In the booklet Listen: your baby’s life before birth, which I received as part of a pack of free samples from various companies, there’s a page devoted to the way hormones cross the placenta, allowing the unborn child to experience, in its own way, the mother’s emotional reactions. It goes on to warn:
Repeated maternal stress should always be avoided during pregnancy, as it may alter the baby’s patterns of sleep and activity on a permanent basis.
That passive construction makes me suspicious. Who’s responsible for avoiding maternal stress? Is it simply saying that we should, as a society, avoid putting pregnant women under too much stress? I could heartily endorse that position. Or is it suggesting that pregnant women, along with everything else we expect of them, have a responsibility to their unborn babies not to get stressed out?
The second half of the sentence isn’t promising either. In my experience of repeated maternal stress, the baby’s sleep patterns are the smallest problem. Stress can make a pregnant women vulnerable to all kinds of health niggles, some of which can turn into serious health problems if they’re not picked up. Stress can lead to depression, to lack of interest in preparations for the baby’s arrival, to dark thoughts of whether it’s too late for abortion. Repeated maternal stress should be avoided because it’s bad for the mother, not just because it could be bad for the baby.
Before I was pregnant, I thought “woman, what woman?” was an attitude held only by fairly extreme pro-lifers who had never come into contact with a pregnant woman in all their sheltered lives. But to my surprise, I keep seeing a very similar attitude from people who provide health care to pregnant women on a daily basis. They talk to me, they look me in the eye, they ask me how I am, but under the surface, I get a distinct impression that they see me as an incubator. The baby is all that matters.
My health visitor – a trained midwife charged with making sure new families have all the support they need – asked me during a routine check-up whether I was eating well. I replied that I was doing my best – a flared-up infection had left me with a low fever, aching joints and no desire to do anything but sleep, and had disrupted my eating patterns for a few days – and got a lecture about how my best wasn’t good enough. I had to eat a perfectly healthy diet at all times because the baby needs nutrients.
A pregnant woman needs to eat well for her own sake, not just the baby’s. Iron-deficiency anaemia is especially common in pregnancy, and makes any tired, lethargic feelings even worse. More seriously, if her diet doesn’t supply enough calcium for her needs and the baby’s, Mother Nature harshly dictates that the baby comes first. If the price of strong bones for the little one is erosion of the mother’s teeth, too bad for the mother’s teeth.
Why didn’t my health visitor remind me of these health issues? Why did she concentrate instead on the harm an inadequate diet could do my baby? I think the answer lies in a belief that goes deep in our society: a pregnant woman is a womb first and a human being second. Because I’ve chosen to have this baby, many people assume I’ve also chosen to put my personality to one side for at least nine months and think about nothing but the baby, all day and all night.
Sometimes I do put the baby’s needs before my own wishes – when I switch to orange juice after the first beer rather than run the risk of damaging the baby with my pre-pregnancy alcohol consumption, for instance. And sometimes, knowing I’m helping my baby as well as myself gives me the courage to stand up for things I wouldn’t otherwise stand up for. But other times, I’m just myself; the same self I was before I was pregnant. I oversleep and skip breakfast. I walk a couple of miles to take in a football match. I grieve for the bits of my past that didn’t stop hurting just because I have a new life inside me.
I don’t believe I’m unusual in any of this. I guess most women who are pregnant by choice and looking forward to having the baby will want to do the best they can for their child, but I don’t imagine anyone can support nine months of being nothing but an incubator. We all have to balance the baby’s needs against our own – “Yes, it’s better for the baby if I eat wholesome, home-cooked meals, but tonight I’m too shattered to do anything but shove a frozen pizza in the oven” – and sometimes the balance we strike won’t be easy for onlookers to understand.
Women’s choices – especially when it comes to motherhood – come under intense scrutiny from society. I feel as if I need to defend myself against the charges of skipping breakfast, thereby depriving my baby of vital nutrients; of letting myself get stressed, thereby disrupting my baby’s sleep patterns; of being unfit to be pregnant in the first place, thereby forcing my baby to develop in a sub-standard womb. The world throws advice at me from all sides, and I have neither the experience nor the confidence to sort out the vital from the trivial. I defer to the greater experience of medical professionals, but they invariably err on the side of protecting the baby from every possible harm.
In the early days of my pregnancy, I became concerned that the vitamin C tablets I was taking for my own health and comfort had an advisory on the packaging that they shouldn’t be taken during pregnancy without medical advice. I checked with my doctor; he told me not to take them. He couldn’t point to any specific danger to the baby, but there was “no point” in taking them. He could have informed me of the risks and allowed me to decide for myself whether the benefits outweighed them, but he didn’t.
Treating pregnant women as incubators with no needs or wishes of their own isn’t just anti-feminist, it’s probably also counter-productive. If the medical establishment doesn’t seem interested in meeting my needs, I’m going to start trusting it less. This is fine if I can simultaneously develop my own robust sense of what risks are acceptable – like my mother, who by her fourth child had a very good idea of how much alcohol she could safely consume during pregnancy – but I could all too easily come to dangerously wrong conclusions. Disregarding the advice that there’s no point taking vitamin C probably won’t do much harm; disregarding the advice that headaches and blurred vision are grounds for an immediate trip to the hospital could be fatal to mother and child.
Pregnant women are as capable of making their own decisions as any other segment of the population. We know what’s right for us, and if we’re given enough information, we can co-ordinate that with what’s right for our babies and strike a balance. But society – and given my defensiveness I’m inclined to consider myself part of the problem – needs to stop brushing our needs aside as trivial and start trusting us to make those decisions.
