We the undersigned strongly object to the conditions of the study on Infant Sleep Disturbance, which is being conducted by Kate Jackson at FlindersUniversity.
We are concerned that the children involved in the study will be subjected to ‘sleep training’, otherwise known as controlled crying, cry it out or controlled comforting. This aspect of the study is inconsistent with Flinders University Ethics policy (1), which requires researchers to protect the rights of their experimental subjects.
The Australian Association for Infant Mental Health(2) does not support the practice of controlled crying stating that the technique “is not consistent with what infants need for their optimal emotional and psychological health, and may have unintended negative consequences”. If there is ANY concern that controlled crying could be harmful to infants, then the rights of the child are not being protected and the study should cease immeditaely.
We are also concerned with comments that Kate Jackson has made to the media, which display bias unfit for someone conducting a scientific study, “Conflicting advice about controlled crying meant some parents were being scared off the technique” (3) .
As informed individuals we question the theoretical foundations of this study, in particular, the definition of'sleep problems' (4).There is evidence to support that it is completely natural for infants to wake often during the night throughout their first year and beyond (5,6). This is NOT a 'sleep problem'.
Controlled crying and other similar regimes may indeed work (although one Australian baby magazine survey found that only 8% of mothers who used controlled crying said that it worked for more than a week) to produce a self-soothing, solitary sleeping infant. However, the trade-off could be an anxious, clingy or hyper-vigilant child or even worse, a child whose trust is broken. Unfortunately, we can't measure attributes such as trust and empathy which are the basic skills for forming all relationships(7).
These infants cannot speak up for themselves
Please sign to help protect their rights
References:
1. FlindersUniversity, Ethics and Biosafety.
http://www.flinders.edu.au/research/info-for-researchers/ethics/
2. The Australian Association for Infant Mental Health,
http://www.aaimhi.org/documents/position%20papers/controlled_crying.pdf
3. The Sunday Mail, Adelaide Now.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,24305993-5006301,00.html
6. Goodlin J, Beth L, Burnham M M, Gaylor E E, Anders T F, 2001, Night Waking, Sleep-Wake Organization, and Self-Soothing in the First Year of Life, Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Volume 24, Issue 4. View abstract at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11530895?dopt=Abstract
I'm supposed to be writing about forgiveness today. I owe an article and it's been sitting in the back of my mind, stewing in the detritus of the parenting and activism which lives back there. Forgiveness and birthing women. Learned authors I consulted on this topic like Desmond Tutu and Starhawk seem pretty clear that forgiveness is a part of a longer process involving survivors speaking out and someone listening and actually caring about the pain inflicted. So that's my sticking point, I guess.
Forgiveness is impossible in the war zone that is birthing in the western world.
Sounds so dramatic but well that's how it is! Imagine gatherings like the South African Truth & Reconciliation meetings where victim/survivors and perpetrators came together to listen, communicate, discuss, take responsibility and eventually offer forgiveness. Birthing women could stand up and through their grief, describe how it feels when people with absolute power over you inject you with drugs without consent, or how it feels to have your vagina cut open for no reason, without consent and without anaesthesia. Or how it feels to listen to your baby screaming while strangers poke and prod them and then take them away for you while you beg for them to be in your arms.
Imagine surgeons and medwives standing up and saying "I cut a woman's belly so I could go on holidays" or "I made fun of a woman's birthing noises because it made me uncomfortable." Imagine midwives actually saying out loud, "I gave that woman a VE because Doc X said I should even though she didn't want me to and I felt terrible doing it." Imagine the opportunities for healing their own experiences of birth trauma which lie unaddressed when midwives could say, "I insisted on washing babies because my babies were washed and I couldn't bear the thought that other women would get what I missed." Imagine homebirth midwives saying, "I'm sorry I insisted you transfer for no real reason, I just had a bad back and felt overwhelmed." Ah so much possible insight, so little likelihood.
Of course this stuff will never happen in the current climate. Not while birth reformers are meeting with surgeons and reassuring them that they're not like those Angry Women who might get all uppity and start making "demands" instead of having birthing "wish lists". Scuse me while I vomit into my keyboard. I figure the adequate socialisation of most of us which means we don't get angry about stuff, we get cancer instead, means that some of us have to do extra Angry Duties like teachers who do extra playground duty as favours to friends. I'll do some angry for the women who are dead now because of obstetricians since they can't do it and no one seems to want to talk about them.
I don't forgive the people who perpetrated my birthrape. Fuck that. They don't give a shit, they've gone on doing it since then, what good would forgiving them be? I'm not eaten up with anger, it's not gnawing at me, it bursts right on out in wildly appropriate ways like blogging, activism or running forums that seem to scare the hell out of casual observers. ("OMG did you see?? They say OUTRAGEOUS things on those forums!!")
Yep outwaaaaageous things like "Only you give birth, only you decide where." What we don't talk about is the advanced certificate in forgiveness a woman might require when her husband has decided she'll have an out-of-homebirth which goes to shit. How can a woman forgive herself and him for insisting she go to hospital when the damage can be so terrible? Will that woman be able to forgive her husband when she lives with the daily reminders of her surgery or other birthrape? When she sees the scars on her baby's mind and body will she forgive him? The worst of all is she'll probably just live in denial for years and not even tell him how angry she is that she let someone talk her out of birthing safely.
What can we do?
Go be angry. Warm the cockles of my cyberheart with the flames of your righteous anger. I'm beyond rage at how women are treated in birth in Australia. Let's do anger together, sisters. We have nothing to lose but our denial and apathy.
Despite scaremongering and weirdness from the press, all utterly predictable of course, simultaneous national rallies occurred! You can see all the news and pics at this link.
“Rallies for Accountability” were held simultaneously nationwide on Friday 28th March 2008. At midday, women, men and children gathered in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth as a show of public support for survivors of abuse in the healthcare system.
