Before my daughter was born, I’d always been skeptical of the claims from natural health advocates and birth experts that anyone—anyone!—could have a pain-free birth. A cocktail of migraines, anxiety, and depression had long kept my shoulders tensed and my temples pounding more often than they should, and I didn’t expect that fog to lift during labor.
I knew that my anxiety disorder would probably prevent me from doing much beyond getting through birth. But what I didn’t know was just how much my anxiety would play a role, not only in my experience of birth itself, but in how I’d be treated by my medical team during it.
In the last months of my pregnancy, I sometimes stayed up after my husband went to bed, secretly watching video tutorials on approaching birth like a magical adventure rather than a necessarily painful process. I tried the breathing exercises and the visualization techniques, but it took most of what I had just to relax my jaw or loosen my shoulders from their perpetual perch near my ears. I didn’t think a pain-free, or at least less painful, birth was possible for me, but it was a nice form of escapism to imagine one. Like watching beauty tutorials for makeup I couldn’t afford, or buttercream frosting piled on cakes that didn’t fit into my meal plans.
As it turned out, I’d been right about the pain. After laboring for hours, I asked for an epidural, despite having pipe-dream-planned to avoid one. The needle was nothing more than a prick, but it was followed by a foreboding swell of symptoms. Almost immediately, I knew something had gone wrong. I’d been told I would have limited movement only from the waist down, but I felt almost fully paralyzed from nose to toes. I couldn’t squeeze my husband’s hand, breathe properly, or even open my mouth to speak, and my nose was running–a sign, I was later told, that the anesthesia dose was too high.
Because I have a medical history of anxiety, my clinicians assumed I was having a panic attack. With the now-impaired muscles in my mouth and tongue, I tried desperately to convey what was happening to me. “Honey,” said the anesthesiologist, “nothing’s wrong. If you want the benefits of anesthesia, you’ll have to make some sacrifices. You’re panicked, that’s it.” With that, she left the room. “She has anxiety,” I heard one of the nurses say to the other before they all turned away, as if it undermined my perspective to begin with. She has anxiety. Case closed.
But when I wouldn’t stop protesting, the anesthesiologist returned to ask how tall I was—they’d never asked me before, but apparently I’d been given the dose for a much taller person. She left without a word, and I was left with the sick shame of not being heard. Before I left the hospital, I’d feel that same angry shame again when my serious postpartum preeclampsia was dismissed, too, as “anxiety”—twice. One little word that meant “don’t listen to her; not to be believed; not to be taken seriously.”
Over the next few weeks, amid the overwhelming joy of having a child, combined with the requisite sleep deprivation and confusion that often follow birth, I found that I couldn’t dismiss my feelings of anger and hurt about the way I’d been treated while so utterly vulnerable as easily as my clinicians had dismissed me. Once my daily routine set in, those memories did too.
As I worked through those feelings—which, through research about similar experiences, I later came to understand and validate as birth trauma—I learned that I’m far from alone. Women’s growing awareness of and resistance to dismissal in all medical settings—as our pain is routinely overlooked, our word doubted, and our physical symptoms misread as psychological—perhaps applies most urgently in the context of labor and delivery.
Around a third of women report experiencing birth trauma, which can range from outright assault and verbal, physical, or sexual abuse by medical staff to ongoing experiences of prejudice, insults, or condescension. Many of these women go on to develop PTSD or temporary symptoms of it. By offering information about filing legal and civil complaints and encouraging women to tell their stories and talk openly about their birth stories, organizations like the Birth Trauma Association and Improving Birth are working tirelessly to address this problem, to give women more of a voice during childbirth, and to ensure that the word “pro-choice” applies in the delivery room, too.
As more and more women come forward with their experiences, it’s evident that women of color, disabled women, poor women, and mentally ill women (like myself) are particularly vulnerable to feeling silenced or abused by medical staff. And our mounting resistance to these tendencies mean that perhaps, at long last, we are starting to view women’s own birth stories and bodies as just that: their own.