First, let me say, sad story, and it sounds like a truly shitty situation.
But using your logic, she might as well call it “armed robbery.” Sure, it’s technically not armed robbery, but I think the impact can be the same.
What happened to your wife was shitty. I get that people have bad experiences. But all kinds of people have all kinds of medical bad experiences - and calling this ONE type of bad experience “rape” smacks of Special Snowflake-ism – MY pain is worse than YOUR pain. And my pain is worse because I as a Mommy, am the most oppressed class in all of medicine. Sorry I’m not buying it. Tell that to people whose leg was wrongly amputated. Or orphans dosed with radioactive isotopes “just to see what would happen.”
I think we officially need a word for “feels like rape to the person it’s happened to, but isn’t actually rape.”
I like “assault” for that, actually. Or even “medical assault”, “medical trauma”, or something like that. For the situation in question (what a horrible situation, opossum), then “medical bullying”, “malpractice”, “failure to obtain proper informed consent”, “medical assault”, “assault with a deadly weapon”, “coercion”, “threat of bodily harm”, “medical abuse”, “threatening a minor”, “causing bodily harm”, something to do with “obtaining money (payment) under false pretenses”, whatever they call padding the bill in medicoland, “fraud”, and several others, may indeed apply. But rape? Well, if the doctor had decided to “punish” opossum’s wife by doing an aggressive gynecological exam while she was screaming no, or had taken scissors to her genitals without her permission and no clear emergency in order to “force” her to do something, I could potentially see a charge of “medical rape” and “genital mutilation”. And a few head bashings for opossum for standing by and letting some jerk assault his helpless spouse, of course.
But since that didn’t happen, “rape” isn’t the word I’d choose.
StaudtCJ, if that was partially in reply to me, I’m looking for something that would apply to broader circumstances than the ones recounted here. For example, a woman consents to sex, then changes her mind, but doesn’t say anything or in any way indicate that she no longer consents, but not because of anything her partner did or said to threaten her. Rape? Very no. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t feel like rape to the woman in question, or that she wouldn’t be suffering the same psychological consequences as a rape victim.
Ah. I apologize, then, because I thought you were referring to opossum’s situation. I agree with you that we need a term for the psychological stressors that feel like/emulate a rape victim’s mental state. Maybe if there’s a psychologist/psychiatrist on the boards? Seems like there would have to have been some word in place already.
I’d probably choose something a bit more specific when it comes to traumatic childbirth, but the term ‘medical assault’ does seem to crop up online, beyond the piece about ‘birth rape.’
Here it’s used to describe the drug cocktails given to unwed women giving birth but not other pregnant women, in an attempt to force or coerce them to give up their newborns for adoption (I haven’t checked out the site thoroughly, but it seems to be appealing to native Canadian and Australian women).
Here it’s used to describe the US government’s testing of drugs and radiation levels on its own citizens.
There are a few comparing vaccination to medical assault that, uh, I’ll let you find for yourselves if you’d like.
It’d be a shame if this issue were hijacked by a group or discounted because of the terminology, as it does seem to be a problem. Whether it has more to do with attitudes towards women, especially pregnant women, in the medical community or just generally sub par medical care and stressed resources, I don’t know. I’d be really interested to hear from a doctor or lawyer who specializes in medical ethics.