The rallies were inspired by recent reports in the media of the actions of Dr Graeme Reeves, an Obstetrician/Gynecologist dubbed the “Butcher of Bega”. Hundreds of women have come forward telling of assault, abuse and mutilation while under the care of Reeves. Even more disturbing is that in spite of several hundred complaints submitted since around 1990 by patients and staff about this man’s practice, he was not struck off the medical register until 2004.
The members of Joyous Birth were so outraged and moved by news reports about the actions of this doctor; they decided to “do something”. “Rallies for Accountability” were planned as a public show of support for the survivors of abuse in our healthcare system, and to highlight the lack of accountability and culture of silence in the healthcare system.
Joyous Birth, the Australian homebirth network is currently organising a national day of rallies to show support for the women stepping forward with allegations around their experiences of Graeme Reeves. This is planned for Friday 28 March, midday outside parliaments in every state but NT, at this point.
Joyous Birth hopes that women all over Australia can join forces over this issue which we see as linked to the wider issues of medical culture in this country. A Graeme Reeves could only have occurred in a system which is already sick. Contact me at janet (at) joyousbirth (dot) info for more information.
Have you seen this in the news lately? Stand by these courageous women and offer them your support!
QUOTE: THEY call him the Butcher of Bega - a NSW doctor who has committed such monstrous acts that hundreds of terrified victims have remained silent for more than five years.
Dr Graeme Stephen Reeves is alleged to have routinely mutilated or sexually abused as many as 500 female patients while he was working as a gynaecologist and obstetrician at various hospitals across Sydney and the NSW south coast. Click here for Source.
QUOTE: Mrs Dewaegeneire was admitted to Pambula Hospital on August 2002 to have a minor lesion removed from her labia.
Before she lost consciousness to a general anaesthetic, she said Dr Reeves leaned over and whispered in her ear: "I'm going to take your clitoris, too".
After the operation she discovered all her external genitalia had been cut off her body. It is alleged Dr Reeves later boasted of removing "all the fun bits" - and said she wouldn't need them as her husband had died. Click here for Source.
In spite of there being 1200 complaints against this man, there are those who still seek to protect him.
QUOTE:Butcher victims top 1200
SUPPORTERS of the "Butcher of Begs", Graeme Reeves, have gone to ground as the growing tsunami of email complaints surpasses the 1200 mark.
The Sunday Telegraph was met with a wall of silence when it contacted former colleagues, psychiatrists and health regulators last week to find out how the disgraced former gynaecologist and obstetrician managed to escape detection for more than a decade.
Only one former colleague spoke out last week to defend Reeves, who is accused of routinely mutilating and sexually abusing hundreds of patients. Click here for Source.
QUOTE: Last week Dr Simonson, who provided a letter of reference for Reeves at his NSW Medical Tribunal hearing in 2004, said he stood by his statement that Reeves was ``one of the better surgeons'' in his experience.
"I assisted Dr Reeves in some operations and what I saw him do is what I've seen othersurgeons do similarly in other operations,'' he said.
Asked if that meant he had seen other surgeons mutilate their patients, he replied: "I'm not commenting''. Click here for Source.
WE MUST EXPRESS OUR HORROR AND OUTRAGE THAT THIS HAS BEEN ALLOWED TO HAPPEN IN OUR HEALTH SYSTEM. WE MUST SHOW OUR SUPPORT FOR THIS MANS VICTIMS, AND SEND THE CLEAR MESSAGE THAT THIS MUST NEVER BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN AGAIN, AND THIS MAN MUST BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE.
Nationwide rallies have been organised in the following cities, on Friday the 28th of March, Midday, on the steps of Parliament. (others cities may also be involved, I will update as necessary) You can also e-mail me at janet (at) joyousbirth (dot) info
Bring ribbons to tie to represent the women abused.
Come along, bring your families, bring placards, spread the word!
Contact Joyous Birth to get involved, spread the word, bring your mothers’ group, tell your school committees, tell anyone who’ll listen and come along to support these women.
• 10/3/2008 - Rape? Mutilation? All in a day's work and supported by his mates.
Those of you from out of town, may not have heard but a serial mutilator of women has been recently discovered in the eastern states. He is currently residing somewhere in NSW with his wife accompanying him. It seems that he sexually assaulted many women and mutilated the genitals of at least 1200 women over a decade and without public outcry or police follow up. He performed these mutilations in public view, in front of hundreds of other people and yet none reported him or followed up his behaviour to see that someone, anyone, put a stop to his activities. Women he mutilated made complaints but these were ignored. Why no outcry?
He was an obstetrician.
There is barely any press coverage, letters women are sending to the newspapers deploring this man walking free while women suffer are not being printed. Silence abounds. Except for his friends who are speaking out to defend him and in hopes that he isn't suffering too badly now, poor man.
Some of us, of a cynical turn of thought, might hypothesise that a system based on the oppression and subjugation of women, where women are routinely disregarded as they scream no, is the ideal hiding place for a serial misogynist. While there is no denying the vile, unspeakable nature of this man's deeds, he's not that far from plenty of birthrape stories, is he? Mutilated genitals, women left scarred for life unable and unwilling to speak out for fear of ridicule. A system where doctors are gods is going to breed this kind of behaviour at some point. I daresay he's not the only one using the safety of general anaesthetic to indulge personal desires of a revolting nature.
Are you feeling shocked and staggered by this? Despite being deregistered in one state, and concerns being raised about him in a number of hospitals, and despite at least one woman dying, he was allowed to keep mutilating and raping for over a decade in our maternity hospitals. Those with so much invested in how maternity hospitals keep running are not going to just leap aside and offer themselves up for more regulation of their activities. Too much money is involved for anyone to really give a damn about this.
"The Sunday Telegraph was met with a wall of silence when it contacted former colleagues, psychiatrists and health regulators last week to find out how the disgraced former gynaecologist and obstetrician managed to escape detection for more than a decade.
Only one former colleague spoke out last week to defend Reeves, who is accused of routinely mutilating and sexually abusing hundreds of patients. Dr Frank Simonson also revealed fears about Reeves's mental state in the wake of the scandal, which has made headlines around the world.
"I hope that ... he is getting medical treatment and counselling,'' he said.
