Shackling women to their wombs
by David Atkins
Longtime progressive activist and new mother Natasha Chart writes about the inhumanity of demanding that women with unwanted pregnancies “just” have the baby and give it up for adoption.
After describing her experiences buying multiple sets of maternity clothes and almost contracting gestational diabetes, there was this:
I’m sure the last month of pregnancy would have been all kinds of interesting, but I wasn’t going to find out. Friday, May 24th, I had a prenatal checkup where everything seemed fine and my doctor was unconcerned about the weekend train trip my husband and I were taking to New York City. Monday, May 27th, at about 3 am, I suspected that my water had broken. The medical advice line directed me to go to the nearest hospital at once and not to try to get home to Washington, DC.
The doctor in the labor and delivery triage unit doubted that my water had broken because I wasn’t dilated, but an ultrasound confirmed that there was practically no amniotic fluid left around the fetus. They told me that if I didn’t start labor they’d have to induce to prevent infection. They admitted me. I went into labor, and delivered my son about 26 hours after my water broke.
The hospital bill was over $24,000. The anesthesiologist’s bill for the epidural was over $9,000. The presiding obstetrician’s bill was around $4,500. Those are just the bills we’ve seen so far, and we’re lucky that our insurance is going to pick up the majority of it. I do not know the full range of what happens when you get a set of bills like that and you have no health coverage or little to no income, but it can’t possibly be good.
The baby came out face up, which makes for a difficult labor, and had a large head for a six-pound baby that came five weeks early. If someone had wanted me to show up at a job site that week, they would have been out of luck, and I might have been out of a job. Until last week I couldn’t even sit up on a chair without serious medication and I still feel bruised, because why wouldn’t I?
While there are some few people who are up and about like nothing happened just days after a normal vaginal delivery, and some few who have significant birth injuries, it usually takes about six weeks to recover from giving birth if everything goes well. Since there are millions of parents in the United States who can’t even get a day off for the flu, it’s not hard to figure out that birth itself causes a lot of immediate job loss.
To the other option, a nurse I was talking with over the weekend said it took her a month to recover from her c-section to the point where she could even lift her 10-pound son after he was born. They didn’t make the incision large enough, so they still had to vacuum the baby out and she lost 2 liters of blood in the process. She said she wasn’t back to full strength yet, even though it’s been over a year.
Not something I had to go through, but it’s a good reminder that it’s offensive to talk about having a c-section as if it weren’t major abdominal surgery. Like other kinds of surgery, some people recover quickly and well, but some people don’t. It’s monstrous to expect an exceptionally quick healing response from everyone after getting their abdomen cut open and sewn up.
To say, ‘just have the baby,’ is to say, just risk a prolonged illness, surgery, and the loss of your income when you have a lot of new expenses. It’s to tell someone casually that they should sign up for the possibility of experiencing more physical pain and agony than they thought a person could live through, and maybe having a great deal of it continue for days, weeks, months, possibly even years.
But that’s not all. Natasha’s baby has illnesses associated with premature birth as well, involving long and expensive care in NICU. Read the whole thing.
Two points stand out here:
First and foremost, it’s cruel, arbitrary and monstrous to tell any woman that she must simply carry a fetus to term as if it were a mere minor inconvenience. Beyond the mere principle of civil rights and freedom involved, it’s an insult to women that severely underestimates the expense and danger involved in pregnancy. Some pregnancies go very smoothly, but many do not.
Secondly, however, it’s particularly monstrous in the context of a society that does not provide remotely adequate worker protections for pregnancy, childbirth, post-natal care and nursing–for women or men for that matter. To tell women what they can do with their bodies and to underestimate the problems with pregnancy is horrible enough. To do so while failing to provide free universal healthcare and worker protections isn’t just patriarchal and monstrous, but downright punitive.
It’s the result of a sick, twisted culture whose highest priority is punishing women for daring to have sex outside of their husband’s strict jurisdiction. And every culture that places punishing women for being sexual beings ahead of basic human rights should be humbled and brought to heel, with half its population emancipated from the monsters who would shackle them to their wombs.
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