Can you provide us with some cites to back up your claims?
You need cites that doctors in the 1700s were quacks? 
I cant even believe some even posted that to “prove” a point that “doctors” are dangerous.
I figure "I said yes, meant it, and enjoyed it " rape is just around the corner.
Soon to be followed by “absolutely nothing in anyway even occured” rape.
I found this site: http://navelgazingbirthstories.blogspot.com/2004/08/different-kind-of-pain-in-childbirth.html
A lot of these things don’t seem so horrible:
Some of them seem inappropriate but most seem innocuous.
Gosh, I’ve never been in labor, but I would think that putting pillows under someone’s head would be a courteous thing to do.
From time to time, I read the forums at mothering.com, and there is a forum there devoted to healing “birth trauma” as they call it. I have seen the term “birth rape” used there, and it very much runs in parallel to the link that Freudian Slit provided. I find this quote from that website particularly interesting:
Many of the birth traumas that the women at mothering.com have gone through are a result of having some problem during labor or delivery that involved transfer to a hospital. They will often describe things that happened to them that they found VERY upsetting that I can vouch are simply part of the normal hospital routine. For example, one woman called it “birth rape” when the nurse applied a fetal monitor to the baby’s head. This is a perfectly routine procedure that is done when a laboring woman arrives at the hospital, and the nurses in my experience don’t take the time to explain it or all the other things they are doing to get you ready to deliver. This, IMO, doesn’t make it rape, and I think that to a certain degree, all the normal procedures that are done in a hospital are tacitly agreed to when a woman for whatever reason checks into the hospital to have her baby. Perhaps that’s what that statement I quoted above means by “indirect” permission, but I kind of doubt it.
Yeah–I mean, like lifting the woman’s legs…you shouldn’t start groping the patient, but at the same time, if you ask permission for things that seem mundane won’t that get a bit out of hand?
Pretty much in my experience. I mean, I wanted the nurses to be nice and all, but if they had asked my permission every time they touched me, it would have driven me batty. The difference being, I guess, that I planned my births as hospital births, and expected all this stuff to happen. If you plan to give birth at home, you might have very different expectations about being touched and having procedures done. Of course, when you consider that when a woman transfers to the hospital in the middle of a planned homebirth, it’s usually an emergency situation, it makes sense that the nurses wouldn’t take time to explain every little thing to you.
heh, www. mothering. com is whackadoodle central. There are some areas where they DO have expertise (those women could get milk from a stone) but by and large it’s an insane culture of perfectionism and anger and guilt. SO much mama-guilt.
That being said, I did have some trauma associated with my scheduled c-section. And it wasn’t that I had any ambivalence about the procedure or my doctor - I’d even asked not to have my arms strapped down, and he consented, no prob. I healed just fine from the surgery, no complications.
The c-section itself was almost perfect, though since I was carrying twins and I’m only 5’4", my daughter was really wedged in under my ribs and he had a difficult time yanking her out and it took an extra minute during which I got bounced around pretty good. To this day I have muscle damage there, but it’s nothing for which a doctor can be blamed.
No - I don’t know what caused my problem.
I just know that once I came down from the post-birth high, so about 72 hours later, I couldn’t lay down. At all. I had to sleep sitting upright. When I lay down, it felt as though I was suffocating. I remember trying to talk to a cousin who’d called really late and though I answered the phone to talk to him, I couldn’t speak. I was trying to talk but I was gasping for air, pausing between words. It was the weirdest thing, because I’d been fine an hour before, when I was sitting in the living room. It was like that every time I tried to lay down to sleep.
Took about a week to subside, by then I was on a fair amount of Paxil because my heart wouldn’t stop racing.
Birth and whatnot does crazy things to you.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
Hey, she was asking for it, getting on the delivery table and dresing in that skimpy hospital gown…
“Birth rape” … puh-leeze.
Mothering.com is the birth equivalent of the pro-ana websites. The site actively encourages high risk women to attempt unassisted home births. There are posters there who care far more about having “a good birth” i.e. no medical interventions other than someone sitting in a corner chanting good thoughts then they do about actually bearing healthy babies.
Some serious sick freaks right over there.
You want a bad birth? A bad birth is a dead mother or a dead child. A bad birth is an obstetric fistula or one that necessitates a hysterectomy. A bad birth is a child with cerebral palsy or other damage.
A bad birth is not I Didn’t Get The Exact Kind of Birth I Asked For and It Hurt and Unicorns Didn’t Fly Out of My Rear. An imperfect birth may be frustrating but it sure as hell isn’t rape.
Don’t know if it’s true, but I once heard a story of a different charge of birth rape. A girl found out that her parents had had sex while her mother was pregnant, and charged them with rape because she felt violated. Weird huh?
Wow. How would the girl even find that out? And that’s a really creepy reaction.
Amen.
One night, on my floor (postpartum) we had 2 section patients - both who had experienced cord prolapses while in labor. The outcomes were very different.
Very sad - one of the babies did not survive, despite all efforts. The poor mom and dad, what an awful, tragic situation!
The mother of the surviving baby, however, was pissed that she didn’t get a chance to have a meaningful discussion with the staff before they rushed her into the section. Man, did I ever want to sit down with that lady and tell her exactly how lucky she’d been and what most likely would have happened if she’d gotten her meaningful discussion while her baby was suffocating inside her.
I understand it’s disappointing when things don’t go to plan, but every prospective mom (and dad) should know that most plans do not stand up to obstetrical emergency, or physical limitation.
She had one bad eye. Or a dent in the head. Yeah…the second one makes more sense.
What I keep thinking about is that for there to be “rape,” there has to be some intent to do harm. If the intent is to be sure that baby and mother both come out of the experience life and in one piece, then calling it rape is unfair at best. My honest instinct is that people who make such claims really can’t wrap their heads around the potential danger or bad outcomes, and so choose to believe instead that these interventions are malicious in nature. I won’t deny that some health care professionals are a little abrupt in manner, but my experience has been that the more serious the situation, the more abrupt they tend to get.
Forgot to comment on this before:
Again, most likely no harm is meant by it, but I think what that website is talking about is doing position changes without asking the laboring woman. It might be more comfortable for her (or make it easier to push), it might not. The best thing is for anyone assisting to do is to ask the woman if she thinks a change of position might help her, and if she says yes, then help her do it or provide the pillows. Just pushing you up and sticking the pillows back there could be really, really annoying.
I should clarify that IMO, things that are really, really annoying are very very rarely equivalent to rape.
If I punch you in the face, it’s clearly assault.
If I kick you in the groin, it doesn’t become rape just because your genitals were involved.
This whole thread is reminding me of when I had to register at the hospital of my choice during each of my (sadly unsuccessful) pregnancies.
There was a 20 page questionnaire about what they could do and when (if I wanted an episidiotomy, under what circumstances, did I want drugs, what kind, under what circumstances I would agree to a C-section, yadayada). I brought back all the forms and asked why they were doing it. They said because I would be too out of it to make those decisions.
I put don’t care under everything. Except the drugs. I wanted drugs…