By Ignangeli Salinas
“The way a culture treats women in birth is a good indicator of how well women and their contributions to society are valued and honored.” – Ina May Gaskin
All around the world, women fight for and defend reproductive rights and healthcare and, essentially, to control their own bodies and experiences. When it comes to this subject, most people think of “reproductive rights as limited to birth control in terms of contraceptives and abortion,but rarely about birth.When you imagine an empowered woman, is she pregnant? Is she a mother? Birth is not usually related to empowerment; it is usually quite the contrary.
When it comes to pregnancy, women do not face only one problem. It’s not only a matter of whether to have the pregnancy or not, it’s also matter of the power women have to decide how to carry out their pregnancy and birth, if they choose to have it. The experience of birth will positively or negatively influence women’s lives. Even if it’s rarely seen that way, birth is also a space that women have to take back.
This week, Philosophy professor Sara Gavrell held the last two of her three ethics-related workshops at UPRM. The workshops consisted of viewing two documentaries, The Business of Being Born on Febuary 16, and Orgasmic Birth: The Best Secret Kept in America last Tuesday, and an open dialogue and discussion about these documentaries last Thursday. These documentaries offer an alternatiev take on pregnancy and childbirth, explained here:
A clip from The Business of Being Born.
1. Pregnant women are not sick
As soon as a woman checks into a hospital to give birth, she is treated as someone who is sick. She is put into a wheelchair and escorted into a private room where she will proceed to be prodded, examined and connected to various uncomfortable equipment. In order to speed up the process, some doctors will inject women with pitocin, which in turn causes an immense amount of pain. To ease this pain, they will later suggest an epidural, which might slow down the process, making more pitocin necessary.
This scenario also makes a C-section, a serious surgery that is rapidly growing in the US and in Puerto Rico, more likely, since pitocin causes distress to the unborn child. As implied in the documentary The Business of Being Born, these drugs are administered for the benefit of the doctor, not the patient, so that they can assist the birth quicker and move on to their next patients. These interventions significantly limit the woman’s participation in the birth process. When women are convinced that they do not know how give birth, and are then submitted to unnecessary and dangerous drugs and procedures, such as pitocin, epidurals and cesareans, the process can be traumatizing. Of course, some women do need medical intervention; however, many experts such as the World Health Organization claim “there is no evidence showing the benefits of caesarean delivery for women or infants who did not require the procedure.”
2. It’s not always painful
In fact, according to Orgasmic Birth, some women even find birth pleasurable! Many women are terrified of birth because of its relation to pain, and who wouldn’t be: it’s often presented as a horror story in movies, tv shows and the media, and even in the stories of women who have had negative experiences (and it’s a no-brainer that pushing a 21-centimeter baby from your vagical canal can be excrutiating). Pain and pleasure, though, can sometimes come hand in hand.
This ABC News clip contains information and footage of women experiencing orgasmic birth. Needless to say, in contains explicit content.
The pain in most cases is present, since it’s responsible for sending signals so that the brain can release necessary hormones to facilitate the birth, especially oxytocin (known as the love hormone) and adrenaline. Yet, these same hormones are also released in the process of sexual intercourse. Also, the child is also coming out of, well, a sexual organ. This is why a relaxed and secure woman, who is experiencing levels of these hormones only acquired during birth, may be able to experience pleasure while giving birth.
3. Giving birth can be an empowering experience
Even if it is painful, it can be wonderful. Knowing you have the power to give birth to a living being, to experience pleasure or to embrace pain, should make a women down right invincible. If she can do that, she can do anything. In Orgasmic Birth, Helen, a woman who suffered sexual abuse as a child and teenager, expresses how the experience transformed her: “I felt myself go away, and this woman who knew how to birth a baby came in. I felt transformed.” But for this experience to happen, a woman has to be confident in herself, she has to have enough information, she has to decide how she wants to do it and if she wants to do it. She has to be in control.
4. It’s her choice
Atabey, the taíno goddess of fertility, is a symbol of how taíno women used to give birth.
Whether a home birth, in a hospital or a cesarean, if the life of the woman or the child is not in major danger, it should be the woman’s informed choice. Sometimes though, women’s choices are not something obstetricians take into account. That’s why women should stand up and demand to have a safe birth, that takes into account their basic needs, not only physical but emotional, to be treated like people, not objects.
While the documentaries are enlightening, they are not a subsitute of advice from a medical professional such as a gynecologist or midwife. If you are curious for more information on alternative or natural birth, contact your medical professional.