RadFemmeFrog 🍁<p>You know what's crazy? I had managed to isolate myself through my work and great friends from so much I had actually forgotten what it was like to be on the receiving end of dehumanizing treatment because I'm a woman. Of all places, I rediscovered this during childbirth. Never in my life have I experienced such a complete lack of respect for women and their bodily autonomy. From a failure to obtain informed consent to procedures, to dismissing concerns, through the willful mismanagement of pain, to treating me as though I'm not even there (by dictating personal texts to another midwife while her fingers were inside me during a contraction), to forgetting to remove a catheter (BC distracted) which led to severe incontinence - I'm absolutely certain if I had been male this wouldn't have happened. The fact that pain is so normalized & even celebrated -and the lack of respect and professionalism came from midwives themselves- absolutely shocks me to this day. </p><p>If you had a great experience with midwives or enjoyed the pain as a right of passage, great. I'm happy for you, if that memory brings you joy. But "no" should be a complete sentence in any context - and the fact it wasn't disgusts me. That I am told to simply be grateful for a healthy child is to say that my experience and trauma (both physical and emotional) doesn't matter. It does. </p><p>If anything good came out of this (besides my beautiful son) it's that I have again picked up the baton of feminism and I am fighting to raise awareness of birth trauma. No women should go through what I did (or worse). Birth is hard enough, we don't need others making it harder - or stripping us of the language to describe our experiences.</p><p> <a href="https://spinster.xyz/tags/birthtrauma" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>birthtrauma</span></a> <a href="https://spinster.xyz/tags/feminism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>feminism</span></a> <a href="https://spinster.xyz/tags/breakthesilence" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>breakthesilence</span></a> </p><p><a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/inside-the-painful-lonely-experience-of-birth-trauma_n_5751a7cae4b0ed593f142c91" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">huffpost.com/entry/inside-the-</span><span class="invisible">painful-lonely-experience-of-birth-trauma_n_5751a7cae4b0ed593f142c91</span></a></p>