Birthzillas Podcast

Hello, and welcome back to birthzillas: the newscast. This week we’re going to be talking about a major issue in reproductive justice: child separation. I have some of my own baggage on this, with three of my sisters being taken out of my mother’s custody (and the other one and I leaving semi voluntarily). But this is an issue in the news right now, not just with regards to ICE in the US but in Denmark taking a newborn baby out of her Greenlandic mother’s custody for failing to pass a state-mandated test.This is going to get complicated, and I’ll try to explain it the best I can. I apologize to everyone involved if I pronounce your names incorrectly, my Danish is non-existent, so I’m doing my best.Let’s go!(insert transition music)As I talked about last time with Dr Breisacher, I work in reproductive justice research, not just reproductive rights. What’s the difference? Well, reproductive justice was founded by about 13 Back women who wanted to include all aspects of the reproductive journey and not just abortion/contraception. When other women (yes, white liberals) ignored them, they just went out and started a movement and scholarly stream that said: you should be allowed to not be pregnant, but that you should also be allowed to BE pregnant AND to raise your children in a safe environment.Why the addition? Because for white women, especially non-poor white women, the struggle has been to not be pregnant when they don’t want to. So, abortion, contraception, and making marital rape a crime. These are all good goals, but they also ignore what non-white women and a lot of poor white women have also faced: not being allowed to have children or not being allowed to keep children.There is a history of reproductive coercion in the form of forced mandatory sterilization (from hysterectomies to “tubes tied” to experiments with long-term birth control without consent). There’s a documentary called L’Operation which centers the US government’s deliberate involvement in a plan to sterilize (often without their consent) a massive portion of women in Puerto Rico. The numbers are see are that in the ‘70s, 30-35% of Puerto Rican women were permanently sterilized, again, many without consent.This isn’t the distant past, either. While Black women were used as slave-producers and had their children stolen from them, once those children were no longer profits for rich, white folks, Black women became the targets of campaigns to forcibly sterilize them. Hysterectomies became so common they were called the “Mississippi appendectomy.” In Becker’s new book the Politics of Hysterectomy, she talks about how even today when dealing with reproductive issues white women and Asian women tend to have to fight for hysterectomy while Black and Latine women are offered, encouraged, and coerced into them.And let’s not forget the doctor during the Trump 1 ICE detainments who was known as “the uterus collector” who forced permanent sterilization onto people who could not give full consent.So, like, the ability to keep your ability to have kids is a deeply political and historically rooted issue.What about the third thing? The ability to keep and raise children in a safe environment? Well, as Dr. Breisacher and I discussed, taking children away from their families and giving them to other families to erase their identity is cultural genocide. This is something that is currently happening in Ukraine with hundreds of children missing (or as it’s actually known, being trafficked) and showing up on Russian adoption websites.These laws come from the global attacks on indigenous people in dang near every country where indigenous people lived. The US, Canada, and Australia, in particular have finally been open about their truly horrible histories of native children removal. (but we’ll circle back to this)In the US it wasn’t just Native American schools (where white people would take children from indigenous families and torture them and otherwise try to break their spirits). It goes back again to slavery. Black women were raped and forced to have children and then those children were stolen from them and sold to other people. It’s still unclear to me why slavery isn’t considered genocide. Like, is it because we wanted to work them to death before they died?But this goes into a long history of snatching people’s kids.Now for the main issue of our story. Ivana Nikoline Brønlund, a young Greenlandic mother (and if you don’t know, Greenlanders are indigenous people, though Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark even though it is a self-governing land since 2009.Why does this matter? Well, Ivana is Greenlandic, born to Greenlandic parents. The history of indigenous erasure. This kind of racism and supremacy is not something you get rid of with a policy, and sure enough, despite (as reported) going through multiple conversation before her child was born, she was still forced to endure the torture of newborn separation.So, what’s up with these parental competency tests? Well, they are meant to measure competency, but not like we think of it with say, early parenting classes. This isn’t really about “how do you change a diaper” or “how to breastfeed,” but it’s more a psychological test. What’s the problem? Tanya Dutt of Health and Me.com describes elements of the test: “The test assessed parents in a series of areas, such as their responses to imagined scenarios, self-concept, physical and mental well-being, outlook on life, and plans for the future. Most importantly, it was based on Western