Nick: I’m considering the advice you got on vitamin C. The standard dogma in medicine is that pregnant women shouldn’t take any medications they don’t absolutely need because our knowledge of what medications are safe for a pregnant woman and her fetus and what aren’t is sorely lacking. (This is at least partly because no drug company is willing to do clinical trials on pregnant women: think of the lawsuit if the drug in question turned out not to be safe, so we rely on anecdotal evidence and retrospective studies.) If your ob had said something like “I don’t know of any particular problem, but the safest thing to do would be to not take the vit C if you don’t absolutely feel you need it” and maybe given some of the background information as to why most obs are going to advise you to take as few medications as possible, would you have felt less like he was thinking of you as an incubator?
BTW: Don’t take excess vitamin A. That can definitely do damage to the fetus. (Although vegetables with high vit A content are safe because what they contain is an inactive form which the body only turns on as needed. So don’t do what I did when I was pregnant, which was eat a package of carrots and then get freaked out by the nutrition information showing that I’d just eatern 300% RDA of vit A. One panicked phone call to the midwife later I found out that it was perfectly safe. I should have known already, but…)
If your ob had said something like “I don’t know of any particular problem, but the safest thing to do would be to not take the vit C if you don’t absolutely feel you need it” and maybe given some of the background information as to why most obs are going to advise you to take as few medications as possible, would you have felt less like he was thinking of you as an incubator?
Yeah, if he’d explained, and especially if he’d asked why I felt like I should be taking vitamin C anyway, we might have got somewhere. But the vibe I got was “Don’t do it; it’s bad for the baby and that’s all that matters.”
I have my own vitamin A horror story: I went away for a couple of days and forgot to take my folic acid tablets. Rather than spend the money on another bottle which I certainly wouldn’t use, I started popping multivitamins that contained folic acid. Only after I’d been taking them for a couple of days did I realise they also contained vitamin A and I wasn’t supposed to have too much…
Seems to me like one of the bonuses of being pregnant would be the numerous opportunities to encounter people who treat one like an incubator, and tell them to fuck themselves, on the way to hell, whilst simultaneously shoving their attitudes (sharp corners out) up their asses. But then I’m confrontational and not very maternal; you probably have better bonuses, Nick, than I am able to consider.
It bears pointing out (you started to in your post) that while these attitudes are bad for women who *want* to be pregnant, it is rather worse, insult added to injury, for women who don’t want to be. And it is somewhere rather in the middle for women who hate being pregnant but tolerate it because they want a baby, like I’m probably going to be if I ever decide to have a child of my own.
Bingo!
Nick, this is right on the money. Not only is the mother converted into a walking womb, but all baby advice immediately becomes the most conservative possible.
Spewing fluids out of every available orifice and becoming dehydrated? Can’t take medication, it might hurt the baby. But as soon as the dehydration starts causing contractions? Hook her up to a monitor (So handy when you’re running for the bathroom every 10 minutes), and a giant-size IV. (Equally handy), and give her not just the one medication she was asking for earlier, but two others to combat the contractions, that she probably wouldn’t be having if you’d let her have the first one when she called in!
This happened in my first pregnancy. My doctor successfully converted a minor stomach bug into an overnight hospital stay with massive discomfort and inconvenience. All because we can’t treat the mother, unless not treating her will hurt the baby.
It’s frustrating in the extreme, and it’s everywhere.
Very true–and similar to what I experienced in my first pregnancy.
But once I developed severe pre-eclampsia–a disease that tried to kill me (and required that I terminate my much-desired pregnancy at 22 weeks)–it all changed.
Now that I’m trying to get pregnant again (currently pregnant until proven otherwise), most of the care I’m getting is all geared toward me and my health–screening me for clotting disorders, changing my diet to better moderate my fluid levels and overall health. Recommending I swim regularly as that can help balance body fluid as well. That sort of thing. While the potential fetus’s health is considered, the primary concern for this possible pregnancy is that I remain healthy (I do have a wonderful–male–OB).
It’s a very different experience.
So I guess in order to NOT be treated as an incubator, you need to develope a life-threatening condition that puts only YOU at risk, and NOT the baby (at least not directly).
Kyra: When I was 9 months pregnant and frankly waddling, I used to get cheap giggles out of people asking when the baby was due. I used to look at them in horror and say “Oh, my god, I do look pregnant, don’t I?” I found the responses amusing, but then again I always have had a rather low sense of humor. (This response also works for getting rid of unwanted advisors. My other response to unwanted advice tended to be to ask the advisor to give me a reference for the wisdom they were spouting. Then criticizing it. Most people seemed to prefer that I go with the tasteless jokes.)
Nick – You will be fine. Your body will do what it will do, your baby will do what it will do and you will deal. You are a strong woman and you can do what you need to do. You are not alone, no matter that you alone are carrying this baby. You will be a fine mother and your baby will love you. You will smile alot.
I wish someone had said the above to me when i was pregnant the first time!
I mean what I say, and I say what I mean. I know what I’m talking about.
a hug, then a BIG hug,
stacy
I’m also a midwife, and it is imperative for midwives and OBs to always remember that they are working with TWO patients, not just one. I don’t want to sound judgemental, but there is no excuse for “skipping over” the fact that a woman has been sick for days.
I think a part of the problem is the paternalistic viewpoint that is present in medical education, and another problem is the assembly-line mentality of most prenatal care settings. It’s hard to get to know a woman and feel her humanity during a 5-10 minute examination, especially if the woman doesn’t see the same practitioner at every visit.
I come from the nature-muffin, home-birth camp, so I was taught to spend much more time (like an hour or so) on each prenatal, discussing anything and everything that the mother has concerns about. We see childbearing as an opportunity for female empowerment and all that hippy stuff, so the mother’s physical, psychological, and emotional state are vitally important to us.
A possible explanation for the attitude is that they assume you are more likely to make changes for another person’s benefit (the baby’s) than for your own, therefore they motivate you by mentioning how it affects the baby’s health.
