Why you should always let doctors cut you open

  A New Jersey court of appeal upheld the court’s decision to take a newborn baby away from her birth parents because the mother refused a caesarean section.

The mother refused the c-section which the doctor recommended because the baby was in distress. In the end the baby was born vaginally and totally healthy.

The baby was taken away immediately after birth and put into foster care.

Because the naughty mum disobeyed her OB and was “combative”, “uncooperative”, “irrational”, and “erratic” (unlike the usual stoic, pliant women in labour) she’s lost custody of her child.

The court used the woman’s psychiatric history as a major factor in the decision. If she hadn’t refused the major abdominal surgery, her past psychiatric care would never have been questioned.

If being a difficult labouring mother means your baby can be taken away in the United States, it’s no wonder there’s a movement of women deciding to give birth at home.

Comments

[mouthyorange]

I've written a comment but I keep getting a message that the site won't accept my data. Let's see if it will accept this.

[mouthyorange]

This is a horrifying story. I didn't know about it, and I'm glad you blogged about it. I think you've got it dead on — what's wrong and why it happened. What the state did here is just so screamingly outrageous.

Many years ago there was a letter or article—I think it was in Toronto's old Broadside feminist paper, which is not to be confused with Antonia Z's blog called Broadsides. I'm not sure I remember correctly, but I think the piece was written by Vicki Van Wagner who has long been involved with midwifery in Ontario. I'm also not sure I remember which of the points I will make here were in that piece, but some of them were.

Many people in the midwifery movement at the time saw the natural process of childbirth as expressing the unequalled and awesome physical life-giving power of women. The points I remember from the piece or inspired by it were:

• that caesarean sections primarily serve the (sub-conscious) cultural purpose of allowing patriarchal society to prevent women from experiencing the fullness of their life-giving power.
• that they enable doctors—OB's were mostly male—to avoid the profoundly sexual nature of feminine life-giving power, which confronts them every time they face a vaginal delivery.
• that they allow doctors to avoid being intimate with the woman. Interacting with a woman's active vulva is a very intimate thing, and as a rule OBs barely know the women whose births they are privileged to attend, as opposed to midwives who develop a relationship with the woman.

This woman's situation, in light of what you've posted about it, sure is intriguing in light of that kind of analysis. Thank you for drawing attention to what happened to her.

P.S. And as for the psychiatric thing, who today hasn't dealt with a psychiatrist for something or other? It's an everyday occurrence, almost. Even if it were rare it's outrageous to use it against her.