Opinion: There Is No Such Thing As Birth Rape

This topic is obviously a very sensitive one to people on many sides of the story. I think, more than anything, we need to learn to be more sensitive about our language, about the way we conduct ourselves, and about communication with our caregivers.

I was a victim of systematic mental and physical rape for almost 3 years as a teen. About two months into my first pregnancy as a 33 year old, I began to have vivid flashbacks, panic attacks, and extreme anxiety. I had been in counseling for my abuse in the past, but not for years at that point, and this reaction to my pregnancy blind-sided me. I loved my child, wanted to be pregnant, and yet had to endure a growing terror within me about exams and childbirth.

All that to say, we need to remember that everyone's experience is different - and difficult for their own reasons. And we need to be more sensitive than to so easily throw out comments like "get over it", "don't whine", and "you don't deserve your children". My abuser, for example used comments like "it's natural", "get over it", and "don't whine". When I was pregnant and people told me these very same things, it only increased my terror, and isolated me from helpful solutions.

Few people actually publicly share this type of experience, unfortunately, and it took me until my third trimester to find literature written about it. Once I did, I finally opened up to my doctor who then worked out an agreement with me about how we could communicate and how he would ask my permission to do anything. I also entered weekly trauma counseling leading up to birth. These were very helpful solutions and ones I couldn't have gotten to if I had continued listening to people tell me "get over it", and certainly not if I actually heard someone tell me "you don't deserve your children". The after affects of sexual abuse have a way of lying dormant for years until something triggers them. For me, the trigger was pregnancy and childbirth and I know I'm not alone.

I wished I had heard more women share similar stories when I was pregnant for the first time to encourage me in healthy ways. Perhaps I would have had more success in battling my issues and actually enjoyed my pregnancy more. That is why I'm sharing now. Please be sensitive to those around you. I'm on my second pregnancy now, due in 2 months, and this time around it has been so much easier - due in full to all the communication I had/have with my doctor, support from sensitive friends and family and professional counseling. There are women out there who need this kind of network of support. Let's make an easy, non-judgemental path for them to get what they need.

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For all you gals who are delusional with your birth plans, I say just stay home and deliver the baby old school. Or to paraphrase the late Mike Royko "just squat and do it".

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WHY is there no way to report inappropriate, obscene or threatening comments on this board? Please remove comments from jjoekiker7. There are many nice, intelligent, thoughtful people posting here. They shouldn't be subjected to offensive language and intimidation.

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If the writer takes offense at the inflamatory language apparently she can't reisst using it to sell her own story as a headline! Cheap!

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I was 27 when i had my first child I had no insurance and went through a university hospital with students coming in and examining me while in labor and i was given a breast exam and touched inapproapriately I felt scared violated and was not only laughed at when I asked the doctor he said that since I wasnt on insurance that it was the procedure to allow students to examine me at the stages of my labor. I am 49 now and have had 2 other births and never did i in the following births have the experience i had. I was definately violated and humiliated.

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For one thing, by the time that you get to the L&D room you should be comfortable enough with your doctor that you listen and do what he asks you too. Not resist and say you dont want to be checked because your in labor and irrational because certain things aren't going your way. I am not sorry if you have a healthy baby because the Dr. forced some good medical attn on you.
Now, if you DO NOT feel that comfortable with your doctor, whatever the reason, (he/she made tasteless remarks in front of you before, or even you just plain dont like them or their way about them) you should have FOUND ANOTHER!

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These same women who complain about "birth rape" would have died just a century ago. What a bunch of ungrateful baboons.

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Unbelieveable, where do these people get those ideas. Maybe babies should be born in a field. Seriously, half the problem today is that people are looking to sue for any reason, hoping that the sued settles out of court. Easy money. Abuse the system.

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As a rape victim and a mother, I tend to agree with this article. However, that does not diminish the very real trauma some of these women may feel. I just think there is a better way to describe it. I think they may be saying rape because these women feel that they have no control over the situation or their bodies at that particular moment. I can certainly understand this because when I had my daughter, I felt very much the same way.

However, I had advocates there with me. I had my husband and my mother-in-law who advocated on my behalf for my wishes to be honored as much as was medically and reasonably possible. I was told I would have to have a c-section. I was in a European hospital because of military cutbacks (there was no military hospital near our base) and I had not been given any pain medication or an epidural. They assumed because I was in my 17th hour of labor and had not dilated past 3 cm that I needed it.