Ain’t it lovely how the warning labels on the medication tell you that “pregnant women should consult a doctor before taking this” and then the doctor doesn’t have anything useful to say? It’s easier to look up the potential risks of the medication on your own, online, and then make balance the risks yourself.
A ploy I’ve thought of is that you might get better results (than “don’t take this you’ll put the baby at risk!”) if you ask from a perspective other than that of a pregnant woman who wants to take a medication. Pretend you’re in college and doing a research paper, for example (over the phone if you’re visibly pregnant), and ask about the documented side effects and risks of such-and-such medication when taken during pregnancy. Get percentages, other factors that increase or decrease the risk of side effects, and of course the info you’d need to cite them as a source on your fictional paper. I’d imagine doctors tend to think of intellectually-curious medical students as more capable of making use of raw data than pregnant women, i.e. medical students will become medical personnel who will need to do the thinking and decision-making for pregnant women who need to be told what to do so they don’t risk harming their baby by trying to think through the medical aspects of pregnancy for themselves. Especially since their perspectives are skewed—they might put too much weight on their own discomfort and not understand that the baby’s utter freedom from any tiny chance of side effects is more important than their little migraines and back pain and whatnot.
Ugh. I *hate* arrogant medical personnel. And pharmacists. And insurance companies. All these people who as a unit influence society to *make* us dependent on them, and then feel free to be condescending, useless, controlling, and counterproductive. Anybody else heard that the insurance companies down in New Orleans have reclassified the hurricane damage as flood damage? Because floods, unlike hurricanes, are not covered under normal insurance plans; you have to buy it separately and in advance (several months in advance, I believe), and therefore most people (especially the poor) don’t have flood insurance, and the insurance companies are saving themselves a fucking bundle by being able to not pay for most of the New Orleans insurance claims.
Nick: oh how I hear you. And it goes the other way, too, sometimes; one of my midwives kept urging me to take evening primrose oil, despite the fact that I wasn’t even due yet, and that there are no reliable studies (as I found on my own) proving that it does help or hasten labor. I had to tell her look, I don’t take extra meds without good reason, herbal or not.
And I did, early in pregnancy, decide to take some very mild cold medicines when I got ill, after doing lots of research; my doc said “don’t take anything” but not being able to breathe when I lay down was seriously hurting my health. I know he was probably just concerned about a lawsuit if something went wrong, anyway.
And I have thoroughly enjoyed my morning caffeine fix all the way through pregnancy, after learning that studies showing effects on mice fetuses were dealing with the equivalent of 12 cups of coffee a day. Which amount I had never consumed in my life.
I’ve even had to tell my husband, when he said I needed to do X for the baby, that, excuse me, it’s for ME as well. I’m not just a flowerpot over here.
Kyra: “It’s easier to look up the potential risks of the medication on your own, online, and then make balance the risks yourself. ”
Just make sure your source of information is reliable. There’s a lot of crap out there on the internet (like anywhere else). Medline and the NIH are reasonable places to start, though neither, of course, contains The Truth and All the Truth.
I will point out that many first-time mothers have NO clue about pregnancy nutrition or even about child nutrition, and if the visiting nurse does a lot of public health low income visits, the nurse has learned never to take anything for granted. There are plenty of pregnant women who think sodas and chips are sufficient diet, plenty of pregnant women who think it is good to diet or to not gain weight during pregnancy, and plenty of new mothers who think it is ok to give infants soda pop. It may also be that the visiting nurse doesn’t know what to make of your gender presentation and is talking to you as she would a man assumed by dint of gender to be completely clueless about pregnancy.
I always thought that they did this based on the assumption that the pregnant woman herself valued the fetus’s health first and foremost, so they would care more about information about the effect on their child-to-be much than the obvious “don’t get stressed because you don’t enjoy stress / do something about anemia because anemia makes you feel crummy.”
Not quite that the doctor only cares about the baby, but that the doctor thinks the woman mostly cares about the baby and/or already understands how such-and-such might affect their own self.
Of course, that assumption is a pretty big one.
And of course there is always the self-protection reason for attempting to keep the mother in line for the sake of the infant. Medical professionals who deliver babies pay significantly more in medical malpractice insurance than almost any other specialty. People who give birth to dead or medically involve infants tend to be much more aggressive with the malpractice suits.
Maybe I just had exemplary experiences; but I never felt that the fetus was the primary interest of my physicians during my three preganancies. I had different doctors, all men, and they appeared very solicitous of my physical and emotional well being. Different people have different experiences and different perceptions of those experiences.
I hear ya on the incubator thing. Maybe you can tell all the people that bug you that “stress is bad for the baby, and you’re stressing me out. So bug off!” ^_^
On a more serious note, I’ve felt a bit of sexism back in my old country, but then I come to the country where the Feminism is supposed to have made GREAT STEPS! and it’s like, where? And woman’s health is really put on the back burner as far as priorities go. I’m glad I did not have to give birth to my son, but I shudder to think what would I do when I do decide to take the plunge eventually.
Good luck, and hope everything goes well for you and the baby. But remember, you can’t take care of the baby is you don’t take care of yourself.
It’s funny how people romanitcize the uterus. Hell, it’s pretty funny that I just said that. But the womb has long been regarded as an Edenic haven to which we all long to return. That’s obviously not possible, and neither is it possible to entirely shelter one’s offspring from that less-than-ideal thing we call reality, not even when the little parasite is tucked away in one of your internal organs. Yes, parents are responsible for their children, but it’s unrealistic and damaging to think that we can or should “protect” our children from reality. From pregnancy on out, I think a parent who has a life outside her child is a happier parent, and I think a child who is raised to one day be able to navigate reality on her own will be happier as well. That said, I now have to go devote all my attention to my teething, screaming, fifteen-month-old daughter, so I hope my reply doesn’t vanish in a puff of logic!
