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Милли Хилл. Give Birth Like a Feminist
GIVE BIRTH LIKE A FEMINIST. Your Body. Your Baby. Your Choices. Milli Hill
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1 ‘Am I Allowed?’: The Birth Room Power Imbalance
The Language of Permission
Bloody difficult women
MAKING A BIRTH PLAN LIKE A FEMINIST
Safety first?
#metoo: the power of no
Good girls
LANGUAGE OF MATERNITY CARE TO CALL OUT OR CHALLENGE
Obstetric violence
‘Can I hold her now?’ Who owns the baby?
Love from a distance: life in the NICU
‘Re-centering me as the decision maker’: love and loss
Opting out: freebirth
Chapter 2. Birth: the Land that Feminism Forgot?
Incapable women
The set-up
Two doors
ASSERTIVENESS IN MATERNITY CARE
Sorrow and trauma
Lacking attention
The cult of natural birth
#metoointhebirthroom
Chapter 3. When Women’s Bodies Became Men’s Business: A History of Birth
The hammer of witches
Tools of the trade
Eve’s curse
All or nothing: the angel in the birth room
‘A night dropped out of my life’
Feminist awakenings
Men’s pleasure, men’s convenience
Birth freedoms
A third way: relationship-based care
Chapter 4. Loose Women
‘I am the expert here’
Policing birth choices
Crazy choices
Midwives with their hands tied
THE PERFECT BIRTH ENVIRONMENT
Taboo topics
Yes! Sex!
Chapter 5. Women’s Bodies: Unfit for Purpose?
The broken chain of wisdom
Too much of a stretch?
The evidence maze
Have you had that baby yet?
FINDING THE EVIDENCE
Measuring up
Hands off!
Hands on
Technologised mistrust
Give birth like an adult
Chapter 6. Birth and Culture: ‘Fish can’t see water’
A tale of two bottoms
Bare reality
#birthjusthappened
#birthundisturbed
one born every minute
The gore of childbirth
WHAT IS POSITIVE BIRTH?
#soproud: celebrating new mothers
CELEBRATING YOURSELF POSTNATALLY
Seeing the water
Chapter 7. Birth Rights are Women’s Rights are Human Rights
Free choices?
Birth rights in the zeitgeist
Birth rights for every birth
WHITE RIBBON ALLIANCE: RESPECTFUL MATERNITY CARE CHARTER.[13] THE UNIVERSAL RIGHTS OF CHILDBEARING WOMEN
Woman-centred obstetrics
‘Gone are the days’: the end of medical paternalism?
‘It needed to be finished’
MAKING A COMPLAINT ABOUT YOUR CARE
Having a voice is a privilege
Sing loud like canaries
Stand and Deliver. A letter to pregnant readers
Be an adult
Know you matter
Make plans
Challenge the ‘language of permission’
Know there is no right or wrong way to give birth
Watch out for polarity
Demand the best care you can get
Think of other women too
Resources
Footnotes. CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
Endnotes. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
Cover
Title Page
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Of course, you may actively want a VE, or indeed any other birth intervention. Giving birth like a feminist isn’t about declining everything, it’s about knowing that you can, and the shift in the power dynamic this brings. To use another example, in your sexual relationship, you hopefully know that if you say no to your partner at any point, they will respect your wishes. You may have been with your partner for just a few years, or for decades, and in all that time you might never have said no to them, not once. You might have said yes, yes, YES to everything! But all along, you have known that, if you wanted to say no, you could say it, and be respected. Just think how the power balance of your relationship would change if this fundamental and often unspoken understanding was not in place? And yet this is the exact dynamic in which the majority of Western women give birth.
There is a wider issue of compliance to those in ‘white coats’ that can affect all of us and is not purely a women’s issue. Most of us, male and female, have been conditioned to accept without question that ‘doctor knows best’ and to follow their ‘orders’. However, there is something about being female that makes challenging authority of any kind particularly difficult, perhaps because, as young girls looking around us as we grow, most of ‘authority’ is male. Politicians, lawyers, scientists, doctors, artists, philosophers: the default human-on-a-plinth is almost always male, and we grow up looking up to them and, consciously or unconsciously, absorbing maleness as synonymous with ‘leader’. The feminist campaigner Caroline Criado Perez has tackled this head-on, getting the first statue of a woman – Millicent Fawcett – in Parliament Square, along with Jane Austen commemorated on the new £10 note, but even in the twenty-first century, these are notable exceptions – and it’s worth remembering too that Criado Perez has been vilified in the media[16] and even sent death threats for her activism in this area.
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