conception of good parenthood and delivered in Danish, with minimal attention to Greenlandic language, customs, or kinship systems. This incompatibility resulted in regular misinterpretations of the capacity of Greenlandic parents and sometimes led to children being taken from their parents.” Around 1% of Danish cases result in child removal. But when you study Greenlandic families, the cases rise to 5-7%. That is a large difference.In fact, in both 2022 and 2023, not only Danish Human Rights groups, but the United Nations found this test to be culturally bias. This resulted in the test NOT being applied to Greenlandic parents, like Ivana.Ivanna was told she “wasn’t Greenlandic enough” for the exception to count for her. Instead of going for some low intervention help, the Danish government chose to remove the child at one-hour old. If you know anything about child development, the first 24 hours are known as “the Golden Hours” because there are a host of emotional and developmental impacts of parent-child bonding that go on. This is why skin-to-skin contact with both parents, but especially the gestational parent—is seen as vital to infant wellness during these first hours. Not only was Ivana Denied this, but her baby was too. This could actually leave lasting trauma on the child. And will almost certainly lead to lasting trauma on the part of the mother.It's so distressing to see this kind of racist separation being played out in this day and age. Really, any time is bad, but we know so much about how flawed and problematic this test was that the government claims to have stopped doing it. Unfortunately, that’s not been the case.(transition music)While it was nice to focus on a policy outside the US that sucks, it’s time to wrap up for the day. Keep your eye on the news and see what happens with this case. In the meantime, think about how these legacies of child separation still shape policy today. In the US this is a major problem with social services and protocols for family separation.Next week, we’ll be back with whatever fresh hell I can find for you. Until then, take care of yourselves, and each other! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit birthzillas.substack.com

This week, we’re talking about tough stuff in maternity care. In particular the role of birth trauma or traumatic birth and what is known as obstetric violence. I have spent so much of my career just having to convince people that obstetric violence even exists, it’s been frustrating. Fortunately, public health, reproductive justice, legal and social movements around the world, and increasingly OBGYNs are not as stuck on a patriarchal relationship with liberalism and institutions like mainstream political science is. So, I’ve both qualitative and quantitative stuff to share with you below. As always, when we talk through the tough stuff, take care with your health and step away if you need to. Take care out there! Transcript below. Hello, and Welcome back to Birthzillas, The Podcast! I’m your host, Amber Vayo, and this week I’m sliding into your play list just to totally depress and enrage you. You’re welcome. But seriously, this week we’re going to get into some of the parts of birth we don’t talk about, in fact, when I’ve talked about half the time I’m looked at like I’m completely nuts. We’re going to talk about birth trauma.Over the weekend I saw an article about women being traumatized in labor and delivery. Then last week on LinkedIn, I saw a post that someone had started researching rates of PTSD that stem from birth. Because this is an important (and understudied area), I thought I’d bring it to yoru attention. But also since it’s something that is often silenced, I hope that if this resonates with you, you fell a little less crazy!Let’s go!(transition music)What is Birth TraumaWhat do I mean when I say “birth trauma?” Interestingly, if you google it, you’ll usually get articles about babies who have been hurt during birth. But what we’re looking at is the role of moms.My most recent article, published with Law & Policy is about people’s experiences during childbirth and how they can lead to PPD and PTSD. During my interviews, I’ve had mothers break down in tears recounting their experiences. Other mothers have decided not to have more kids just because they didn’t want to relive the treatment they experienced at the hospital.Birth trauma is associated with what’s called voluntary infertility: when people who can have more children choose not to.One such story was of a woman who gave birth in central Massachusetts. Between the pushing and being forced to lay on her back in labor (which has actual health problems and is counter to the natural way your body wants to push—you know, down). She fractured her tailbone. She also believes this herniated her disc. It took months for the hospital to take her pain seriously as something other than “oh, that’s just postpartum pain.” One of her husband’s colleagues, a doctor who worked at that hospital said, “if you love your wife, take her to another hospital.”This woman was so upset because she had wanted to have a big family and felt like she couldn’t because there was nowhere safe to give birth.But also, we have to consider the implications that she wasn’t in enough pain (something that several people told me nurses actually said to them when judging how far along their labor was!). Women’s pain is so often ignored. Women are far more likely than men to be diagnosed with mental health issues that later turn out to be actual physical issues