theroguefeminist:
bitter-badfem-harpy:
i-was-a-naive-antifemini...
Obstetric violence is institutional violence. Break the silence.
A lot of these stories feature a male obstetrician, just sayin.
Hospitals also often give women in labor unnecessary medication against their consent (which is listed in the chart in the link as a form of obstetric violence). When going into labor with me, my mother was given a narcotic despite the fact her chart specified no narcotics because she had a history of addiction. After she gave birth to me, they took her off the narcotic, and she couldn’t sleep due to having symptoms of withdrawal. Despite this, the hospital refused to let my mother stay to recover and forced her to leave soon after the birth.
My mother didn’t sleep for three days straight due to withdrawal symptoms. Subsequently, she had a psychotic break. She started talking word salad and hallucinating. At one point, she thought my father, who was holding me, was the devil and grabbed me from my father’s arms and started running blindly down the street with me, thinking she had to protect me. As a result, she was admitted to a psychiatric ward and stayed there for a whole week to recover, separated from me, her newborn child, the entire time. She had vivid hallucinations, nightmares, fevers and other horrible symptoms for days.
Fortunately, she made a full recovery. But there’s a permanent record of my mother’s admittance against her will to a mental facility due to this event, and if things had gone differently, the event could have resulted in my mother harming herself or me, becoming hooked on narcotics, or undergoing permanent damage to her mental health. All because doctors did not honor her chart or her consent.
