I get frustrated by how women buy lies and totally illogical ones at that, too. The need for approval (I call it the Inner Good Girl henceforth IGG) is so strong in us that most of us would rather be raped than make anyone uncomfortable by being forceful about saying no. We accept interventions we don't want because we don't want to offend complete strangers we'll never see again, and who probably won't even remember our names the following week while we'll remember the pain of the experience for the rest of our lives. Women do this in all areas of their lives, I never see a woman who makes less than nurturing decisions in birth for herself who isn't also making those kinds of decisions for herself in other parts of our lives. It's not like this stuff is isolated to birth, yk? We stay in violent relationships, we abuse our bodies with food and drugs, we have little self esteem or sense of self worth a lot of the time so approval is really important. I think of this stuff every time someone says "Good girl!" to my daughter and breathe a little sigh of relief that we've decided praising is not a tool in our home. For us to admit that we've accepted this shoddy treatment, like say a c/s for no reason at all, means unpacking so many other places in our lives that most of us recoil from it. I see women all the time who ask me how to stop the pain of their birth trauma but then also tell me they can't possibly look at the rest of their lives and what they took to the birth space that made them compliant because it's too painful and scary. Many of us would rather put all our energies into avoidance because the whole foundation of our lives is cracked open if we admit the truth to ourselves. That IGG is like rotting meat many of us drag around. We deny the smell to ourselves and others, and just spray perfume around hoping it will go away but we never actually just cut it off with the knife of our intelligence.
post #21 of 32
10/15/07 at 12:32am
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: Sure I know better but we ran a CBC to shut up DR and well, I am curious....
"Birth is safe" doesn't mean nothing bad ever happens in the best possible environment with the most connected midwife and client, it means that like life, sometimes birth has adverse outcomes. It doesn't make them ok, and we should do all we can to avoid them but sometimes babies die, sometimes women die. We've forgotten that that can happen because we've decided our technology is the ultimate protection. Women sometimes say to me, "I didn't know anyone ever died in birth any more." despite the way the "dead baby card" is constantly bandied about by surgeons who obviously like to paint themselves as the shaman straddling life and death and saving us all from our faulty female bodies. So I can no more lose my faith in birth than I can lose my faith in life, yk?
(Keep me from going on with my fave car analogies but we've all known people who died in cars too but we still drive 'em. No one "loses their faith" in cars despite how many of us die on the roads, hey?)
