Capitalizing on Loss and Risk
When a woman dies in a hospital, there is often a lawsuit or complaint filed, it’s often settled and the documents go quietly into unreadable territory under a confidentiality agreement. Sometimes, a settlement will be offered without a lawsuit. It’s a quickly hushed-up, quieted down thing.
After all, a loss of a mother or baby in a hospital costs the hospital and care provider money via a loss of confidence in both. If the provider themselves is at fault, getting it out of the public eye is the only way to recover.
Strangely enough, there is rarely a public outcry against hospital birth.
Several years ago, a young woman in Florida became a quadraplegic after her birth due to her treatment. We never heard a public outcry against the hospital or questioning it’s procedures or safety. It wasn’t a public inquiry item. Some news stories have cycled but it’s treated more as an “aw, how sad” tragedy than an informative “How to avoid this happening to you” article.
Another young woman, a teacher with a semi-famous football husband, induced for non-medically indicated reasons hemmorhaged and died after the failed induction that resulted in her cesarean.
And then, two teachers from the same elementary school in New Jersey who both died after non-medically indicated cesareans.
I know another young mother whose husband and two girls miss her severely, her birth experiences having a tragic effect on her life.
I’ve read a few news stories that quickly faded from view on these but rarely see an outcry from other obstetricians about all the maternal deaths that are rising due to coerced or physician/hospital-mandated cesareans and unnecesary inductions. Why am I presenting this when the story isn’t about those mothers? So that we even the playing field and don’t pretend that loss doesn’t happen at every level, with every kind of provider. But still, you don’t see publicized maternal mortality boards that explain how to help offset these risks or a dramatic outcry to stop doing these things. What you do see is the March of Dimes promoting lots of research and provoking a public outcry that has only had the effect of encouraging a few select hospital groups to stop doing medically non-indicated cesareans before 39 weeks. Not across the board, mind you, but they want us to be proud of them NOT doing them up to a full two-three WEEKS before many of those babies would normally come.
This is the daily reality of hospital birth in the United States. These women are such a small representative sample of all the women who die on a daily basis, most of whom die from causes that could have been prevented. This is reality. We are killing women with hospital policies, protocols, drugs, interventions. It’s happening. Those women made the choice to go into that hospital and did so without knowing the risks because most of those risks are not even accessible to the public. They aren’t given true informed consent, they aren’t given even an illusion of choice on many things. Their choices are presented as a one-way street with a dead end answer, whatever the doctor wants to do. They don’t feel they are allowed to make other choices. So when a mother makes another choice and something bad happens, it’s played out as “her choices caused this bad thing” when in fact, all pregnant women should face a singular reality:
The minute you become pregnant, you are at risk for death. Your infant is at risk for death. Natural death occurs during pregnancy. It occurs during life. If birth is as safe as life gets, then it’s time we realized that life is 100% fatal. Life is always going to end. Sometimes, the end will be caused by our choices, who we trust, who we don’t trust. Sometimes, the end will come because that is the way life happens. It’s an awful reality but it is reality. We mourn, we cry, we fear, we fight against it, but it happens. What we do in the meantime is try to make the best choices possible to get the outcome that we want.
Right now, there is a family who is facing loss. They are mourning their wife, the mother a child will never know. Is the right thing to do to go after their care providers, their loved ones, their friends, to attack everything about this mother’s choices without even first giving the benefit of the doubt? Someone out there sure thinks so. They think that by capitalizing on this loss, they can cause damage to the cause of homebirth.
Wake up. Women have the right to make choices that take them OUT of the risks of hospital birth. They have the right to not choose to go back under for another cesarean that could easily kill them, either this pregnancy or the next. They have the right to choose to give birth how they want.
Any freedom is worth fighting for. Worth living for. Worth dying for. If I die tomorrow, giving birth to my child, I would rather die in freedom, than in bondage, in slavery to a system that only pretends to save me. I want to make my own choices. I want my children to know that I did. I don’t want them to have to explain to people that I died in a hospital, having a lot of things done to me that I didn’t want done. I don’t intend to turn down medical care that I develop a need for. I never have. Neither did this mother.
Her child lost it’s mother. Now, stop depriving both of them of their dignity by turning her death into a circus.