"He would be suffering terribly mentally at the moment - and he certainly would need some mental support.""
If you're a client of Frank's, I suggest you step away. He befriends serial misogynists and defends them publicly.
Are you feeling moved by the surgeon's plight? Are you wondering where the hell the hundreds of hospital staff who enabled him are hiding? Or maybe they're just working away in the hospital like they were then, watching some other butcher perform mutilations on women. Well yes, they would be, they'd be enabling episiotomies, right? They'd be holding women down and forcing their legs apart to allow easy access to people with sharp instruments who have no business between any woman's legs - ever. They'd be putting up the synto and telling women to shut up and stop complaining. They'd be saying, "Well you let a penis up there!" to women who don't want vaginal examinations. They'd be taking babies from their mothers' arms, jabbing them with noxious chemicals and filling virgin guts with powdered poison made by multinationals.
Not so hard to see how a mutilating surgeon came about and stayed undetected, hey? How about all the surgeons who slice open vaginas and then stitch without anaesthetic to punish women for refusing interventions? Or stitch women too tight to deform their vaginas and supposedly make their (always) male partners jump for joy at the thought of fucking a woman who cries in pain. Or those who force women to have caesarean surgery for no reason thus risking their lives and the lives of their babies? They're having their names printed in glowing birth announcements, as I type, where Dr So-and-so is thanked for the "safe delivery" of a baby. Or they're signing a credit card chit for goods paid for by Medicare where every time a surgeon lays a hand on a woman they get paid a little more. When these women went to see specialists for repair work, the doctor would comment that the mutilating surgeon had left his "trademark" mutilation on their genitals. And yet none reported him? So they colluded and obviously approved, right? People who don't approve of genital mutilation would report it, wouldn't they? Doesn't this rather make a mockery of all the supposed disapproval for female genital mutilation in this country? Or do we only disapprove when non-white, non-surgeons do it?
Obstetrics is the job for serial misogynists. They get to control and abuse women's bodies and not only that, but women's bodies while trying to perform the societally sanctioned defining act of womanhood. And then their colleagues and friends all stand by them. Plus plenty of women who experience brutality on this continuum also fail to speak up even though the people who rape them are clearly coming from a history of rape and will continue to rape as long as they have those positions of power over women.
So if you've experienced interventions without consent or been coerced or forced into anything in a hospital, speak up! Not speaking up means we're colluding!
Can you imagine a surgeon who was removing penises and testicles without reason or consent lasting very long in a job? Especially if it was a woman doing the mutilating? I can't. She'd be gaoled, pilloried, dire mutterings of bringing back the death penalty would be happening in clubs across the country. But let a man loose on women under general anaesthetic to slice at will and no one really gives a damn.
My rage knows no bounds.
Stay tuned for the news of a rally to protest about this shocking travesty.
• 17/12/2007 - Because I'm a birthing woman and...
Because we are too short, too tall, too thin, too small of foot, too old, too young, too wide, and our pelvises are too narrow, too small, too untried, or unproven or the wrong shape, and our uteruses are too scarred, or pointing the wrong way, or we are too multiparous, too fertile, too infertile, too female, too small, too big, too fat, too emotional, too detached, too strong, too weak, too intelligent, too well designed to birth, not designed well enough, and our vaginas are too scarred, too unproven, not stretchy enough or too stretchy, and we’re too inconvenient, too unpredictable, too demanding, too informed, too loud, too messy, and our bodies labour too long or not long enough, and our cervices don’t dilate 1cm an hour on command and because when you hire a surgeon you get surgery and hospitals are for sick people…
and so for these and many other reasons, we are part of the homebirth movement.
• 30/11/2007 - 2008 - year of homebirth awareness!
2008 –the year of Homebirth Awareness!
Changing our world through one action a day.
The time has come to speak out as women and mothers about how our lives have been changed by the beauty of birthing at home. We cannot stand by as more women go through the conveyor belts of our maternity hospitals without speaking the truth –
Birth is safe, interference is risky*, birth belongs at home.
Join all of us in speaking out with just one action a day, however small, and be theripple effect as each of us across Australia speaks out to inform, normalise and honour birth.
What can you do in one day? How about these ideas?!
* put a HOMEBIRTH sticker on your car, pram, bicycle helmet, letterbox, gate, fence, front door
* sew a homebirth patch on your sling or wrap
* get a note in your school newsletter
* put your homebirth pics on youtube
* drop off JB pamphlets and info on normal physiological birth to your local medical centre
* tell someone about your homebirth, past, present, or planned
* write a letter to your daily, local or national newspaper
* buy a homebirth book for your local library, don't forget the kids' section
* talk to your community group, ABA group, mothers' group however casually you like
* tell your GP if you have one
* tell your natural therapists and give them some JB brochures
* carry a JB tote bag
* take a few pamphlets everywhere just in case the need arises
* say "Homebirth is lovely" on mainstream internet forums
* change your sig to something supportive of homebirth on mainstream forums
* put a link to JB on your website, blog, community group website or anywhere else you can
* give a voucher for JOY to friends who aren't members (and some who are)
* give gift vouchers from Capers
* host a showing of BOBB in your local area and invite the newspapers
* go to anything women-related and talk about homebirth - WEL, CWA, IWD.....
* do some community-minded graffiti or even a mural!
* write stuff on toilet walls in maternity hospitals
* do some Wiki edits
* put a homebirth quote in your email sig
* ring the radio when talkback time is on and say all health matters would be solved by women having babies at home
* do an essay at uni about it if you can, or a tutorial presentation
* wear a homebirth tshirt, put homebirth clothes on innocent children who can't protest
FORUM AVATARS
Each image is 100x100 and is no larger than 19.5 kilobytes in size.
* thanks to www.trustbirth.com for "Birth is safe, interference is risky". Thank you, Carla!!
• 2/10/2007 - Put your anger where it belongs, not with me, with your surgeons.
How do we organise the revolution without offending anyone?
