Another connection between anti-abortion and anti-midwifery movements

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So I haven’t actually read this book yet, but Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon did a great summation of it for their new book club. I just wanted to share that Leslie Reagan, the author of When Abortion Was a Crime, makes the historical connection between the crackdown on abortion rights and the medical movement to eradicate midwifery in the late 19th century. Shocker!

A more detailed timeline of the history of midwifery in the US.

I promise to explicate if I get around to reading this book, which judging from Amanda’s review seems interesting and does a good job of trying to pull abortion from its “issue silo” (making the connections to other social justice issues). I’m currently reading Female Masculinity by Judith Halberstam, which is really good…

Kick-ass Radical Doulas: The Prison Doula Project

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So I am starting a series called “Kick ass radical doulas.” Periodically I will highlight awesome doula programs or doulas that I learn about or meet, particularly ones that focus on providing doula services to communities of women who REALLY need the support. Like my first group, who works with incarcerated women.

So I’m inaugurating this series with a shout-out to the Birth Attendents, an amazing group of super-radical doulas who provide support to incarcerated women giving birth in Western Washington State. I have had the pleasure of meeting some of these awesome doulas, and I think they typify what it means to be a radical doula. The work they do with incarcerated women (who regularly are shackled during labor and delivery) is truly inspiring. I have the particular pleasure to befriend Christy Hall, who is an awesome radical doula, and was actually the person I had some of my original conversations with about radical doulas.  Meet these awesome women here.

Not only do they run this Prison Doula Project, they also have a community education project:

Our community education project links our vital work inside prisons to the greater issues surrounding incarceration and works toward creating pathways of knowledge for western Washington communities about incarceration and its effects.

Rock on. Want to support these awesome doulas and their work? Then give them some money. Or volunteer.

If you have know any doulas or doula programs that you think I should highlight for this series, email me at radicaldoula@gmail.com.

TV to blame for increased c-section rate?

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I just found this article, in the British newspaper The Independent, that their “Maternity Csar” is placing the blame for Britain’s increasing cesarean section rate on television coverage of birth.

The IoS reported last week that Caesarean sections had risen from 9 per cent of all deliveries in 1980, to nearly 23 per cent by 2004/05, well above the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation of 15 per cent. Ms Lewis’s comments come in the wake of several shows depicting Caesarean sections, including ER and Emmerdale. She said: “I blame TV programmes. Every time, you see a pregnancy on television it seems to go wrong and ends up with a Caesarean section. You never see a woman having a normal delivery.

This is a claim that I have been making for awhile now, and although I cannot really comment on British television, I think this is exceedingly true for US TV, particularly in the wake of the Psuedo-documentary Reality TV boom. There are a number of these medical documentary series, particularly on stations like The Discovery Channel and TLC.

Check out one particularly frightening example:

No wonder women are afraid to give birth. And one last thing, our c-section rate is even worse than the UK, at almost 30%. Thank you reality TV.

New Abortion Technologies=Woman Controlled Care

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Last week was the 51st Annual UN Commission on the Status of Women, being held in New York City. I attended a parallel event to the commission, entitled Abortion Providers Attitudes toward Women, hosted by the Guttmacher Institute, Ipas, Human Rights Watch and Gynuity Health Projects.

It was a great panel, but there was one particular presentation that stuck out for me, and seem to have the most relevance here. Dr. Beverly Winikoff, the President of Gynuity Health Projects gave a talk entitled “Giving Women Choices: Access to New Technologies in Abortion.” I particularly appreciated the logic with which she began her discussion, which focused on the new technologies for “medication abortion” or the abortion pill (aka RU-486). She explained that we need to keep in mind that the technology exists such that presumably all women could simply have a set of pills in their medicine cabinets at home which could be taken if she had a late period, or discovered she was pregnant. She went on to say that it is a complicated and overtly hostile political climate which has prevented this from happening, even five years after the introduction of these abortion options. The nuances of this opposition are interesting, and very related to the pharmaceutical industry as well as provider issues, and even logic that argues that these technologies make abortion too easy.

What I think is interesting about this, and what connects it to the birth activist movement, is its focus on woman-centered care. Actually, this idea is not really woman-centered care, but woman controlled care. Because of such intense barriers and restrictions placed on access to reproductive health care services, particularly in relation to abortion, activists have begun to argue for policies which allow women to decide when to use them—removing the intermediary that is the physician or clinician. We have seen this effort with Emergency Contraception, which has recently been approved for access without a prescription (at least for women over 18). Here we see women taking control and autonomy over their reproductive health, with a possibility of making their own decisions in the privacy of their own home. I see a strong connection between this and the midwifery movement, which works to place the woman at the center of care, and the midwife-woman relationship one based on equality and mutual respect, rather than hierarchy and control.

Obviously there are drawbacks to these modes of access, mainly when the woman may not be seeing a provider at all. Both in the case of EC and the abortion pill, if a woman has had unprotected sex, she may be at risk of exposure to an STI and this necessitates follow up with a health care provider. It’s also easy to see why the anti-choicers are doing whatever they can to stop these technologies from becoming accessible, since that would conflict with their ceaseless fight to win back control of women’s bodies.

Making the connection between pro-choice activists and birth activists

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Lynn Paltrow, the Executive Director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and a pioneer in the reproductive justice field, has a great article in TomPaine today which eloquently clarifies why there needs to be more coalition work between abortion rights activists and birth activists.

