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.