Why am I supposed to pretend it’s ok for surgery to be presented as an equal choice with spontaneous, physiological birth when it’s not?
Why should I go on the same manipulation trip that surgeons are on when there are facts which just speak for themselves?
When will women start to put their anger where it belongs? It belongs with the medicalised birth industry, not with activists who are telling you the truth and telling you that your body works.
Just like there are facts about breastfeeding, there are facts about birth and we are just not responsible for how others choose to interpret facts.
The fact is that surgery is a suboptimal way to be born and that most surgeries are not for evidence based reasons. I know, I've had one for no reason and I read the perinatal data. The main reasons for caesarean in Australia are previous caesarean(s) (yep, no evidence to support that one), breech (and again), twins (c'mon now people!). There are going to be isolated occasional women who fluke surgery because they really needed it. Most of us don't, it's just a fact.
We can't inhabit other's heads and know how they're going to receive things. Women will either be ready to hear it or not and if we "tone it down" or "make it widely acceptable" we're never going to push any boundaries and get through this constant violent assault against us and our babies. Anti-smoking ads aren't tailored to avoid offending, they're designed to shock you with the reality of the danger you're putting yourself in, and rightly so!
If I'm offended by something I look to myself first to see why I'm responding in that way. Let's take responsibility for our own actions in leading to surgery instead of blaming others for somehow creating some feeling in us.
If you had surgery you really needed, why feel bad about it? Surgery exists for a reason and if you've needed to access it, and been able to access it, and it's saved your life and your babies life isn't that great? I'm very glad that the handful of women I know have been able to access it for life saving reasons but of all the hundreds of women I know personally and the thousands I see online, they're the minority by a long shot.
The reality is that most caesareans are unnecessary, dangerous, created through iatrogenic practices, inadequate support for women, money making and misogyny and until we accept that as birthworkers, and start telling it like it is, we may as well swim around in the same crap forever.
We got to this position in birth because we were all taken by surprise at how efficiently the multinational medical juggernaut overtook us and because we've always played nice and tried to not offend even the most scalpel-happy surgeons who slice and dice us on a whim.
Do I feel bad when discussion about the risks and dangers of caesarean occurs? No, not in the least. Why should I?? I had my caesarean because my careprovider told me I needed it. I made that decision which I now know was a poor one. I therefore learnt a lot, processed a lot, took responsibility for my own actions and despite feeling sadness and regret over what my son and I missed out on, I moved on. I also still have some PTSD from some of it but that's my issue, I don't expect anonymous strangers on internet forums to read my mind and avoid my triggers. I also understand and place responsibility on my careprovider and our medicalised birth world where that responsibility belongs.
Women aren't "to blame" but if we keep whining about how reality "makes us feel bad" then we continue to blame ourselves instead of speaking out about a whole system which makes mincemeat of us. We are responsible when we lie to each other and support each other to make bad decisions that risk our lives and our babies lives.
Why should someone else's inability to deal with her unnecessary surgery stop a first time mother accessing the accurate information she needs to potentially save her life?!
You can't run a campaign of any kind which is going to make everyone happy and neither should you try. We need to get angry and understand the contexts in which our largely unnecessary surgeries occur instead of blaming activists for speaking the truth about them. I'm so tired of being criticised for "making women feel bad" when nothing I say can ever do anything like the damage that unnecesary major abdominal surgery has done to a woman and her baby who is also permanently altered for life and yet the surgeons who perpetrate this violence go scot free. At least if I speak the truth about birth I'm not continuing the lies we tell women and I can sleep at night with a clear conscience.
All revolutions take truth speaking to get off the ground.
There is immense and tragic pain among so many of us over our birthing experiences and this violence won't stop until we cease to pander to surgeons by lying to women.
But the anger and blame belong with the system that does the damage not the activists who are trying to save women's lives.
No matter how uncomfortable the truth, it’s not more uncomfortable than trying to comfort your toddler and breastfeed your newborn over your stitches and through a haze of pain from infection.
No matter how inconvenient it is to have to shop around for an appropriate careprovider for your VBAC, it’s a lot more convenient than being rehospitalised because your wound is infected with Golden Staph and you have to have IV antibiotics that play further havoc with your child’s injured gut.
Think it’s rough waiting at the end of pregnancy for spontaneous labour? Not half so rough as waiting to see how your child’s damaged gut responds to allergens, and whether your child develops asthma.
It’s going to be a lot less convenient trying to find a surrogate mother because you lost your uterus in surgery you didn’t need because you hired a careprovider you didn’t need, a surgeon.
No matter how bad this list makes you feel, it’s nothing compared with how bad you’ll feel recovering from surgery and risking your life in the myriad of problems it commonly causes.
If this makes you uncomfortable why don’t you tell your surgeon instead of blaming the activist who is telling you the truth?
The surgeon who told you that you needed to book a repeat caesarean because your pelvis was too small, or your baby was too big, or because you’re too old, small, tall or fat was lying to you and your anger belongs with them. If you feel upset with yourself, look at it, don’t fear it. Use the pain to work out why you felt drawn to something patently bad for you, or if you felt uncomfortable with it, look at why you consented while having doubts. That way lies your healing.
Don’t just heal a small portion, heal your life, take back your power and get angry with those who robbed you, not those who support you to heal and other women to avoid the traps we fell into.
I don't care if you don't like the word or the idea, it's real so get used to it. Survivors are angry and we are starting to talk about it.
Yes means yes,
No means no,
However we dress,
Wherever we go!
Remember that old anti-violence slogan? Well it means even in hospitals and even in stupid hospital gowns, when I say no, it means NO.
When you shove your arm in a woman who's screaming no, that's rape.
When you rupture those membranes because you have to tick the box and comply with "protocol" even when the woman screams no, that's rape.
When you slash a woman's vagina with scissors and she's screaming no, that's rape and on the street it would earn you a gaol sentence. Your green gown is not protection, do that to me and I will charge you.
Don't forget it, we are angry and we are powerful. We have survived your raping protocols so we can survive anything. Be afraid and don't underestimate us.