Huge quantities of Vitamin C can occasionally cause abortion… but moderate doses don’t, to my knowledge, unless there’s something else wrong anyways.
But, seriously – I got chewed out once for not being able to eat three squares a day with my first child (twenty-five weeks of morning sickness really did my appetite in). I pointed out that I grazed – it wasn’t good enough.
Women get saddled with everyone else’s expectations and then get guilt-tripped for not living up to them. I’ve found the people who do this the most often are usually not parents themselves, or had their kids long, long ago.
Seriously – if you feel healthy, if you aren’t running into any health problems, and you eat and drink enough that you don’t feel ill – you’re fine, in my book.
I was lucky enough this time around to have a doctor who didn’t push or nag, and gave me credit for my first two kids (both of whom turned out beautifully) by telling me straight out that she figured I knew everything, and that I woudl ask if I needed to.
I appreciated it.
Heh – Dianne – I had my own version of that when I was 9+ months pregnant (both of my pregnancies ran over and I get BIG). When someone would ask me when I was due, I would look over innocently and say “Last Saturday”, very casually (and truthfully). Much amusement was had watching various people fall all over themselves with every twitch I made, sure I was going to pop out a baby on the spot!
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I had two totally divergent pregnancy experiences. The first, which was medicalized all the way, in spite of my best efforts at doing things more naturally, was more along the lines of Nick’s incubator experience. It was a horrible and traumatic experience, and the birth itself felt like rape.
I wised up the second time around and found a homebirth midwife. She spent an hour with me every visit JUST TALKING. And talking about ME and MY EMOTIONAL ISSUES, only talking about the baby when I brought it up. It was wonderful, and I did a lot of healing during my pregnancy. The birth itself was absolutely wonderful and empowering and really a powerful endcap to the healing process.
I just wish homebirth and midwifery was more supported in general.
If mom isn’t happy and well-cared for, the baby isn’t happy and well-cared for. Take care of mom (before and after birth), and mom will be able to take care of the baby. (Common sense, in my book).
It is facinating that someone on a “progressive” Blog would wonder why a midwife or OB would care more about someone who cannot look after his or herself than one of the two people who should be looking out for the child’s well-being. Every other time it is the end all be all for society to take protect the unprotected.
That being said — if you remember that women have given birth for thousands of years without the bull-shit of Dr. Spock and his spawn of quacks that masqurade as the middle aged housemom’s down the street (you know the one’s whose son just stole the car and whose 13 y.o. daughter is giving blowjobs behind the bleachers). I have just told them to fuck off — they are idiots and their kids are gonna end up drug mules on meth.
JT—we’re complaining about being overlooked, about being treated like we’re less important than what’s inside us. The person that “can’t look after itself” is being looked after, is being supported, already—barring major complications with the pregnancy. In a normal pregnancy, it has everything it needs provided to it automatically. Meanwhile, the person who is “supposed to be looking out for it” has that responsibility to deal with, and it’s a physically demanding one, in addition to other aspects of life, other stresses and demands, that the fetus doesn’t have. The fetus is on easy street—it doesn’t need to be cared for more by the OB-GYN, beyond making sure things are proceeding properly. Rather the mother, who is *working* to provide fully for the fetus, and isn’t completely shielded from real life, should be cared for more.
While it’s true the fetus can’t look after itself, it also is not consciously dealing with physical and emotional demands on its body. It just sits there and grows; it is *being* *supported* completely, rather than doing the supporting. When the fetus is at any given time *much* better off (all its needs provided, no exertion or demands on its body) than the mother (has to fulfill her own needs, keep up with the rest of her life’s demands, and provide full life support for the fetus), it is not unreasonable to put the woman first—the supporter before the moocher. Especially when she’s the only one who can tell the difference—the fetus doesn’t know whether the mother’s eating right for it or for herself. The feelings of being cared for as a person or dismissed as an incubator are something only the mother can feel.
The people we’re complaining about are completely overlooking pregnant women as people with needs of their own. People whose advice says “no pain or inconvenience is too great for a woman to suffer in order that her fetus can avoid even the tiniest of disadvantages.” People who act as if a woman’s health and comfort aren’t worth the effort, unless they’re a side effect of perfectly catering to the baby in the belly.
When someone is told that another person is worth more than they are, we usually call that discrimination. OF COURSE we’re offended.
“The people we’re complaining about are completely overlooking pregnant women as people with needs of their own. People whose advice says “no pain or inconvenience is too great for a woman to suffer in order that her fetus can avoid even the tiniest of disadvantages.” People who act as if a woman’s health and comfort aren’t worth the effort, unless they’re a side effect of perfectly catering to the baby in the belly.”
I completely agree with that contention. I have seen the person who gives their unsolicited opinion and recommendations to pregnant moms. That is extremely insensitive to that mother, who is going through great sacrafice to fullfill our main duty as human beings — the duty to ensure we do not voluntarily extinguish ourselves. I don’t think it is that they believe the mother’s health has no worth.
It seemed the problem was that the mother was perceived as an incubator and not a mother with a responsibility to her child. People who care only about the child are rare and perhaps only gravitate to Nick. For the most part, mothers are treated with the utmost respect and I am sure when someone asks “how are you doing?” it is out of genuine empathy for someone who is carrying around 30 extra lbs, perpetual PMS symptoms, can’t tie her own shoes, swells like a helium balloon at 10K ft, and is about to “shit a watermelon” for the good of the human race. I may be off the mark, but I find it hard to believe people are that mean-spirited to not give a damn about the mother, as the people Nick is explaining (or perceiving). But, I may just live in the area of town that care about mom and her well-being. Granted, the moms I know thought they were treated like royalty, by their significant other, when they were pregnant. I am sure there is some sinister and manipulative reason for treating someone nice that the cynical can contrive.
