Читать книгу Give Birth Like a Feminist - Милли Хилл - Страница 11

Currently we are only just beginning to acknowledge that we have a big, ongoing problem with the way we treat women in our culture, with our collective relationship to their bodies, with our respect for their bodily autonomy, and with consent. We would be foolish to think that women’s experience of maternity care is somehow exempt from this.

Let’s look at vaginal exams (known as VEs). During labour, at regular intervals – usually around every four hours – a midwife or doctor will place fingers inside you and estimate the dilation of your cervix. In this way, the speed with which your body is opening up to allow your baby to be born can be neatly marked on a graph and your progress – or lack of it – can be readily assessed. You may be asked to lie on your back to have the VE, or get out of the birth pool. If there is any kind of ‘hold up’ with your labour, a VE can be a very helpful assessment, but standard practice is to perform VEs routinely, even if labour is patently ‘cracking on’ and there are no concerns for either woman or baby. Some women don’t mind them, some really like knowing their dilation, others find them intrusive, distracting, uncomfortable, or violating. No matter how you feel about them, they are part of a standard package, and you will get them anyway.

The interesting thing about VEs is that they are completely optional – but not a lot of people know this. You would think it would be obvious – of course nobody can put their fingers inside your vagina if you don’t want them to, right? But the majority of women are unaware that they are perfectly entitled to decline. Furthermore, some women report a nagging sense that they are entitled to decline, but are unable to voice their refusal, whereas others do manage to decline but are then either directly or indirectly coerced, for example by being told they cannot be admitted to the ward or use the birth pool unless they comply, or by simply being told they ‘have to’ – which is of course incorrect, as you don’t ‘have to’ allow anything to happen to your body against your wishes. Still others consent to the VE but are told afterwards that the midwife or doctor gave them a ‘sweep’ or broke their waters ‘while they were in there’. Women to whom this happens report finding it extremely violating and yet rarely complain formally about it, perhaps because there is a widespread and unspoken acceptance that maternity care requires you to ‘leave your dignity at the door’ and can at times be violating by its very nature.

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.