Pushed Quotes

“When ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) claims that home birth and midwives are unsafe, they imply that the women who choose it and the midwives that provide it are acting irresponsibly and selfishly. They stigmatize normal birth just as the political right has stigmatized abortion. And they stigmatize women.
"Our country has created a mythology of women who are irresponsible and don't care," says Paltrow. "We talk about welfare queens, crack moms, and murderous women who have abortions." A culture that allows such language to permeate our national subconscious inevitably dehumanizes all women, including mothers. Lyon argues that this thinking perpetuates a phrase often invoked in exam rooms and delivery rooms: The goal is to have a healthy baby. "This phrase is used over and over and over to shut down women's requests," she says. "The context needs to be that the goal is a healthy mom. Because mothers never make decisions without thinking about that healthy baby. And to suggest otherwise is insulting and degrading and disrespectful."
What's best for women is best for babies.
...
The goal is to have a healthy family. ”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“Today, what's normal is being redefined: from vaginal birth to surgical birth; from 'My water broke,' to 'Let's break your water;' from 'It's time' to 'It's time for the induction.' As medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes, 'in the early twenty-first century, we do not know what normal birth is.' Most practicing obstetricians have never witnessed an unplugged birth that wasn't an accident. Women are even beginning to deny normal birth to themselves: if 'normal' means being induced, immobilized by wires and tubes, sped up with drugs, all the while knowing that there's a good chance of surgery, well, might as well just cut to the chase, so to speak. 'Just give me a cesarean,' some are saying. And who can blame them? They want to avoid what they think of as normal birth.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“The context needs to be that the goal is a healthy mom. Because mothers never make decisions without thinking about that healthy baby. And to suggest otherwise is insulting and degrading and disrespectful.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“She does not exist for herself. She exists for and through her community.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“Helen Sandland, an obstetrician in Wilmington, North Carolina, resigned in June 2005 after hospital administrators told her to increase her cesarean rate, which was a modest 10%.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“The logic of episiotomy was that a second-degree tear would prevent a third- or fourth-degree tear, but studies conducted through the 1980s and 1990s found the opposite to be true. One study found that episiotomy makes such an injury nine times more likely.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“mothers are not informed enough to know that this is not a good idea, and that any woman who has the right information would not want to have her baby induced.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“Ultrasound estimates can be off by more than a pound on either side; in fact, studies have shown that palpating the belly with the hands yields a more accurate estimate.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“A woman is four times more likely to die having a cesarean section than a vaginal birth.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“In the countries with the best maternal and infant outcomes—the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark—women and babies benefit from lifelong universal healthcare, but that care is markedly different: obstetricians attend only high-risk pregnancies. The vast majority of laboring women get individual support from a midwife, are free to move about and birth in whatever position feels best, and are rarely induced, anesthetized, or cut.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“What they don’t understand is that obstetricians are surgeons, and they know pathology, but they really suck at wellness.” They are trained to sew up a tear, but not to prevent one.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“A cesarean section is a wound that impedes normal digestive function, function that must resume following surgery. Breast milk is delayed. Seven layers of tissue and muscle are severed.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“These include longer hospital stay; longer and more painful recovery; higher risk of infection, organ damage, adhesions, hemorrhage, embolism, and hysterectomy; more blood loss; higher chance of rehospitalization; higher chance of a complication with the next pregnancy; less initial contact with the baby; less success breastfeeding; higher risk of respiratory problems for the baby; and twice the risk of the most catastrophic complication of all: maternal death.51”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“You know, all the methods for childbirth, whether it's Bradley or Lamaze, they've all been developed by men, ' she said. 'I don't want to sound like a feminist but it kind of bothers me because there's no real childbirth process or plan or whatever you want to call it that's been developed by a woman.”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

“The following year, she quit. Several things were bothering her. Safety protocols seemed to have no bearing on actual practice; she saw too many women induced or wheeled to the operating room, she felt, because the floor needed a bed free or because the physician had to be somewhere...”
― Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care