than men. Women are overprescribed anxiety medication when they complain about symptoms.Twilight Sleep and the Drug Use in the “good old days”The “mother’s little helper” ideology from the 1950s when women were alcoholics, abusing prescriptions tranquilizers, or being given literal lobotomies, is not as far away as we like to think.My grandmother was given something called “Twilight Sleep” which is a mixture of two drugs: one that makes you forget or hallucinate and one that is supposed to be for pain. In the 1950s there was an article about this called “Cruelty on the maternity ward” because so many women, when they could remember what happened, were having nightmares about it. Other women came out of the drugs with mysterious bruises and no recollection of what happened.A nurse said that it was so ubiquitous that the first time she even considered it might be a problem was when a woman came in so far along that she delivered her baby in the hallway on the gurney. The baby was pink and happy and not blue and lethargic like the Twilight Sleep babies.Couple of things here. Women were being drugged into literally not knowing what happened. Few people seemed to consider this a problem. The first sign of real trouble was when someone (finally) considered that this might affect the baby. Overall, it showcases that we have some serious problems with how we think about birth and who gives it.Kimberly Turbin and Obstetric ViolenceIn more modern cases you see issues like Kimberly Turbin who caught her doctor on camera cutting her while she screamed for him to stop. The doctor responded with “what do you mean why? I’m the expert here.” Which was ironic since the episiotomy he was doing is not recommended procedure.I talked to a doctor who gave birth at her own hospital. She referred to her treatment as obstetric violence. Her doctors wouldn’t let her put her leg down, even though they knew she had hip problems. They twisted her body and held her down to the point where both she and her husband had nightmares from the experiences. Fun fact: I have discussed this before and there’s always at least one person who chimes in with “well, we don’t know what was going on…and what about the baby?”Even if we stipulate that this kind of treatment was acceptable, the fact that no one explained it to the patient (in this case a doctor herself), means that it’s still on the hospital for traumatizing the patient.Ultimately, this shouldn’t be the most controversial thing I talk about, but people hate trusting women when they say someone hurt them (just look at, you know, everything). And when it comes to women saying “a doctor hurt me and even though I was pregnant, I should have been treated like a person” people lose their damn minds.Mothers are afraid of having their babies taken away if they complainThere is also the trauma of child and family services. I talked to a mom who was so ashamed of being accused of drug use and having a note on her file that said to call DCF (department of child and family services) that she decided to stop having kids even though she wanted more.And what did an article on CBS News just say? That there is even more evidence (there was always evidence) that these drug tests are not accurate. Imagine the trauma to the baby, the mother, and the family of removing a newborn from its parents because of a faulty drug test?Imagine being told that mommy is going to the hospital to have a baby. But mommy comes home without the baby and freaking out because the police took the baby for no reason. Now you have a mom traumatized. You have a dad traumatized both because his kid got taken away and because he feels like he can’t protect his wife and family. You’ve got kids traumatized because they realize the the government can come take them away for no reason and there’s nothing mom and dad can do about it.That kind of stuff leaves a legacy of mistrust, trauma, and pain. All because fool government policies and cheap hospital tests. That’s insane and immensely traumatic.My own ridiculous birth storyOne of the reasons I wanted to give birth with my first daughter at home was because I didn’t trust hospitals. But my midwife, after 17 hours said it was time to go to the hospital. So we did. And the first staff there were really nice. But after an hour, the shift changed, and the night crew sucked. The doctor talked smack about me when she thought I couldn’t hear her. They said I hadn’t been in labor long enough because it was only 2 hours (because that’s how long I was there).They told me I was having contractions because the machine readout said I was (I wasn’t). They didn’t believe me when the epidural didn’t work. And finally, just to get the hell out of there I “elected” to have a cesarean (and this is why we should all be skeptical about the number of “elective” cesareans…because a lot of those are not truly a free choice).TO get permission to give a me c-section, a male doctor I didn’t know, walked in, didn’t even talk to me, stuck his fingers in my vagina and walked out.They were going to start the c-section because I had the epidural despite me telling them it didn’t work, Fortunately, my doctor believed me because he poked me to test the epidural and found out that it really hadn’t worked.A news article I read, and at least 12 people I have talked to, felt all or some part of the first few cuts of their cesarean. Another news article pointed out how many women felt their organs being moved around even if they didn’t feel the pain.I was cut incorrectly and lost two litres of blood