My mother-in-law and husband convinced them to give me an epiduarl at the beginning of my 18th hour of labor. 45 minutes later my daughter entered the world the way I had always wanted my children to enter the world.

While this experience for me was traumatic, it certainly does not keep me awake at night. I do not have nightmares of it. I do not worry when I hear a noise outside my home, even if it is a sound I have heard a hundred times before, if there is someone out there coming in to force me to relive that experience. I do have those feelings regarding my rape experience. That is the difference.

I think of that experience but when I look at my daughter, I don't remember the bad. I think of how beautiful she looked staring up at me for the first time.

When I think of my rape experience, which has taken me several years to get over, my blood still runs cold. Maybe this is because they never caught him. I still check my doors every night 4 and 5 times. I still sleep with a club under my pillow so I can protect myself if I need to. But the birth of my daughter, I don't think of the trauma, just the wonderful little person I helped bring into this world.

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"Rape" used metaphorically, I feel, could pertain to this situation....in labor a woman is at one of her most vulnerable points ever. I felt completely violated during the birth of my first child....rape? Violated I guess would be a better word, but it's not fair for someone who has been raped to nullify the trauma another person has suffered...I was very upset for many years, and wrote my crappy MD a letter, which I'm sure she blew off, but I felt very, very violated by the whole hospital "experience"....needless to say my other children, home births.

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Fine, call it rape and prove you are too mentally incompetent to function in modern society or am I missing something here. Could dear Heather possibly be Muslim?

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I am so glad that so many women spoke up on this subject. How can AOL allow such an uninformed person to write and publish this article without doing the proper research. It is a gross misrepresentation of the subject. Shame on you AOL and double shame on you Amy Hatch. Get your facts straight before you make such false statements as these. Read all the replies and see how man of these women totally disagree with you.

And in the future when you write and publish an article have someone proofread it. Your second paragraph is so full of punctuation and grammatical errors it should be pull from the sotry. And "Getting a Cesarean section, even thought it wasn't part of your birth plan?" as witht he whole paragraph, this isn't a question and it should be "though" not "thought". Shame on you AOL for letting this be publisshed.

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If this is where evolution has taken us, then we're dumber than ever. Sadly!! Now, they're calling the birthing process "rape"? I am a maternal child nurse, everyone has a right to privacy of course. Students and residents need to learn, how else can they become doctors for pete's sake!!! When I was a nursing student, we had to observe and take part in procedures under supervision. All residents are supervised and nurses make sure that they are!!! Making remarks about an emancipated teen having a baby is surely degrading and you did the right thing by taking it public.

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When I gave birth, twenty-five years ago, the obgyn claimed that I was going to give birth the beginning of August. I knew the night I got pregnant, and told him it was going to be the first week in July. The doctor made a comment about wanting me to make sure I didn't screw up his holiday weekend with his family. I arrived at his office in labor, on Friday, July 5, mid-afternoon, and he had already left for the holiday weekend. I had been in labor for 2.5 hours before going to the doctor's office, contractions were 2 minutes apart when I arrived. The office staff said they didn't want to disturb the doctor over the weekend, to go back home. I have practiced hypnosis for years, and asked the baby if she could hold off until Monday. Labor stopped. The doctor's office said it was just Braxton-Hicks.

Monday morning, 3am, I woke up with contractions once again at two minutes, passed the blood plug, and drove to the hospital. The doctor arrived at 7:30am. He promptly put both his hands into my vagina and started separating his hands. That was the only painful part of my giving birth process. I had to tell him three times to get his hands out of my vagina, before he gave me an ugly look and complied. He then snipped me open, and my baby slid out in a couple of pushes, within minutes. He told me it was an episiotomy because I hadn't been sufficiently open for the baby to finish coming out. As I watched him put stitches in to pull together the cut he made, I asked if they were dissolving or if I would have to have them taken out, and he said they were dissolving. I had a hard time walking for the next few days, and the hospital wouldn't let me leave until I had a bowel movement. It took a four days before they gave me a laxative, and I was able to pass a very painful loose stool and they let me leave. When the stitches dissolved, i ripped open and had a hard time walking for another two weeks.

