!)
No, it happened because of the research, just like the vast majority of changes to standard medical practices, and I’m all for it. But there’s a world of difference between expecting your doctor to be up on the latest medical practices, and expecting your doctor to not use the very judgment you’re paying for, because you mistake “episiotomies shouldn’t be routine” with “episiotomies are bad”.
Actually, from what I understand, it’s not generally the doctor that you trusted for nine months, it’s the intern or OB-on-call or overworked L&D nurse or the 14 residents tromping through your room that causes these (rare) problems. The OB you trust is at home with his wife and kids giving orders over the phone. He’ll get a phone call from the L&D nurse when she thinks you’re close to pushing, and rush into the hospital to “catch”. In my google-fu, it’s rarely the OB, midwife, or other professional that you have had a long-term (9 month) trust relationship with, but the “others” involved.
In my opinion, as I am not a medical professional, there are sickos in every profession, and there are likely to be some in obstetrics as well. There are those who just haven’t kept up with the modern age and the new studies. There are those who truly believe that a woman in labor is nothing more than an unthinking animal, and should therefore have no say in what happens to her. There are those that believe that the woman is merely an incubator for the IMPORTANT person in the deal. Those people cause these sorts of problems that are (perhaps sensationalistically*) called birth rape. At least the term has people talking about this issue.
I think that “birth rape” is not necessarily the most accurate term, but that some medical abuse does occur in certain circumstances (and not necessarily related only to OBs or whomever). Birth Rape may be the wrong term, but it’s got people TALKING. Maybe by getting people talking, something can be done, not only for those medical abuses in obstetrics, but in other specialties like pediatrics.** I repeat, I THINK THIS STUFF IS RARE. It’s not lots of women, or even MOST women, but I think that there are times when this happens.
*Is that a word, or even a valid word form? I’d appreciate education on what word would convey this meaning.
**I was completely shocked at how some children and parents are treated in pediatric care. Everything from CPS threats if you don’t purchase some specific medication (without details on the side effects, other effective meds, generics, etc.) to the hospital refusing to allow parents to see their kids, and doing medical procedures like circumcision without parental information or consent, have been documented. Again, this is RARE, but it HAPPENS. Maybe if we called it Medical Child Kidnapping and Molestation, or Aggravated Assault: Genital Mutilation of a Minor, people would talk about THAT subject, too.
My experience, once and nearly 20 years ago, was that I dealt with my chosen OB and only my chosen OB, and of course the nurses on call. One nurse pissed me off and I asked for and got another. I don’t doubt that this experience is not universal.
As for the term “birth rape”, yeah, it’s got me talking, but it’s also got me thinking that the people who insist on using it are idiots and those for whom victimhood is an avocation.
Right, and today, complaining about that nurse, DianaG, is more likely to get you turfed with a certified letter. Eight and a half months pregnant? Too bad. Go find another service provider. That takes your insurance, that will take you on, that will birth in a hospital you can get to in a reasonable amount of time, and so on.
To give a perspective from someone who isn’t a crazy fringe person and is not crying “birthrape” about this, but who was mistreated and traumatized:
My friend had been raped earlier in her life. Her medical personnel were informed of this. While they were waiting for her doctor to arrive at the hospital during her birth, the baby started crowning. The nurse had a panic attack or something and tried to push the baby’s head so she couldn’t emerge until the doctor got there. My friend was, to put it mildly, freaked out by this.
When she later told her doctor about it, he told her she had every right to file a complaint with the hospital, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t go anywhere as most people involved in obstetrics view laboring woman as hysterical, and anything they complain about in the process of birth is written off as nonsense.
THIS is the climate in which women are battling for a right to control their own damn healthcare, and it doesn’t surprise me that accusations of birthrape are a by-product.
Erm… I meant that I dealt with the nurses on call while I was actually in labor. The nurses at my doctor’s office (which was not at the hospital) were delightful.
As for the rest of your post, I’m not really sure what that means. Doctors won’t see you now if you request a different nurse? Wow. Nurses must have gotten much better union contracts lately. Good on 'em.
Wow, DianaG. I’ve had two babies so far, and I didn’t even see my OB until he was shouting “push” at me with either one. You were really lucky. I’ll flat out say that my selected OB was far more understanding of my personal rights and nitpicky things like consent than the laborist (hospital OB who was the overseer for the L&D ward) that kept coming in and yelling at me to “hurry the hell up already” because they needed the labor room. (I had a 6 hour labor with #1, and 4 hour with #2. He was just a jerk. The nurses concurred with my assessment.) I want to point out that I was never assaulted, birth raped, dehumanized, or anything else like these stories talk about. I do know that unless you get lucky, you’re probably not going to have your doctor at your side. The average OB has office hours to see the other pregnant ladies/gyno patients, hours of time spent doing insurance and other paperwork, and probably a home life as well. With all that going on, I wouldn’t expect my OB to be there for all the hours of an average labor. I think the average is 12-24, but I’ve heard of 48 hours being normal.
Just to clarify, he didn’t sit by my side the whole time or anything!
He came in periodically to check on my progress, and of course was present for the entire delivery, but I just meant that I didn’t even see any other doctors, and I had two nurses for the duration (three if we count the one I booted), who were also relatively hands off. Of course, I had a pretty easy labor, and again, I don’t expect that my experience is “normal”.
