Australian Blog Weighs in on Caesarean Death Rate
By Danell Swim
April 7, 2008
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: No discussion of reproductive justice is complete without attention to birthing and birthing care.
A blithe, shallow, naive focus on “reproductive choice” is not enough. We don’t have free choice in birthing care right now, and there’s no point in pretending that we do.
Truly free choices are almost impossible within a societal and medical patriarchy in which birthing is considered a stupendously dangerous, messy, primitive, terrifying process which must be timed and controlled and scrutineered and interfered with in the normal course of things. Woman don’t have free choice when they’re being coerced, threatened with court orders, restrained and railroaded into “active management” of birth and surgical procedures. Women don’t have free choice when the “dead baby card” is being simplistically played, over and over, whenever they raise questions about the necessity of interventions - while risk to the woman and fetus/infant from interventions is dismissed or ignored. Women will not have free choice so long as medical unions collude with government to marginalise and suppress midwifery care. Women don’t have free choice when a standard-issue hospital birth is the only birth they can access or afford. And women don’t have free choice when they know that any mention of medical rapes[link trigger warning] will only be met with shocked silences, hasty lectures about how they should be grateful for their baby, and referrals for ‘counselling’.
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so sad…and so true. And not just in Australia either.