Ten years later, I had an exam with a nurse practitioner who asked me how my bowel movements were. I told her that ever since I had my baby, i had to place a thumb into my vagina to allow bowels to pass, otherwise the stool would pile up into a lump that would not pass, and I could feel the mass pressuring my vaginal area, so I had learned that by placing a thumb in my vagina, I was able to provide a smooth surface for my stool to pass easily out my anus. She carefully explained to me that the scar she saw was not from an episiotomy, which is only supposed to be a cut from the vagina part way through the perineum, it was a scar from an episioproctotomy, the doctor had cut through the ring of my anus on both sides. What I had was a posterior prolapse, which is not uncommon if a woman has given birth a dozen times, but is uncommon in a woman who has only given birth once. She recommended i have a surgical repair to the damage that doctor did to me with his sloppy handling of my birth.

I learned that female genital mutilation is not just something that happens to women in Africa, it can happen in U.S. hospitals with sloppy work by obgyns. It only took me four hours to give birth, and that doctor had fussed that I was taking too long. He wanted to give me a C-section, and I told him that unless my baby's life or health was in danger, he would explain to a lawyer why he wanted to due surgery on me that i was not interested in having. My mother gave birth in several hours, I expected I could do the same.

Four hours, of which he was there for a few minutes, and I was too slow. So he gave me an "episiotomy" and went on with his day. I have had to deal with the aftereffects of his mysogyny for a quarter of a century. I have not opted to have the surgery to repair this problem, as it requires surgical changes to my existing structure of the rectum and vagina to correct the damage he did to me with sloppy handling of my genitalia during birth. I am fortunate that I did not develop a permanent tear between the vagina and bowel. A girlfriend discovered, also several years after giving birth, and going to a new obgyn, that the physician who assisted in her birth with forceps, had punctured her vaginal wall and rectum, cause leaking of fecal material into the vagina. She had asked him repeatedly why her vagina smelled so bad after giving birth, and why she kept getting vaginal infections. The doctor attending her birth never bothered to tell her that she needed to have a surgical correction to the damage he did to her. It wasn't until she saw a new doctor that she was informed of what had happened.

These are not "birth rape", they are medical malpractice. Neither me or my friend knew what had been done to use for a decade.

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Yes, the word "rape" is indeed strong language to use. I can understand why some have a hard time wrapping their heads around this. The fact remains that many women walk away from their birth experiences feeling robbed, violated and a deep sense of shame and loss. These are all the emotions a woman who has been raped experiences. Trust me, as a rape survivor, I should know. For those of you who think that this is part of the "birth process in the hospital" and that women ought to just suck it up, you have not done your research. Hospital birth is dangerous. The outcomes for hospital birth in the United States are NOT an improvement from what was going on over a hundred years ago.We have the highest infant and mother mortality rates in all the developed world. Do your research before you spout your uneducated "opinions" upon the world. Babies come out just fine on their own most of the time, without the doctor performing "exams" which more often than not lead to unnecessary and dangerous interventions. I am so tired of hearing women go on and on about how their C-sections were needed. You ladies believe they were needed because that is what you were made to believe. BY YOUR DOCTOR. It is EASIER for you to believe that you were in an emergent situation than it is for you to face the fact that it probably was not so, that your c-section was unwarranted.Why aren't women educating themselves about this? It is sheer and utter laziness. One in three births in the US ends in c-section. That number is impossibly high and ridiclous. If you were to follow this thread of skewed logic it would mean that one in three women and babies died a hundred years ago in childbirth. If this were REALLY the case you, the reader, probably would not be here today. It is truly absurd. The only way things are going to change in this country is if we start suing for unwanted and uneeded c-sections and for "birth rape". Legal action is the only language these doctors understand. This is coming soon. Back to the original topic: Does birth rape happen? Absolutely. Does it matter whether or not rape victims agree with this terminology? Not really. This is just a smoke screen, a distraction from the real issue at hand. Hospital birth MUST change. For our mothers and for our children. For our future. I know women who spend more energy and time shopping for clothing than they do on educating themselves on labor, childbirth and child rearing. This is shameful and indicative of a society headed for the dark ages. WAKE UP folks.

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