Your comments about being perceived as an incubator really struck home for me. I remember when I was pregnant with my second child, asking my husband not to tell anyone I was pregnant until it became self-evident (I tend not to “show” until about 7 months or so). I just hated the idea of being seen as only a pregnant woman and not as a person in my own right. (infuriatingly, he secretly broke his promise and told his mother, who then told everyone else. I have not quite forgiven him, though it was 13 years ago). I think–and this is based on my own perceptions of other pregnant women, much as I dislike this about myself–that we all tend to be so fascinated with the pregnancy, the visible and invisible aspects of it, that we no longer really notice the woman. By virtue of being visibly pregnant, women seem to stop being perceived as individuals and the idea of them as being walking incubators takes over. All anyone wants to know about is the baby. Nine months is a long time to go being viewed and treated that way.
I remember with my first pregnancy, not really feeling bonded to this “thing” inside me (it didn’t seem real to me yet that this would be a person someday) and at times feeling unhappy and resentful that I was expected to put this baby’s needs and safety and comfort before my own. It seems I was expected to want to undergo anything–bed rest, induction of labor–just in case it would be beneficial to the fetus. When I gave birth, my first feeling was not “Oh, let me see the little darling!” but, “Wow, finally, a flat stomach again!” It takes time and experience to develop a “maternal” bond.
With my second child I avoided a lot of the similar problem of being cast as a “patient” and a “sick person” by simply avoiding doctors. I have training as a lay midwife, had already given birth once, and felt competent to have my daughter at home with no one else around but my husband. It was great.
It seemed the problem was that the mother was perceived as an incubator and not a mother with a responsibility to her child. People who care only about the child are rare and perhaps only gravitate to Nick.
Is the weather nice on your planet? ;)
Generally speaking, when a woman gets pregnant she immediately becomes viewed differently. She is not a “person” or even a “pregnant person“, she is a “mother, a “pregnant mother”, or a “mom”. She becomes defined by what is growing inside of her. She is referred to not as a woman, but as “the mother”. Even folks who agree with Nick have done it on this thread. Ever watch people interact with pregnant women? The woman might as well not even be there. It’s like her IQ drops suddenly when she gets pregnant and the further along she gets the more it drops. People don’t talk to “her” when asking about the pregnancy, they talk to her belly. They lean in and ask in a sing-song voice “How are you and Mommy doing?”. If she is with someone, they chat for a minute then ask whoever is with her “How is she doing?”. Strangers feel comfortable touching her stomach without permission. They suddenly feel it’s OK to criticize or try to correct any behavior they feel is bad for “baby”. And the sad part is most of these folks are very well meaning. If you pointed out to them that they just treated a woman like a walking womb, they would be shocked. Because they didn’t mean any harm, they were just worried about the “baby”.
Contrast jstevenson’s views on how mean-spiritedness is all in Nick’s head with his own charming sentiments in paragraph two of post #23.
The laughs just keep coming, and the week isn’t even over yet.
People don’t talk to “her” when asking about the pregnancy, they talk to her belly. They lean in and ask in a sing-song voice “How are you and Mommy doing?”.
Ewww! Thankfully, that’s one experience I’ve been spared, although random people I hardly know appear to think an acceptable way to enquire about the progress of the pregnancy is to ask “How’s everything?” while patting my stomach.
Did your doctor check on how much vitamin C you were taking? Stopping megadose levels of C can give you scurvy. (Source of information: I read about this somewhere, and then found it had happened to a friend.)
You might be interested in a book called _Mother Nature_–it’s about how mothering works in the real world where mothers (both human and animal) have to balance a child’s interests with their own interests and those of their other children.
Nick: although random people I hardly know appear to think an acceptable way to enquire about the progress of the pregnancy is to ask “How’s everything?” while patting my stomach.
My view is that a stranger’s right to be treated with courtesy ends the instant they lay hands on me without my permission…
Ya know, I hear this all the time about complete strangers patting or rubbing pregnant bellies, and it never happened to me. I’m eternally grateful I never had to deal with that.
On the other hand, because of the way I carried both times, I looked as if I was ready to pop out twins at any instant from about 6 months on, so maybe they were afraid they would precipitate the blessed event if they did touch me.
It’s not about being mean-spirited and not giving a damn at all Jstevenson. It’s about insensitivity and an unwillingness to accept that the mothers feelings are something that need to be taken into consideration when speaking about the welfare of the child.
I’d hesitated on posting on this thread, simply because being two days out from giving birth myself, I’ve had a ‘generally’ good pregnancy both times out. By generally good, I mean I’ve not had any real serious scares, barring one that occurred in July for me, so that’s what I’ll get into. On the 4th of July, I bit into a bratwurst that had a bit of grisle and it ended up traumatizing a tooth that has been giving me problems for a while now. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get it fixed during the pregnancy because at that point I was already 6.5 months pregnant and they would not work on a pregnant woman despite my doctor’s note that it was okay. It lead to an infection in the tooth, up in the root which will be taken care of (hopefully) by a root canal sometime in the next month. What ended up happening because they would not treat it was I was given a prescription for penecillin (twice), and during the hard pain, when my doctor was on vacation, I was given a prescription for vicodin. The nurse when telling me I had a prescription for vicodin, gave me this really frightening talk about how vicodin could be bad for the baby, relaying that the Doctor had asked her to say as much. Of course this freaked me out so I told her to have the doctor call me himself and tell me exactly what this meant. They acted a bit put out and finally he called and was like ‘Oh, well, it could mean that you’re endangering the baby because it is this sort of drug, but if you’re in -that- much pain (trust me I was), then we’ll have to cope with you taking these drugs for a bit’. How reassuring is that? If you’re that much of a wimp that you can’t take a toothache that has pretty much taken you to your knees in pain, we’ll cope with your potentially harming your child in some ‘unknown’ manner due to your inability to suck it up and do what is best for your baby. Well, oddly enough, the fear of some unknown ended up getting to me enough that I was sobbing and told Matt I would not take the vicodin and I would just have the tooth removed if it to the point that I couldn’t deal. Matt called the Doctor back and explained that I was pretty much a wreck and that I would not take the vicodin. Matt explained that I had decided I’d just have a glass of wine instead should the pain get too unbearable, which would put me to sleep as someone who gets the one drink sleepies something fierce. The doctor swiftly replied ‘Oh no, I can’t recommend that, get the prescription for vicodin’ – wtf, are you kidding me? This boggling bullshit lasted for the duration of the phonecall and finally I just said fuck it and went with the route Matt and I had decided was optimum (the one beer or one wine sleepies) coupled with taking the penecillin, which thankfully ended up working within about a day and a half as the infection became uninflamed. When my doctor came back from vacation, she was a bit peeved at the manner her colleague had dealt with the situation, and spent a good 30 or so minutes with Matt and I discussing the different things we had read about and considered during the ordeal. I have to say, while my doctor can be a bit of a jackass at times, she definitely does take -my- welfare seriously, and -our- feelings seriously with regards to prioritization, and I definitely felt like my own sanity and concerns were far less understood during the few days I had to deal with her colleague.