• 19/8/2007 - Lucky for me, I have a blog! And I just give birth!
I used to write for a homebirth magazine in my local area. I did this because I think it's important, I like to support homebirth groups, I think I have something important to say and all those kind of activist reasons that one might offer one's time for free to so many groups.
Interestingly, this article was knocked back because it supposedly dismisses women's concerns around birthing after previous surgery. Obviously only someone not very bright would think that or perhaps someone with an agenda other than offering information to birthing women? But further, I happen to know that other women have said the exact same thing in their submitted (and accepted) articles as I said and that was somehow deemed appropriate. Go figure. What possible conclusions could one draw from that then, hey?
Welcome to birth politics where what tree I pissed on, and who my friends are, is more important than the work I do. Where Sheila Kitzinger's words are greeted with sage nodding and mine with exhortations to get Over It and stop Being Angry. Hmmm. Underneath this short article is one I wrote in 2005 thus demonstrating that this is not even new thinking on my part.
On Birth – and with due deference to Nancy Wainer whose revolutionary thoughts helped so many of us frame our own.
I propose that we reclaim birth. Our first step can be the removal of labels from birthing. Birth is birth. Women are women. We’re not mothers, wives, primips, multis or “the VBAC in room 3”, we’re women. We’re women at work, women in the home, women in the revolution and women when we birth. And birth, is just birth.
If a woman has had five previous surgeries, this homebirth is still just a birth.
The woman-hating surgical discourse has colonised our once great nomenclature and turned it on us, pathologised it, made it an unattainable, risky, undesirable managed process designed to “fail”. And let’s drop “successful” and “failed” from our descriptions of reclaimed birth. Birth doesn’t fail although often the system does.
Alternatively, if we reclaimed our lives, maybe birth would naturally follow on? Now there’s a radical thought!
A survivor of birthrape birthing again, is just birthing.
A woman with a “big baby” is just birthing.
Let us leave the acronyms to those who seek to remove our humanity and have the power in naming our own births. No more FBAC, VBAC, HBAC, EBAC, UBAC, BAC, whatever. Don’t give in to the powermongers, and fearmongers, just give birth.
Give birth at home. Give birth with friends. Give birth on your own. Catch your own baby as she plunges from your yoni and inhale deeply. That is the true scent of freedom. Give birth screaming, give birth whispering the meaning of the universe. Give birth nestled into your lover. Give birth holding the hand of your chosen wise woman. Look into her eyes and see the line going back to when we first walked upright and our bodies adapted to birthing that way. Give birth in a rented deflating secondbest pool in your study, hey, I can recommend that personally!
Give birth in the living room, after your previous surgery. Give birth on the roof this time if you feel like it. It’s just a birth. Give birth in the garden. Last time you had surgery, this time you’re giving birth. Not a big deal. Just a birth. Give birth at your kitchen sink in ironic tribute to your inner housewife.
Give birth to yourself, embrace yourself, throw off the shackles, womankind arise! Even suffragettes just gave birth. (And most of them at home.)
Give birth to boy babies that they may be loved onto earth and cherished from birth, not brutalised to fit society’s demand for drone-like men. Give birth to girl babies that they may continue the line and know the power of birth and the power of women themselves, all their lives.
Birth, birth, birth, that’s all it is. What our greatgrandmothers did at home, alone or with friends and sisters, just birth.
Reclaim our birthright to name our births, own our births and choose woman-centred baby-loving birth.
Birth after surgery = just a birth.
******************************************
Giving Birth After Caesarean? The Good News Is It's Just A Birth!
Written to mark National Caesarean Awareness Day, 2005.
I recently came to a decision about my next birth. I’m not planning a HBAC, I’m not planning a VBAC, I’m planning a birth.
To quote Henci Goer, “Frankly, VBAC should be a nonissue by now. You should be no more choosing whether to labour this time than you did before you had a caesarean. Based on 2 decades of studies, totalling many thousands of women, the consensus of experts [both of the medical model and the midwifery model] is that in the absence of a specific reason for caesarean section, the routine policy for women with prior caesareans ought to be labour.”
Certain groups central to the pursuing and upholding of the medical model are changing their view on this, despite the unchanging evidence, and this seems to be where the problems lie.
Now the logical, academic side of me feels terribly confused then by what I see happening in our hospitals to birthing women, and not only those who have had prior caesareans. We all know that vaginal birth is safer for babies, the evidence is well documented and persuasively presented by many people.
Spontaneous labour, followed by normal physiological birth, ie the midwifery model, produces the best outcomes regardless of prior surgery. But in Australia, fewer than 1% of women access this optimal care.
Even those who could afford it without much difficulty, mostly choose to hire a careprovider from the medical model despite the worst outcomes being associated with disastrous notions like active management of labour and elective repeat caesarean with no actual medical indication for it.
Of course, if you were to survey most of the people walking past in the street today, no doubt a large percentage could tell you that birth is dangerous and difficult, best confined to the walls of hospitals, and almost certainly requiring the services of a surgeon in some capacity.
The advertising of their business by those who promote the dangerous and poorly evidenced medical model is thorough and buys into larger myths in our culture around women and women’s bodies.
And their continuing promotion, through ridiculously elevated levels of first time mothers experiencing unnecessary caesareans leading to further surgery as VBACs are refused, means that they are safely both capturing and creating a market share via an unethical monopoly.
If you doubt that this is a policy, and in collusion with our media, you need only think of the recent release of a very faulty study in Australia which alleged that induction at 39 weeks gestation led to a lowering of stillbirth rates.
In the same week, a study demonstrating yet again, the efficacy of the midwifery model, now largely the domain of independent midwives practicing in our homes, was completely ignored in favour of the footage of women clutching small infants praising their obstetricians early intervention in saving them from the dangers of normal, physiological birth and timely gestation.
The very language we use reinforces this clash between the well evidenced, and the poorly evidenced but predominant culture – Trial of labour, trial of scar, hoping for a VBAC, successful VBAC, failed VBAC, uterine rupture which rather conjures images of catastrophic bursting culminating in a spewing forth of blood and baby.
