The controversy about the term “birth rape” has ebbed in the blogosphere (which has a shorter attention span than my seven-year-old son). But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped thinking about it. Nor, it appears, have other people. A reader named Ann took the time today to disagree with me vehemently:
To me there is not the slightest smidgeren of doubt that the women who state that they were raped, indeed were raped. Rape is NOT, absolutely definitely NOT only about sexuality. It is mainly about power and dominance. You will find very few among the BDSM community who are not aware of this.
Rape can – also – occur in the total absence of a feeling of guilt of the perpetrator. Whether a nurse, midwife or doctor think their deeds are justified because they have a right to go home early, or that woman birthing is too dumb or distraught to know what she wants, or whether a pedophile reasons that the 5 year old boy “wants it” because he happened to leave his knickers off, or whether the husband holds his wife down, thinking she’ll eventually come around, it all does not matter. It still is rape.
I fully agree that rape is not just about sex but about power. However, by its very definition, rape is about sexualized power. The abuse of medical power has to do with power too, but it has little or nothing to do with sexuality. (An exception would be a doctor who subjects patients to sexual touching – which most definitely belongs on the continuum of sexual assault, and which happens with distressing frequency.)
A doctor who violates consent is not acting from the same motivations as the pedophile. He or she is supported by our cultural values in ways that a pedophile is not. Yes, we live in a rape culture, but you would find very few defenders of a pedophile. By contrast, medicine enjoys partial immunity from criticism because of assumptions that lay people cannot understand it, that medical personnel always hold humanitarian values, and that they will always act in the best interests of the patient.
Of course, this isn’t true. Consider another truly vile category of gynecological violation: forced sterilizations. Doctors in Nazi Germany sterilized about 400,000 women and men, the vast majority of them against their will. About half of the victims were women. The Nazi program was inspired by smaller-scale compulsory sterilization programs in the United States, whose legality the Supreme Court affirmed in its 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell. Compulsory sterilization declined after 1942 in the U.S., but poor women of color have still been subjected to it in the post-war era, most notably in Puerto Rico and on Indian reservations.
There seems to be a common conception that if declining to recognize a phenomenon as rape is the same as trivializing it. And yet, we don’t call forced sterilization “rape,” nor should we. Doing so would obscure its specific nature. It would draw attention to the particular values that legitimated it: the pseudoscience of eugenics, contempt for disabled people, and society’s exaggerated deference to medical authority.
In short: something can still be an atrocity if it’s not called rape.
Insisting on accurate naming is not “language policing,” contrary to what Cara argued at The Curvature:
I also thought that a big part of anti-rape activism was about broadening our definition of rape, not narrowing it — throwing out the stranger jumping from the bushes with a knife as the only model of rape, and recreating a model that encompasses a wide variety violent experiences and promotes affirmative, enthusiastic, meaningful consent as minimum standard of decency rather than a nice bonus if you can get it. I thought that anti-rape activism was about acknowledging that rape is not just one thing, that there is more than one way to violate a person and to be violated, and that whether consent was given was more important than how much force was used. Especially in this context, the posts in question come off as nothing more than language policing, against particularly marginalized populations, no less.
First, I think we should be able to discuss the applicability of “rape” to specific phenomena without shaming other feminists as rape apologists, or saying that they are acting as oppressors, or blaming their words for harming victims. That happened in both Cara’s post and the comments to it. Critique is good; disagreement is healthy. But shaming only leads to groupthink, as the comment thread to that post shows. Only one commenter deviated even slightly from Cara’s position.
I actually don’t think that anti-rape activism is “about broadening our definition of rape” – not if this means extending the term into entirely different realms of violence that are not basically sexual. Of course I strongly support recognizing acquaintance rape, or marital rape, and other instances of sexual violence as just as real, traumatizing, and illegal as the “stranger in the bushes.” But “rape” is not an infinitely elastic term, nor should it be.
Specific names for specific violations are politically and analytically important because they push us to understand the roots of different forms of violence. In cases of medicalized violence, we need to consider the values that enable a scenario like this one, described at the blog Forever in Hell:
The problem isn’t that women in labor are uniquely in a position to be victimized by medical professionals. The victims of such medical professionals are not uniquely women in labor. In other words, you don’t have to be a woman in labor to be victimized by a medical professional. You simply have to be in a room with certain medical professionals.
Case in point: a friend of mine needed a lumbar puncture (spinal tap) in order to tell if he had Multiple Sclerosis or Lyme Disease. These two diseases can cause similar symptoms and similar MRI results, but have vastly different treatments, so distinguishing between the two is necessary. My friend is a large man, so he needed to have the lumbar puncture done at the hospital by a doctor.
Before the procedure began, the nurse told the doctor that the needle they had was too large, they needed to get another. “Too bad,” snapped the doctor. He had a schedule to keep, he had a golf game to get to. Waiting for someone to get the correct needle would take too long, so, before my friend could object, doctor forced the needle into my friend’s spine. When I say “forced”, I mean forced.
I could hear him scream from down the hall.
Then, to add insult to injury, the doctor refused to draw enough cerebral spinal fluid to allow for two tests. “We’ve got enough to test for MS, what more do we need?” he said.
That’s right. This doctor tortured a man so as not delay a golf game and didn’t even get the damn test done.