I’m lucky in that the people I’m surrounded with are very genuinely supportive of the pregnancy and me -Kim- as a pregnant woman as a priority, which has definitely been a stress reducer, but then again, how many are that lucky?
Bottom line, while it’s obviously not something that is a mean spirited thing, there is a definite lack of tact and support that is applied to dealing with the pregnant woman in the face of potential ‘harms’ that the baby she is carrying might be facing.
Either before I go into the hospital on Saturday, or when I get out, I’ll do an entry about the latest ‘bullshit’ that my husband and I discussed with our doctor who was to our delight the first one to speak out and say ‘that’s just bullshit’, which was released by the American Academy of Pediatrics last week.
Ok, I concede that there are doctors and other “pregnancy” professionals (for lack of a better term) who go overboard with their advice. As I said in my first post — I think most people care about the “mother”. Yes, you do become encompassed in the role of mother — I lament regularly about the fact that I am no longer who I am, I am dad and not husband, lover, friend, etc. That is the miserable sacrafice of parenting and doing your duty to society (socialist agenda). Granted, I can hide the fact that I am a father, whereas a pregnant mother cannot hide that fact and suffers much more than I do because of nature. However, sometimes we must sacrafice ourselves for the betterment of society. That does not mean that people have the right to put their hands on you without asking. If someone did that to my wife, I would have to take drastic measures.
As for vicodin — my wife and I were drinking and partying for three months before she found out she was pregnant then the drinks slowed down to two or three glasses of wine a week. Our first born has been an honor student (a real honor student), speaks three languages, and is a star athelete. I say tell them — “Mothers have been giving birth for thousands of years, without giving a damn about the unsolicited advice of others, so it should not start now, especially not with me.”
As I said in my first post … I think most people care about the “mother”.
Interesting you should interpret your first comment on this thread that way. You said:
You seemed to be saying that it confused you why “someone on a progressive blog” would want a midwife or a doctor to care more about the pregnant woman than about the fetus. This may be your way of saying that most people do care more about the pregnant woman, but that it confuses you why anyone “progressive” would.
Assembly-line medicine in an OB setting is just horrible.
When my wife had our first child, she had high blood pressure. It was especially high the first few minutes she walked into a doctor’s office; she finds them very stressful. The doctor checked her blood pressure a while after the first time, when the nurse did it. Then he taught her how to use a blood-pressure cuff. She would then monitor her blood-pressure, and if necessary go lie down for a bit. She did this, and everything worked out fine.
When she had our son, I had a different job and a different health plan. In she goes to the doctor. The nurse had taken her blood pressure, and it was high. He prescribed blood-pressure medication. He refused to take her blood pressure again. He refused to discuss her previous pregnancy and how that was managed.
She brought the script home, quite upset and skeptical. I’ve worked in health care for a while. I looked up the drug, didn’t like what I read, and made an appointment with her prevous doctor, paying for that visit on our own because he wasn’t in the HMO. He took a look at the script, pulled down a couple of books, and we looked at the articles together. The consensus was that she shouldn’t take the drug.
We went back to the HMO and informed the doctor that she wasn’t going to take the drug. This was quite a surprise for him; this was back in the 1980’s, and he (and her relatives, when we told them this story) was shocked that she would have the gall to tell him how he was going to treat her. He then refused to treat her further. Fortunately, there was another OB at the HMO’s office that would take her on and treat her on the basis of the last pregnancy. Everything came out fine; little bugger damn near was born in the front seat of the car on the way to the hospital, but that’s another story….
Not atypical RonF, though that’s less a walking womb story then a doctor-who-thinks-he’s-God story. Lord knows there’s enough of those. I have trouble with them every time. Probably because my Dad’s a doctor, and therefore to my mind “doctor” parses to “guy you watch birds with and argue at the dinner table with, who occassionally looks down your throat and gives you shots.
Some doctors get very offended when someone questions their opinions from on-high. They’re not worth the paper their diploma is printed on.
Well, you know, Tapetum, that’s part of the reason I had the second crib lizard at home – that and hospital bureaucracy inertia. I probably would have been pressured into IV antibiotics if I’d had him in the hospital, and my research into the matter indicated that it wasn’t necessary – but just try to convince a hospital that standard practice as of five years ago shouldn’t be standard practice now. Having that IV stuck into you doesn’t really help you avoid painkillers during labor, I tell you.
I guess I have been lucky and felt I was always taken seriously in terms of my pregnancies. I never felt as if the doctor or midwife were putting me last. I would want the information about medicines and drugs of all kinds (wine/coffee etc.) so that I could weigh the risks/benefits to myself and the child.
