Don’t Ever Invalidate a Woman’s Feelings About Her Birth Experience

So few people actually take a moment to consider how a woman’s birth experience affects her.  Is it just a process that results in a baby?  Or is it the darkest moment of a woman’s life, her most vulnerable time, when she faces her demons and comes out on the other side, victorious and empowered?  Feelings associated with childbirth are so deep-set and can be so intrinsic to how we feel about ourselves as women and mothers and how we relate to those wee ones we bring earthside.

Today I was told that my feelings about my birth experience don’t matter.  That I’m just disappointed about how things went and that I need to accept the fact that it was my choice to birth in a hospital.  That I have misplaced anger and that my feelings would have been more ‘understood’ had myself or my little girl suffered injury from our treatment during my labor. I should have known to research each and every procedure and intervention performed prior to going in for my induction and thus I have no reason to be angry and offended by the lack of information I received about the risks that were placed upon us during our stay at the hospital.

In a nutshell, the birth of my eldest daughter:  I was lied to about the necessity of my induction.  I was told that my amniotic fluid was low- which actually is a normal thing for late-term pregnancies and also something that varies in its levels throughout the day.  I was told that a prostaglandin pill would be placed in my cervix to dilate it.  What appalls me now that I am in the know is that this pill, passed off so nonchalantly as a normal everyday procedure, was Cytotec, misoprostol, which has been contraindicated against use in labor induction by the FDA.  Why is this drug so dangerous?  Well, because it carries the risk of hypertonic uterine contractions, fetal distress, uterine rupture and fetal and maternal death.  Oh, the joys.  A skip in the park is this drug. 

What this drug does is make you contract so hard it feels like your abdomen will involute into a black hole of immense proportions.  So I was offered pain relief, in the form of Nubain through an IV in my arm.  Not warned about the side-effects of this drug as well.  Does this not seem shady in the slightest?  We get prescription drugs at a pharmacy and included with the drug is a lengthy printout of the side effects and warnings.  Where was mine when I received cytotec and nubain?  No one told me that I would lose the memories of half of my labor.  Gone forever.   Oh, but the cytotec, the cytotec-contractions that you KNOW are unnatural and wrong, are so insanely powerful that nubain does not take the edge off.  So in prances the anesthesiologist with the epidural. “Yes, of course, this is a pretty routine procedure here, we’ll just get this into you and soon you won’t feel a thing.”

So after the birth I was left with a little girl, healthy, yes, but I did not have any sort of attachment to her. I had not felt my birth and that natural hormonal loop had been severed.  They did not warn me that I would be so numb as to consider my baby a complete stranger and have no mothering instinct towards her.

I trusted my doctor and I trusted my nurses to take care of me.  I signed a simple admissions form.  I consented only to reasonable care.  I did not consent to becoming an experiment and given a dangerous drug warned against use for inductions by the FDA.  I am furious that my doctor had the gall to take that sort of risk with my health and my baby’s.  How could I have researched for that?  Should I have researched procedures that my doctor should have known NOT to perform on me?  How could I have even known to educate myself on things when I was unaware that the information was out there to be researched?  It saddens me now realizing how clueless I was to blindly follow whatever whim the doctor and nurses impressed upon me but I know I am not alone.  All across this country women trust their bodies, their babies bodies and their emotions to the medical professionals who are supposed to be supporting them through childbirth.  And it happens so often after they begin learning later on that they did not consent to this procedure or that procedure, save to sign a general admissions form.  Do we, by signing that form, sign our mentalities away?  Do we become incompetent people, who don’t deserve an explanation of risks of each procedure?

And then to invalidate their feelings when they are outraged they received such treatment and lack of informed consent- to tell them that they have ‘misplaced anger’ and that they don’t deserve a modicum of empathy because they should have KNOWN to educate themselves.  Let’s tell the woman who is raped that she should have known not to go jogging alone.  Let’s tell her that she would receive more compassion from us if she had suffered broken bones or become pregnant.  Because the emotional pain of her vulnerability and violation of her body does not matter as long as her physical health was compromised.  Let’s tell the woman who sets out to breastfeed but ends it because a nurse tells her that she doesn’t make enough that she should have done her research.  La Leche League is out there, numerous excellent books on breastfeeding are out there, there is information on the Internet- surely with correct, accurate information she could have been successful.  But now she’s a failure, because she didn’t research- she didn’t know the information was there- but she needs to own her failure all the same.  Let’s gloss over the pain and frustration she has gone through and tell her she should have known better.

This is offensive to the core.