Both pro-choice advocates and birthing rights advocates are challenged by decreasing access to services: the former struggles with the fact that 87 percent of all U.S. counties have no abortion providers; the latter struggles against policies at over 300 hospitals around the country that deny women who have previously had c-sections the right to even try delivering vaginally.

And both have been negatively affected by growing claims of “fetal rights.” While these are advanced as part of the campaign to outlaw abortion, they have begun to effect the lives of women who personally identify as “pro-life.” Christian fundamentalists have been told that they must have unnecessary c-sections to protect the rights of the fetus; pregnant women opposed to abortions have been arrested as child abusers in the name of fetal rights for things they did or did not do during pregnancy.

Read the rest of the article here.

Science meets pregnancy, guilt and abortion

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The first thing I want to say about this story in the NY Times, is why the hell was it put in the Fashion and Style section?!?! I hate the way women’s issues get shelved into these sexist categories, especially when they have NOTHING to do with these categories. This article is more about science than anything else. But moving on, it brings up a lot of interesting points about science, pregnancy, motherhood, infertility and abortion.

The article, entitled My Triplets were Inseparable, Whatever the Risks, tells the story of a mother who discovered she was pregnant with triplets after tens of thousands of dollars worth of infertility treatments and years of attempting to get pregnant. They don’t react well to the news, and the doctor recommends they consider “reducing” to one or two fetuses since triplets have such a high risk of complications.

In the end they decide not to reduce, and the pregnancy is as complicated as the doctors had predicted, ending early with the birth of three premature children. Suzanne clearly states her feelings as the two pound babies are born: “I had not kept my babies safe. I had failed as a mother.” She continues, “I was afraid to be involved, to fall in love with my babies. In my mind, science had taken over, and like a mother bird that loses a chick from her nest, my instinct was to stay away, to keep my distance.”

This story mostly draws questions to my mind:

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Plastic Surgery…for your vagina?!?!

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Check out this post at Feministing about the scary prospect of “vaginal rejuvenation” surgeries. Eww. Apparently the Washington Post considers it “Comestic Surgery’s New Frontier.” If this isn’t the final frontier…I don’t want to know what is.

I think the thing that scares me the most about this is how it points to the way our society is really becoming a plastic surgery society–we seem to be willing to go under the knife (even our genitals) at the drop of a hat. Not only are these procedures costly and dangerous…but they are definitely not solving the real problems at hand, which are our over-zealous standards of beauty and our intense focus on physicality.

And to make it even more interesting, there seems to be a relationship between rates of cosmetic surgery and cesarean section rates–best example: Brazil. There, the elective c-section rate is up to 80% (SCARY), even though the WHO recommends a c-section rate of around 10%. Many people speculate that rate has been contributed to by the intense culture of plastic surgery. Maybe that’s the direction in which we’re going…although I personally hope not.

Blog against Sexism Day!

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Blog Against Sexism Day

So, in commemoration of International Women’s Day (which I want to make a plea for us all to have as a holiday–let’s replace Columbus day, come on) it is also Blog Against Sexism Day, or Blog for Gender Liberation. I personally like that title the best, and will interpret it in my own way.

I like the opportunity to bring up this subject, because it’s one of the main reasons I identify as a radical doula. It’s also one of the reasons I pulled back from the midwifery/birth activist community a few years ago. As I got deeper into theories about the social construction of gender and sex (particularly Judith Butler), I started to push back on the rhetoric used by midwives and birth activists about women’s bodies.

How did some of this logic fit into an understanding that the biological difference between men and women is really socially constructed? How do birthing women (and the ability to reproduce) fit in? Butler has some interesting responses to these ideas, which I admit are kind of obtuse and difficult to decipher. But once you get through the intense academic language, there are some important ideas there. Bear with me.

The midwifery/birth activist movement is very heavily based on embracing femininity and the female body, particularly its perceived reproductive capacity, as the necessary center of the movement toward gender equity. This idea is kind of problematic, particularly if you believe that we need to move beyond these perceived biological differences.

Keep reading for more explanation…

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“Drugs, Knives and Midwives”

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Check out this great article by Elizabeth Larson, just published in Utne. It does a good job of giving an overview of the politics of birth in the US today and identifying many of the problems that exist with our current overly medicalized system. She talks about Marsden Wagner’s new book Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First (University of California Press, 2006), which I haven’t read, although I did hear him speak at NAPW’s summit. It also happens to share a title with the documentary that brought me into the birth activist world–I highly recommend it. I dare say it changed my life.

The good thing she does in her article is point out the problems that exist with the polarization of the two birth camps–the highly medicalized OB-GYNs and the anti-medicine midwives. I agree that we need to work on creating birthing options that support women and give them the ability to make informed and supported decisions about their births, regardless of what those decisions might be.

Lesbian parents just as good as straight ones!

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Interesting article in Bay Window’s, a New England LGBT newspaper, about new research about gay and lesbian parenting. Turns out not only are we not worse, we might actually be better!

…Representatives from the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the National Association of Social Workers, and the American Counseling Association to set the record straight with regard to the research on LGBT parenting. Each of the representatives affirmed that the body of credible research on LGBT parenting shows that children raised by two committed LGBT parents develop just as well as their peers raised by married heterosexual parents.

Much of it has been done in response to a campaign by Focus on the Family, who has been taking other researcher’s studies and distorting their findings as proof that children do better when raised by heterosexual parents.

You can check out this website: www.respectmyresearch.org for more information.