I was pregnant with my fifth and had to have dental care and the dentist wanted me to have x-rays. I fought it at first till he assured me he could not proceede with the treatment until he took the x-rays and that he wouldn’t proceede with them if they did endanger the child’s health, the risk was more minimum at that time.
I’m also confused by your statement that eating well was relayed to you in terms of the babies health. I had always heard the opposite, and it was my own health that could deteriorate if I didn’t take care. I do believe there is information on the use of folic acid as being beneficial to the fetus (in terms of less chance of miscarriage or birth defects but as my last child was born 6 years + ago and I’m unlikely, at 47 to have another one…)
But as a pregnant mom I wanted to know the benefits risks to my child to be. I would be the one caring for the child…I would have to know that the potential risk was less than the potential benefit to me. Similarly a woman who chooses to have a child later in life should know the risks of “older mother” pregnancies and should feel that the risk is worth it to her. A woman who is neither willing to raise a child who is born with Down’s syndrome (in the above case) nor willing to abort if that situation should arrive should probably not become pregnant.
If stress has been determined to have a negative effect on the potential child (and it is known to have a negative effect on people, at least stress at a certain level, a certain amount is good) then I as a mom to be would want to know that and, as I am ultimately responsible for my own health, have to see that I subject myself to less stress. I also think that the mom-to-be’s partner and family should know not to stress her out.
As far as society taking care not to stress out pregnant women, how would that work? Would their be laws against annoying a pregnant mom? Would they only take effect when mom shows? How would that work in the work place?
Who else can the burden fall upon but the one who can control it best; mom-to-be. But ask me about Post Partum Depression and I’ll give you a different answer.
Doctors can be the worst, can’t they?
When my best friend’s mother went in to the OB for her ninth pregnancy (she’s Catholic), the doctor told her, “After this one’s born, we’ll fix your problem.” The “problem” (in his mind only) was her large number of pregnancies, possibly coupled with his judgement on her financial situation; the “solution” was sterilization. She told him off but good and now has a different OB.
If I had been in Kim’s shoes with the dentist refusing to treat her, I’d have pulled a World-(can’t say it; the card game)-Tournament-worthy bluff and told him, “All right, let’s schedule it for the week after next; I can have an abortion by then” and upon his expression of protest, informed him that he had limited my choices to either four months of pain or nine more months of pregnancy, and that I found it better to start all over again with the pregnancy than suffer for four months, and that HE was the one who had made the much-preferred choice of small risk + relief unavailable to me, and I was making the second-best choice. If he didn’t fall for that, I’m sure there’s some dentist somewhere in the general area who would’ve. Repeat as necessary, and that’ll teach him to use pregnancy as an excuse to treat me as less than human!
RonF—too bad she didn’t get to tell the bastard that, good, his refusal to treat her makes it much easier for her to get *proper* medical care, and if he’s not competent enough to deal with his patients as individuals, he’s nowhere near competent enough to be a decent doctor, and ought to consider switching careers and working on an assembly line, which is more in keeping with his skills.
Re: “How are you and Mommy doing?” Me: “Well, I don’t know about *it,* but *Mommy* is extremely insulted because someone has apparently decided that someone who cannot hear or understand, much less answer, is more competent to answer their question than she is!”
If I am ever pregnant, I will probably respond to people touching my stomach with threats to break their fingers.
Ledasmom—“Crib lizards.” I love it.
We see childbearing as an opportunity for female empowerment and all that hippy stuff, so the mother’s physical, psychological, and emotional state are vitally important to us.
I’ll buy that *you* see childbearing as an opportunity for female empowerment, etc. When I was pregnant for the first time, virtually all of the lecturing and Think About The Baby You Selfish Bitch advice came from the crunchy granola natural-birth crowd.
I’m wondering how much of this behavior is based, consciously or not, on fears of litigation? That said, fear of litigation is a relatively recent phenomenon. Still, could be a factor.
When I was pregnant for the first time, virtually all of the lecturing and Think About The Baby You Selfish Bitch advice came from the crunchy granola natural-birth crowd.
I suspect that they might have been the types that can’t handle disagreement and wanted to convert you to our side by laying on the guilt. If you had “seen the light” and embraced natural birth, they probably would have switched to being just as concerned about you and your feelings as they were about the baby.
There are risks associated with the use of drugs during labor, but obviously those drugs are not killing babies left and right. The risk we all expose our children to every time we put them in a car is probably greater than the risk associated with using pain medication.
LAmom, I doubt they would have been concerned about me and my feelings to the extent that they required deviating from The One Way. You know–if you’re really relaxed and doing all the right stuff childbirth will be uncomfortable instead of painful, etc.
I certainly don’t mean to imply that all, or even most, natural-birth advocates are like this, of course–just that the mentality that women are incubators doesn’t start or end in medical school.
Long time reader, first time poster.
I love this discussion. I’ve really just entered the baby zone (two best friends with freshly hatched ones, three good friends in various states of preggers). I will certainly point them towards this article as they’ve been talking about these very situations and their rising frustration with this altered attitude towards their state of being. Well, the two with the fresh babies are more upset about breast-feeding nazis making them cry at the hospital, but that is another story all together.
For the record, I love the idea of breastfeeding and want an amazing supportive environment to help women feel comfortable and able to access information about breastfeeding. I just cannot STAND women being made to feel like crap because somebody has decided they didn’t try hard/long enough to breastfeet. And I cannot abide by anyone who snarks and threatens a woman after her having three days of labour, a c-section, an infection, and a 12lb baby (turkey?) A special place in hell, oh yes.
m.
12lb? Good God, that’s big!
Ugh! The breastfeeding debate is downright nasty sometimes. Personally, the idea of breastfeeding seriously squicks me when I think of doing it myself. Luckily I greatly enjoy shooting down people who take it upon themselves to pass judgement on what I do.