For most women, any issues with their scar results in a small pulling apart and cessation of labour, provided you haven’t had your labour augmented with chemicals which stretch the uterus beyond it’s normal capacity. And let’s not forget other terms like incompetent cervix and failure to progress.
The United Nations 4th World Conference on Women, in Beijing 1995, said this in relation to healthcare for women. Countries need to:- "Reinforce laws, reform institutions and promote norms and practices that eliminate discrimination against women and encourage both women and men to take responsibility for their sexual and reproductive behaviour; ensure full respect for the integrity of the person, take action to ensure the conditions necessary for women to exercise their reproductive rights and eliminate coercive laws and practices."
The World Health Organisations, report “Safe Motherhood: a guide for care in normal birth” states that “The uncritical adoption of a range of unhelpful, untimely, inappropriate and/or unnecessary interventions, all too frequently poorly evaluated, is a risk run by many who try to improve the maternity services. And also warns that “Women and their babies can be harmed by unnecessary practices.
Staff in referral facilities can become dysfunctional if their capacity to care for very sick women who need all their attention and expertise is swamped by the sheer number of normal births which present themselves.
In their turn, such normal births are frequently managed with "standardised protocols" which only find their justification in the care of women with childbirth complications.” The report states, crucially that “The aim of the care is to achieve a healthy mother and child with the least possible level of intervention that is compatible with safety. This approach implies that: In normal birth there should be a valid reason to interfere with the natural process.”
Too few women are achieving this kind of care and that is only too evident in our soaring rates of unnecessary surgeries.
So what happens to women and our community in all this? For a start, the money spent by governments on supplying highly priced, poorly evidenced careproviders is money which could be spent more judiciously on programmes preventing violence against women or abuse against children.
Hospitals are performing unnecessary surgeries on perfectly healthy women and leaving women at far greater risk of postnatal depression and, the little mentioned but frequently experienced, post traumatic stress disorder.
Women who have caesareans frequently have difficulty breastfeeding, which not only leads to the high dollar value of formula being used, but the resulting drop in the health of that baby leading to further draining our health budget because we know that formula fed babies are at far higher risk of being hospitalised from illness.
And women unable to breastfeed are also missing out on valuable protection from reproductive cancers, particularly breast cancer, which is in almost epidemic proportions nowadays. There go more health dollars which could have been more usefully and economically spent on midwifery care.
Given that the safety of midwifery has been demonstrated over and over around the world ad nauseam, yet still midwives are asked by obstetricians to demonstrate their worthiness to care for women in normal, physiological labour, something is very wrong.
We need to step up to the community and be proactive with information, to go on the offensive with the superior outcomes and satisfied clients of midwifery care. We need to stop allowing surgeons, ill qualified for the care of healthy pregnant women, to dictate the terms of the discourse because women are losing out to it.
We need to ask obstetricians to demonstrate their safety outcomes and justify their capacity to care for women who require nothing from their impressive skillset as surgeons. As Michel Odent said, “Imagine the future if surgical teams were at the service of the midwives and the women instead of controlling them.”
We need to retain our obstetric services for the few women who need this admirable and life saving technology put to the use for which it was intended. We need caesareans to be treated again as major surgery, and not performed without good reason after a woman has used other less invasive methods at her disposal.
We need for women who have this necessary surgery to have their experience honoured, and not treated as a run of the mill, every day occurrence, with no regard for their emotional state or physical needs.
And those of us who have experienced caesareans need to be firm about our future decisions and base them on evidence and not let the medical model steer us into unnecessary further surgeries.
According to a newly published Canadian study of 308,755 mothers who gave birth from 1988 to 2000 after a previous Caesarean section, maternal in-hospital death was significantly higher in elective repeat caesarean group (5.6 per 100,000) than the trial of labour group (1.6 per 100,000). This means that maternal death is 3 1/2 times greater with elective repeat C/S.
Today is a day for us to honour ourselves and our experiences. We are grateful for the mothers who are with us today, and their children, who might not be if it weren’t for emergency surgery in a developed country.
We are grateful for the journey which our births take us on, because birth is a journey and not a destination. Our courage and experience can lead us into the betterment of birth for all Australian women, if we let it.
• 2/7/2007 - Harm minimisation - a new approach to institutional birthing
Supporting hospital birth.
Part One: why harm minimisation?
The idea of “harm minimisation” came about when people caring for drug addicts began to formulate ways to limit the potential damage from drugs in those simply unable to cease pursuing their own addiction, or slowly working towards that end.
Much like the fall out of drug abuse, trauma from managed hospital birth is so commonplace today as to be almost unremarkable. Despite women’s birth experiences clearly reflecting how little hospitals serve our greater wellbeing, we continue to access those institutions. This is then behaviour which parallels that of other damaging addictions and as such requires harm minimisation strategies in place.
While many sources encourage women to hand their power to the institution, or provide lists of utterly pointless information to pacify women into feeling safe, this article will provide a context within which to view hospital birth that will also suggest some safer practices for women in that environment. Some concrete examples will also be included in Part Two.
Being docile and compliant are traits which are praised and rewarded in women and so it is within the hospital system as well since it is a place which regulates and controls women. Unfortunately this does not reduce the potential harm from unnecessary interventions which are easily performed upon most women despite how they cause physical and psychological trauma.
Women who have the means to birth at home, financial, physical and emotional, will still take themselves into the hospital even when their previous experiences have been negative. The programming of women to listen to authority figures, combined with how comfortable most of us are with feelings of fear and a lack of control, mean that until women begin to move towards liberation in their lives more generally we will continue to pursue this dangerous path.
Despite copious evidence in existence internationally about the dangers of birthing in hospitals, and the equally compelling evidence demonstrating both the safety and desirability of evidence based care in the home, the vast majority of women in Australia still attempt to birth their babies in hospitals.
