Man, where is my head?

Posted on | November 14, 2008 |

I had this great post to link to here, it’s from a midwife’s blog, and it’s a response to a certain Doctor who has a website that professes to be a debate site about homebirth, and somehow through obfuscation and down right lies, hospital birth always wins. You know the one, dear reader ;o) I won’t post it here. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, trust me it sucks and though you’re probably curious, don’t google for it. Googling just makes it stronger.

Anyway, the post I’m looking for is a response to that site, and is a collected list of many terrible, rude, abusive things that have been said to women while giving birth. I stored the link away for a rainy day and now I can’t find it!

As my Mother-In-Law would remind me, it’s proven that my pregnant brain is just getting smaller ;o)
Hi MIL! Thanks for reading my blog!

SO, if anyone reading here today knows where to find that link, can you post it please?

xox,
Heather

Category: talk talk talk

Comments

13 Responses to “Man, where is my head?”

Mother in Law
November 14th, 2008 @ 10:43 am

Hi Daughter in Law!
Don’t worry - your brain will go back to normal size after the birth! Thanks for mentioning me on your website and thanks for having #4
Love
Suzanne
Sora
November 14th, 2008 @ 11:12 am

http://observantmidwife.blogspot.com/2006/05/oh-homebirth-debate-blog.html
Rixa
November 14th, 2008 @ 11:41 am

http://observantmidwife.blogspot.com/2006/05/oh-homebirth-debate-blog.html
Jenny Islander
November 14th, 2008 @ 12:16 pm

I don’t know if I can read all the way to the end of that blog. I’m a quarter of the way down and so angry I am shaking. I am so, so grateful that I was able to have both of my babies at home! The crap I had to go through when the placenta for no. 1 was slow enough in coming that the midwife advised me to check into the hospital before it was pulled out, just in case it was attached–you would have thought I had showed up drunk, raving, and encrusted with feces, my midwife was some kind of feebleminded backwoods Peacock, and my husband was a trained gorilla the way they treated us. And they instantly assumed that my bouncing, vigorously healthy baby had to be watched in case she would suddenly die because she had been born (gasp!!) in her parents’ bed. My husband is a very gentle man who would never, ever offer violence to a woman, but he was just about ready to pick that little bully of a nurse up and chuck her into the medical waste disposal unit.

Quick summary of the state of medicalized birth in this country: A woman in labor is not sick, injured, or shell-shocked. But by the time she goes through a typical medicalized birth, she often has two out of three.
Northwoods Baby
November 14th, 2008 @ 5:35 pm

I hate that doctor and I want to shove my two homebirth babies (one just this Wednesday!) under her rat nose and shriek. I may be a bit hormonal…
Anne T
November 15th, 2008 @ 8:21 am

This was all very well put. I am trying to figure out the best way to share this with Moms in their 1st pregnancy. Afterwards it all makes total sense but how do you get potential Moms and Dads to see this all from the get go?

They’ll just think you’re “crazy”, right? They still trust ALL doctors.
Wiffersnapper
November 15th, 2008 @ 8:21 pm

I couldn’t finish reading that blog either! What I have to wonder is- how did the women in this country get so brainwashed that we just cheerfully accept everything that doctors tell us? This, “Yes, Doctor, whatever you say!” mentality has GOT to GO!!
Lori
November 16th, 2008 @ 8:29 am

“What I have to wonder is- how did the women in this country get so brainwashed that we just cheerfully accept everything that doctors tell us?”

Well when we’re born a doctor told our mothers to hand us over to be tortured. Then the doctors told them they were bad parents if they didn’t starve, beat and ignore us. So eventually we cried ourselves out of any ability to believe we were beings with value and the feeling of misery, loneliness and conditioned helplessness became normal for us.
Then once you accept something as normal you strive to get there. Because you can’t feel “content” if you don’t feel the way you did when you were an infant.
Tina
November 16th, 2008 @ 1:15 pm

Hi Heather, I cannot find an email link for you so I’m sorry for putting this in a reply to an unrelated topic. One of the women in one of the homeschooling groups I belong to informed us of an ad that Motrin has on their website, http://www.motrin.com/ in which they are painting wearing your baby in an unfavorable light (specificially that it causes body aches and pains, however their language is unflattering). I just wanted to let you know, I’m going to see if I can find a contact link on their page and let them know how I feel about it. The commercial is currently right on their front page, advertised as “Mom-alogue”. I don’t know if this commercial has aired on television.
admin
November 17th, 2008 @ 11:50 am

Hi Tina,
thanks for sending the link to Motrin…
http://blogs.forbes.com/sciencebizblog/2008/11/twitter-moms-si.html

Looks like moms win this one!
xox,
Heather
April Dawn
November 17th, 2008 @ 12:21 pm

Interesting discussion about that Doctor and her credentials or lack of. http://www.lamaze.org/NormalBirthForum/tabid/363/view/topic/forumid/5/postid/1082/Default.aspx
soulgasm
November 19th, 2008 @ 9:03 am

Hey! The Motrin ad has been replaced by an apology! Nice work!
AnnieMcPhee
November 30th, 2008 @ 4:54 am

That homebirth “debate” thing - uh, yeah. There’s no debate, just a litany of how horribly bad homebirth is, and she goes all over the net doing that act. Ugh.

And that navelgazing site - pretty potent stuff. It brings up every bad memory of every nasty thing said and done to me (and others around me) during both my births. The only thing I can say is that during the first when the nurse was busily stretching me with her fingers it hurt and I told her to stop - she protested, saying she was helping, but she wasn’t nasty about it and she did stop. During an exam by the doctor during the second, it hurt and I asked her to stop, she said “I have to see where you are” and I yelled Doctor, PLEASE! Then she stopped, at least. That is pretty much the only two things I can note where at least they listened when I begged them not to do something that hurt. Everything else was pretty much all bad from the perspective of how the doctors and nurses treated me - some of it was outright torture. Hm. Makes me almost want to write about it all and post it somewhere because so much of it was so unnecessary and so heartless (like I say not just to me but to women laboring around me) and so terrible, and that site really brings it all up. Those of you who got pregnant a little later than me when homebirthing was a little more accepted, be glad, and I’m very very happy you had the strength to go through with it. Considering the relative ease of my births I would have been a really good candidate for home birth and it would have been infinitely nicer. (I did try with my second, but not hard enough I guess.) Nothing about the actual births was particularly unbearably painful, especially once the pushing started. Except things they did. Like cutting and stitching and other things worse. Jeez, it’s ridiculous when you think about it all!