If you get heat over not breastfeeding from a stranger, you can look mournful and tell them you’d love to breastfeed, but you had breast cancer and a double mastectomy, and can’t. This not only exempts you from their expectations (and shuts them up; always a plus) but makes them think twice about attacking another woman, in case her reason for not breastfeeding is the same as “yours.”
I have to say that none of my three different obstetricians ever made me feel like I was “only” an incubator. The closest they came was insisting that I stay home from work beginning two weeks prior to the edd — because my blood pressure was starting to rise and I had “worked hard” for this, and they wanted me to make it a priority over work, etc. They were so nice and positive about it, however, that I did not have the same reaction that Nick did. (By 8-1/2 months however, you will feel like an incubator even if you don’t want to, I guarantee it.) When I was sick during or in pain just after being pg, all of them stressed that it was important to treat me, that it wasn’t just about the baby. I second those who suggest that the OB or Midwife thinks that they are educating you about the relationship between your habits and the baby’s health, and they do not mean to imply that your well-being isn’t important. Most OBs and midwives are only too aware that alienating a pregnant woman by denigrating her concerns or health rarely brings about the desired outcome for the baby. Good luck.
Isn’t it amazing how EVERYTHING a woman does, from how she dresses to what she eats during pregnancy to every minutae of her life is controversial? It wears me down, even if I have been a part of it a lot.
What I hated during pregnancy was being treated like I was a dummy. Don’t ride in a car down a bumpy road! Don’t bend over! Don’t drink even a drop of beer! I was and am still smart enough to know when some “risk” is bull shit, or that one beer isn’t going to damage my baby. But whenever you read articles about pregnancy that deal with gas fumes, or coffee, or hair dye, cheese (!!) or even analgestics they always say: there is no evidence that it harms fetuses, but abstain just to be safe. And you’re so scared something will happen to the baby that you obey, just to have peace of mind. But it’s almost all bs designed to make the mother’s life as difficult and uncomfortable as possible, like you have to prove you really are worthy by ignoring your own wants and comfort.
I say, obey the common sense of the smart woman. You are not an incubator, and considering yourself won’t hurt your baby.
Ewww! Thankfully, that’s one experience I’ve been spared, although random people I hardly know appear to think an acceptable way to enquire about the progress of the pregnancy is to ask “How’s everything?” while patting my stomach.
Nick, I recommend a swift elbow to the chops to the next fool that does that.
Yes, you will feel better. It’s very empowering.
too bad she didn’t get to tell the bastard that, good, his refusal to treat her makes it much easier for her to get *proper* medical care, and if he’s not competent enough to deal with his patients as individuals, he’s nowhere near competent enough to be a decent doctor, and ought to consider switching careers and working on an assembly line, which is more in keeping with his skills.
Kyra, we were both in fact thinking something along those lines at the time. But seeing as how he was in the same practice as the other OB that she was actually going to be dealing with, we decided to leave it lie. I got the impression that this was not the first time that a patient had gone from the first OB in that practice to the one we ended up with.
The OB’s she had the first time was an interesting team. The one who dealt with patients the most was a very empathetic and knowledgeable guy, very good at working with patients on what was happening, what was happening next, etc.. The other one reputedly was not much good at the bedside manner or patient counseling stuff at all, but when the fecal material hit the rotary distributor and things had to happen a) right and b) fast, he apparently was nonpareil with a scalpel in his hands. My wife’s C-section at his hands (after 21 hours of labor) went smoothly enough.
My wife’s second child ended up as natural as it gets. My son was born 3 or so weeks early and 20 minutes after we got to the hospital and her peripheral veins had collapsed, so she didn’t get so much as an IV. The delivery room staff is trying to get some history from us (we had had an appointment to go to the hospital the next day to get all that information into the computers there, etc.). Given that my wife was occupied, I did the talking. When I told them that our firstborn was delivered by C-section, the nurse said “VBAC!” and everyone froze for a second. But there were no complications.
“Isn’t it amazing how EVERYTHING a woman does, from how she dresses to what she eats during pregnancy to every minutae of her life is controversial? It wears me down, even if I have been a part of it a lot.”
Oh hell, yes. One of the most relaxing things about my alma mater was that we got to ignore a big chunk of that for a while. A lot of other students worried that we lived in too much of a bubble and were not being exposed to the “real world” enough. Considering what some of the “real world” is made of, I didn’t think taking a break from all that mess was such a bad idea. It’s much easier to concentrate on learning and/or doing you job if you aren’t also always worried about being judged about stupid stuff like what you wear and being female. (I always found it funny when people assumed that we were always catty and cliquish – not that all that went completely away, but it was drastically subdued and I think this was in large part to the lack of being egged on by the “real world”.)
The “shock” of having to assimilate back into a world that quite often finds everything I do controversial wasn’t such a bad experience in the end, either. It’s like when my mother asked me during my first break home from college why we all referred to ourselves as women and not girls. I couldn’t say that we saw ourselves as adults because, since she and my dad were still paying for everything, I felt more kinda stuck in the middle than anything else. So I told her why I thought we really did it, which was that we were learning to become adults, and part of that is learning to expect to be treated as adults – and that includes respect as well as responsibility. We were learning to treat each other the way we thought we ought to be by graduation so that it would feel normal by then – and consequently, demanding the respect we deserved would feel more natural as well.
Nick, great essay!
I just had my first appointment with a new OB/GYN, my first time seeing a male doc for this purpose. To my surprise, he was awesome. My visit included not one, but *two* fully-clothed interviews with the doctor and the best pelvic I’ve ever had. He treated me like a person and sounded like a feminist the entire time. Not coincidentally, I believe, my blood pressure was 114/56, much lower than it ever was at my old OB’s office, even when I was not pregnant. She (and her whole practice) always made me feel like a cog in a machine and not an active participant in the process.
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