A complex layering of factors from the personal to the wider community, from the history of midwifery moving out of the hands of consumers and into institutions, and a desire to control and regulate women’s bodies, have all contributed to this situation.The false consciousness which exists in our society that hospitals are safe places for birthing women is so utterly entrenched that supporting women to move beyond it can seem an overwhelming, and certainly a disheartening, task.
No other oppressed group colludes quite so much in it’s own oppression as women.
Once a woman has put herself within the reach of the hospital (And I do not say, “chosen” for it can hardly be considered choice when she does not know the choice exists and most women are unaware that homebirth is even an option.) those who seek to support her must begin to work at minimising the likely and potential harm from this contact.
The safest way for birth to proceed is in an environment which supports the normal physiological process. Women require freedom of emotion and movement, familiarity, safety, dim lighting, warmth, sustenance and companions who are well known to the woman, and who are also well known to her.
Obviously in an institutionalised birth setting, even the most caring midwife is going to be unable to supply most of those. Indeed most women are also unaware that these factors are both essential and desirable in the process. The fortunate woman who has come upon someone who can support them in planning for their hospital experience may be open to harm minimisation strategies, even if she is unable, or unwilling to actually make the safest choice and birth at home.
For the very small number of women to whom obstetric technology could be of benefit, there is still immense benefit to birth support. Planned caesareans for genuine medical need, for example, can still take place in a way which is safer for a woman and her baby’s longer term mental and physical health even though it is a dangerous procedure in the short term.There is always room for respect of the mother-baby dyad regardless of the necessities of a genuine emergency too and a good birth plan with strong supporters to pursue it can go a long way to supporting a woman through such a trauma.
Part Two: Physical ways to minimise the harm of hospital protocols and staff on birth.
As you probably know, I support the boycott of Nestlé products.
According the the World Health Organisation Authority (WHO) 1.5 million babies die every year as a result of inappropriate feeding. Despite this Nestlé continues to push its baby milks in breach of international standards.
Monitoring by groups on the ground around the world shows Nestlé is responsible for more violations than any other company. That's why it is singled out for boycott action.
If you don't boycott Nestlé already, I ask that you consider looking at the evidence and giving up Nestlé products for one week, at least.
Boycott groups around the world have declared 2-8 July to be International Nestlé-Free Week.
The boycott has forced some changes from the company, but it is still a long way from complying. Campaigners are also working for laws. Nestlé can comply when it is given no choice. It is not being asked to do something that is impossible, but without pressure it continues to put its own profits before infant health and mothers' rights.
You can find out more information and look at the evidence yourself on the Baby Milk Action website at:
It is important to tell Nestlé you will be boycotting it, whether it is just for the week, or until it accepts and acts on the plan put to it by boycott groups for saving infant lives.
You can telephone Nestlé on the freephone number
0800 00 00 30 or send a message via its website http://www.nestle.com/
• 18/6/2007 - If hospitals told the truth, would women still go to them?
Have you accessed a hospital for care during pregnancy and birth? Why?
As soon as you're pregnant we want to take lots of blood and do lots of tests, many of which are unsubstantiated. We will also blackmail you into a so-called dating scan which is notoriously inaccurate and begin to poohpooh your faith in your body by telling you that just because you *know* when you ovulated or conceived, we know better.
We will also make a big fuss out of anything we possibly can at this point with a general policy of removing your faith in yourself and putting you into a panic so you accept any help we *ahem* "offer" because we preface most things with some form of "you don't want your baby to die, do you?" We are quite likely to tell you that there an anomalies in the ultrasound and possibly kid you that you will have placenta previa even though in the early stages of a pregnancy we can't really tell that at all.
As your pregnancy progresses, we will call it "uneventful" if nothing of any interest to us occurs. We're not interested in how you bond, any dreams you may have or any clear instinctive signals you're receiving because our machines are much more important. So we don't care if you tell us something is wrong because how could you know? But if we perceive something to be "wrong" by our standards we will pretty much hound you to *do something* about it even if you know in yourself that everything's fine.
We'll start annoying you about having the Glucose Tolerance Test done at some point despite it being notoriously inaccurate and you having no history or evidence of any issues with this. Once you have the test, if it's borderline we are more likely to grade you "highrisk" than ask you if you ate a banana before it. We will also palpate your belly and make wild guesses about a breech baby and tell you that caesarean is the only way to go omitting to mention Optimal Foetal Positioning all the while.
We will offer you classes in understanding hospital birth which will clearly delineate for you all the drugs you can "choose", how you *might* be a lucky mum who can breastfeed for a few months and what will happen to you after your caesarean. We will frown upon you having any evidence-based knowledge and using it to frighten the other *ahem* patients with it in class.
No questions about *why* induction is necessary will be allowed. We know best, after all. You will also have been hearing all through your time at the hospital about all the things we will and won't *allow* you to do but we probably omitted to mention just yet that we want you to be induced if you dare gestate any longer than 40 weeks.
So your belly is large and lovely by now and it's the end of your 3rd trimester. We have probably told you that you need more ultrasounds by now despite the evidence that they are harmful to babies and unnecessary in the process. We might be wanting to clear up the placenta previa (Wow it spontaneously moved!) or the breech issue (Gosh, look at that, the baby moved head down!) or we might want to completely bullshit you and tell you the cord is around it's neck or (no shit I've heard this) that we can see meconium in the liquor. Yes, not just technicians but magicians!
About the 38 week mark we will begin to tell you how if you don't go into labour soon we will *have* to induce you. You might feel a little perplexed by this since you and the baby are demonstrably healthy despite the number of ultrasounds forced up on you both but you begin to feel the fear anyway.
At your 40 week appt you are offered an innocuous sounding procedure called a "stretch and sweep" despite being perfectly healthy, having a lovely healthy baby, and the risk of infection every time yet another person sticks their hand in your poor vagina. You might chug along a bit more in your pregnancy with people on the street asking you why you're daring to be so thoughtless and risk your baby's life by not allowing the hospital to do their thing.
At your 41 week appt, you're told by the midwife or surgeon you've never met before, that you're putting yourself ahead of the health of your (still perfectly healthy) baby and made to feel selfish and uncaring. You *ahem* "agree" to be induced. Much like a woman with a knife to her throat *agrees* to be raped.
