‘Birth rape’ is not new
By Danell Swim
March 25, 2008
From what I’ve read of typical hospital birth in the 1900s, I would say that birth trauma used to be commonplace until general anesthesia for vaginal births was finally stopped. In the era of “twilight sleep” women were given drugs (at their request!) to dull the pain and to make them forget the experience. These drugs made the women act like animals, and were routinely tied to their beds. This was also the era of near-100% episiotomy-and-forceps births. Even as twilight sleep went out of fashion and general anesthesia became “the drug of choice,” the intentional (and almost completely unnecessary) cutting of a woman’s genital area and pulling her baby out by the head with cold steel forceps remained. This kind of birth was traumatic, although the women weren’t awake to experience it–they were just left to deal with the pain of the stitches and the discomfort of having their pubic hair grow back in. This is the kind of birth that my mother had, all four times, and she is basically terrified and/or nervous about birth. She has no knowledge of what it was like to give birth, and only knows the pain of labor contractions and the pain of recovery from this artificial way of “giving” birth. There is a term called “body memory” which if I understand it correctly, is the idea that your body remembers what was done to it, even if you were not fully conscious or don’t have a mental memory of it–either because you were knocked out, or the body part was numbed, or you were too young to remember it. The existence of the term makes me wonder about the past generation of women…
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