and went into shock. Which no one told me, but I figured out when my teeth were literally cracking from grinding them out of shock.And I consider my birth experience far less traumatic than most of those I’ve heard about.Did you see the CDC report that the US birth rate is at its lowest? Wonder why?There’s economic, political, and environmental reasons that make the idea of children a total turn off. But there’s also the ever-increasing body of knowledge that shows women are in danger. It’s like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost: you in danger, girl!If it’s not the maternal mortality crisis, it’s physical trauma. If it’s not physical trauma, it’s emotional trauma. It’s getting your kid taken by DCF. It’s having a strange man shove his fingers in your vagina. It’s being told you don’t know what you are feeling in your own body as you are feeling it.And still there are grown women who will argue and try to carry water for this catastrophically broken system. But not on this show.Birth trauma is real, and it is incredibly harmful to families. More than that, birth trauma leads to lingering medical mistrust that ripples throughout the rest of people’s lives. Birth trauma is not only a reflection of medical misogyny and racism and a broken health system, but the inciting incident in a public health crisis in many communities.Research around the world has shown that people who mistrust medical systems don’t receive follow-up care, fall victim to anti-science expertise, and so on. It’s bad medicine, it’s bad business, it’s bad for people, and yet it persists in ways big and small.Lack of Consent in most maternity wardsFor many parents the trauma came in the form of being forced to have IVs they wanted to being refused food and water for over 20 hours. But for others it was being held down, it was being forced or coerced into interventions (including cesareans) they didn’t want, it was they way people spoke to them. One Black mom I spoke to was told immediately after her doctor repaired a tear from her episiotomy, “you have to have all c sections from now on” and then the doctor just left. She had no idea why he said that or what was going on. She was worried that she had been given the “husband stitch” which some people say is a myth, but there’s reason to believe it is not, where you are given an extra “stitch” in your vagina to make it tighter for your husband’s sexual pleasure. This is incredibly harmful physically but also deeply unhygienic and potentially disastrous for your health (and remember folks, the idea of “lose” vaginas has no basis in society and only exists in the minds of men who think their penises are so important that they change our very physiology). Or, in the words of my boy George Carlin: “It’s bull s**t and it’s bad for ya.”These cultural myths of dangerous practices have roots in reality. Just as cultural fear of birth has roots in reality. I have problems telling people to just not feel afraid, because there are red flags they should be apprehensive about.US maternity care is not evidence-based, it’s actually against a lot of evidenceSome of those red flags include: difficulty finding your hospital’s policies online (including grievance policy), doctors and nurses who do not take your questions serious, care providers who simply say “no” without giving a reason, people who treat you rudely and unprofessionally, hospitals with really low rates of vaginal birth, and so on. Most states will or consumer agencies will have some information on the level of intervention in your hospital. You should be able to ask about the patient-to-doctor ratio, see if there are midwives as well.One thing to remember when looking up rates, though, is if your hospital has a NICU, it means they deal with a lot of higher risk births. That means their c-section rates are going to be higher. That’s not necessarily a problem, so you need to use a few different metrics to make your judgement call, not just one. Previously, I’d suggest asking community members on social media, but as more and more of the internet is taken over by bots, we are approaching the ‘dead internet” timeline where a lot of comments sections are actually bots talking to bots, so there’s no real help there. Overall, try to find real live humans you can ask and get a few different ideas about what’s going on. Parenting and pre-natal classes can be a really useful place for this and help you build a community of support for when baby comes. Prenatal yoga and exercise classes can also work (if you’re not doing prenatal classes, which you really should do). There are lots of ways to look at what’s out there, but for some people, you might not have a choice about yoru hospital. In that case, I suggest asking yourself what information you will need to feel safe, and practicing asking questions about that. For instance, if someone says you need an IV or fetal monitoring, what information do you need to feel ok with that? Now work backwards and figure out what questions you need to ask to get the information.(Transition music)I see by that mean old clock that it’s time to go. This week, the call for action is as simple and as hard as this: listen to and believe women! And when someone doesn’t believe you, call them out on it.We’ll be back next week in our quest to demystify the tough stuff by talking about postpartum mood disorders, it’s more than just postpartum depression.Until then, take care of yourselves and each other! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit birthzillas.substack.com