It isn’t Birth Trauma Awareness week yet. That falls in July.
Yet I need to post about it, today, as it’s a fundamental feminist issue I am only just discovering.
And wow, talk about ‘tip of the iceberg’. Once starting down this rabbit hole, you can’t NOT see the way that society serves up neglect and discrimination against women at their time of greatest need and highest vulnerability.
Being an older woman and a mother of two in the blogosphere, I get frustrated with the lack of discourse about how pregnancy, birth and post partum life can be a bloody awful experience for a significant proportion of women.
And it feels there’s a social silence, a stigma, surrounding it that means it’s rarely heard about.
But listen to us women talk when we’re in small numbers and our inhibitions are lessened by a wine or two and you will hear the stories.
The profound failure of our healthcare systems to meet the needs of the expectant and birthing mother, is a travesty.
When 1 in 3 mothers experience trauma around the birth of their children, why are support networks so poor as to miss so many of us, leaving us with unresolved trauma and the flow on effects for ourselves and our families, for years to come?
I need young women to know that they stand a 1 in 3 chance of experiencing this trauma. And to be bloody certain, that they do NOT create babies with garbage men of which there are so many these days.
The incel forums that drool over the prospect of partnering with a ‘breeding oriented female’ sicken me to the core.
And men who get off ‘impregnating kink’? You KNOW that part of your brain gets off on the fact that you don’t have to carry and birth these babies. You surely KNOW you have been given supreme privilege to fantasise about making babies from the safety of your biology alone.
These men will not be traumatised by carrying and birthing these babies. They will have no comprehension of how to support the partner in ways that help with processing this trauma. Simply none.
I want to slice open the perineums of incel men who gripe about having to forgo sex for a few weeks after birth so their partners have the best chance to heal.
Or help out with domestic labour following a C-section. God forbid the woman needs has a longer than usual recovery period. These man-children will traumatise their partners further by cheating or developing a porn addiction (both applied in my ex-husband’s case).
I want sores to fester on the nipples and peens of men who whine about mastitis, stretch marks, ‘droopy’ breats and post-natal pooch bellies.
Fatherhood is an ENORMOUS privilege and men should be socialised to serve the mother in the crucial weeks following birth. It should be normal for men to treat the mothers of their children with the pinnacle of respect and compassion and love, that should be every mother’s due.
1 in 3 women. Let that sink in.
Birth trauma is a feminist issue.
Silence, shame and stigma, no more.
turnnoffyourmind
yousharknotpass
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