You go home and spend a few days assaulting your partner for sex that neither of you want, eating curry that burns your arse off the next morning, nipple twiddling till you can pick up Radio Australia and nothing works. You shamefacedly submit to the induction despite clear evidence that your uterus is slowly contracting and your cervix is gently opening. Everyone is lovely to you now that you're being compliant so as soon as the artificial contractions pick up we will *ahem* "offer" you some pethidine. We will do this periodically rather than sitting with you and praising/encouraging your coping skills.
We will also *ahem* "offer" to strap on monitors that are proven clearly to not enhance outcomes but rather tend to lead to caesarean. After you are exhausted and we have criticised your crappy cervix enough for refusing to open to our timetable we will up the ante by *ahem* "offering" you an epidural which if we opened a journal or 3 we would know leads to cementing poorly aligned babies (did I mention that you've been on your back for about 8 hours by now?) and straight to caesarean. We omit to tell you this. Don't want to scare the poor hysterical uterus, err, patient.
After your epidural has been inserted (maybe a few times before it's right) we will leave you alone and tell you to rest in a room with bright lights, a squeaky door, nowhere for your partner to sit comfortably, strapped up to monitors and, if you're really lucky, with your baby's heart beat magnified through the monitor so you feel like you're underwater anxiously listening to the sea. The monitors will probably not work properly and we will have to tell you off a few times for not being sufficiently still to allow them to work even if they're faulty and it's nothing to do with you.
Periodically another stranger will come in and thrust their hand into your vagina, record the data, and tell you some number or other. At a certain point, if you're very lucky we might notice that you're fully dilated so then we will possibly turn down your drug relief while keeping the syntocinon on full bore and make you push your baby out lying down through your compressed pelvis. Of course it's not very likely that you will reach this stage because we know that your body isn't designed to give birth but we are designed to deliver, so more likely another stranger will come in and tell you in mock-sad tones that you're defective and need to be surgically amputated of this baby.
We might tell you a few complications like you'll never have another vaginal birth now (total crap) you might lose your uterus in the surgery (not unlikely) and you might die. This seems like no biggie right at the moment because you're probably wishing you could just die. We will also impress upon you the urgency of all this as your baby is going to die if we don't cut you RIGHT NOW and then we'll have a leisurely stroll down to the theatre while you shake and cry, your partner goes into catatonic shock and we all just chat like we're on the bus going home.
In the OR it's really clear who's important lovey, and it's not you or the baby. It's us! We're the complete strangers all looking at your naked body while we are dressed from head to foot and clattering scary looking instruments around. If you're really lucky once they've amputated your very surprised baby you'll get a a glimpse of it's arse over the shower curtain but most likely it will be whisked past you (you have no medical qualifications so you don't get to touch that baby, dearie) stuck under cold lights on a metal surface to hopefully breathe to our timetable despite us having chopped it's lifesupport system off in midcycle.
We will now take care of your baby by putting it in a plastic box and wheeling it away leaving your partner to decide between you crucified on the table or the screaming, terrified, distressed baby in the nurturing plastic box. We will stitch you up, chatting about the footy or our holidays, and tell you how fortunate it was that we were there to take care of you. You will be a stunned mullet through this as we don't tell you before your operation that your baby doesn't belong to you now. It's a finders keepers policy. We found that baby hanging around in your belly so we get to keep it.
Some hours later, hopefully under 24 but not necessarily, another complete stranger will hand you a bundle with a baby in it. Hopefully it's yours but they are much of a muchness and unless there are clear signs of ethnicity we won't be too bothered whether or not it's the one we amputated from you. Someone, or several different someones, will probably pop in and offer you bad advice about breastfeeding and tell you that you'd better give the baby formula because it's x number of hours since the "birth" and the baby will die if you don't.
Now we realise that you might be feeling a little upset by missing out on one of those fabled Natural Births but we know that it's just because you're a silly romantic woman who doesn't know what's good for her. We have produced a Healthy Baby for you which oddly enough had Apgars of 8 and 10 even though it was massively distressed. (And remember, nothing was compulsory, you could have said no at any point but you didn't. You are entirely responsible for all this.) Well it wasn't all that distressed but we need to use whatever tools we can to help you decide what's best for us...oh, we mean you.
At some point we will "allow" you to leave although not without performing any number of tests on our baby, oops, *your* baby. Hopefully we will have completely removed any sense of competency from you so you happily submit to the Maternal and Child Health Nurse when she tells you that you need to switch to formula right now "or your baby will die" (is there a theme here???). You will also be really happy to see us in your next pregnancy and immediately allow us to schedule another amputation so that you don't mucky up our timetabling and time and motion needs by insisting on bloody well labouring! You girls are so thoughtless!
We hope to see you again soon!
PS If *you* get PND you're obviously defective and it's nothing to do with us. And it certainly isn't PTSD!
And the moral of the story is? Stay home. Stay safe. Homebirth.
It’s been a bad week here in birth activism land. I got a Serious Infraction for SPAM for posting a link to my birth pics on a forum. Then I actually had my sorrow at a booked surgery deleted from a post. I really feel for the mama in question, I’m both sorry and sad she’s having a second unnecessarean, she seems pretty sad about it too. But god forbid someone should say so.
I have committed the crime of being unsupportive.
Well if being supportive means ignoring women’s pain, not mentioning the truth about birth and how it’s risking your life to have interventions you don’t need, I am proud to be unsupportive.
Yes, let’s all be supportive. Sounds so lovely, doesn’t it? But what are we supporting? When we tell someone lies about their pregnancy and birth, who is really being supported? Does the woman benefit? The baby? The family and community? Big Fat No. The surgeons benefit, of course!
I absolutely do not support the medical establishment and their rape and torture of women and babies. I feel even more disgust for those who masquerade as friends to women but are just spouting the same shit as the establishment. Dressing it up as support does not make the risks lessen. If we all pretend surgery is safe and wise, it does not make it so.