I don’t agree that doctors are the only offenders (as this post goes on to argue). The potential for abuse is greater among those who are more powerful, but other medical personnel aren’t outside the value system that enables medical battery.
But this example does show that the problem really is primarily with the values that underlie medicine. Yes, we’ve come a long way from the days when a white coat commanded automatic obedience. We have the patients’ rights movement to thank for that, which was driven in large part by feminist critics of medicine. However, as long as medical personnel remain unaccountable for violations of consent, some practitioners will abuse their power.
If we want to stop battery of women in childbirth, we’re not going to make much headway by combating rape culture. We need to call for more humane and democratic medicine. We need to demand medical education that would weed out arrogant abusers and reinforce respect for the patient. We need to insist that doctors hold each other and their subordinates responsible – and if they can’t, or won’t, the law needs to intervene, with civil or criminal remedies as appropriate.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
We FUNDAMENTALLY disagree here. Rape is NOT about “exclusively sexualized power” at all.
Here is the common definition from the dictionary, with which I am quite completely d’accord and it is really, really different from your narrow definition:
You and others willfully NARROW the definition of rape to the first of several definitions and by that you empower rapists of many sorts. This is actually a so vile act, that bile hits my backteeth as we speak here! I am severely squicked by that.
Both other definitions quite literally work for birth rape, as the birthing woman’s body is seized and all but abducted by the socalled caretakers – against her will and against her knowledge. And as a lot of these forced birthings mean heightened deliverey speed and money in the bank account for these people (or other gained goods such as a comfy – for them – delivery and a chance to go home early), it is economic plunder/pillage as well. One of the main reasons why birthrape happens is economics, is financial gain.
And of course the first one also fits the moment that you cease – as you should – to see sexual acts as only that which mean intercourse, but also those which are enacted on sexual organs. Uterus, vagina, vulva – these all undeniably are sexual organs.
By what you hold up here, someone who inserts a bottle or his hand into the vagina or anus of a woman or man, just to test whether he can, out of pure curiosity so to speak, is not a rapist.
And the guy who forced his cock down my throat did not do it – just to make this very, very clear to you – because he had or wanted funny sex with my throat. It was only to demonstrate his power over me. He did not jerk off inside me, he did not cum directly afterwards, he inserted his cock simply to show me he could and because he knew it would hurt and I’d nearly suffocate. He just as well could have inserted a cucumber. If we go by your sort of definition that would have been no rape at all then. Cucumbers have a well-known connection to throats, they are edible, right? So they do belong into throats.
Think – please! See what you are doing there. And after reading your other response I begin to have an inkling why you so much deny what has happened to you. I can only say, I have been there, and done that, too.
Because by your second account (which is MUCH different from the first) you also were birthraped. Denial isn’t helping anyone there. I really hope you seek some professional counselling so you can acknowledge what was done to you and going by your second account that was not just a bit of overbearing medical attitude.
Again, as someone who was raped, I can say that I do not at all contest attributing the term to what has happened to you or other women during birth.
It fulfills more than one of the several definitions of the word “rape” and thereby it is rape. We unfortunately have currently a culture of narrowing down terms to being almost unrecognizable, while new terms (read: euphemisms) are invented to downplay what happens.
BTW – the correct term for what happened to that man with a lumbar puncture is “willful torture”. Watch the poor guy try making that one stick and the resulting outcry from those who got waterboarded or electrocuted, yet he most definitely was tortured.
You assumed I mentioned my BDSM background because you thought that was relevant as to whether or not I might call what happened to me rape. No, that was not the reason. The guy was vanilla, the date was just a date between colleagues, BDSM played no role at all, he didn’t even know I am a BDSMer.
As I tried to explain, obviously without success, people practising BDSM have a very sure feeling for when power is abused and into what direction. We deal with that as per our nature. Which is why it is so very clear to many among us that birth rape is just as real a rape and also meant as a rape as rape including some sort of intercourse.
And what strikes me even as more outlandish just now is how you seem to expect that rape involving intercourse indeed has to have a sexual component for the rapist. Again, that’s simply not the case. There is no such thing as a need for “sexual power” in rape – it is simply POWER over someone, the sex may or may not be an add-on. It’s entirely not about the penis in the vagina (or other orifice). Ask men raped by women about that.
*A doctor who violates consent is not acting from the
*same motivations as the pedophile.
Err – and you know that exactly how?
Sorry, but I keep coming back to what I perceive being a couple of truly basic misconceptions. I have reason to KNOW that quite some medical personnel (doctors, nurses, etc.) do have ulterior motives when they violate consent. The satisfaction of being able to cast aside the will of someone else, is definitely a part of the problem and it can, but it need not be sexual as well.
As to the pedophile, many are absolutely and firmly convinced that what they do to and with children is not just their sexual gratification, but something which is very nice for the child as well and something this child actively wants and asks for. In that respect there is NO difference to a doctor who does something because he thinks it is in the “best interest” of the birthing woman, who may have said no, but he simply knows better. It is indeed EXACTLY THE SAME as the reasoning of that pedophile.
That’s one thing. The other thing is that it DOES NOT MATTER what motivation the perpetrator has, what matters is how the act is understood and perceived by the victim.
A friend from my former self-help group was brutally raped for days by a 16-year-old (huge guy, some 6 foot 4, big as houses, even at that age) whose IQ was somewhere between 60 and 70. He thought that what he did was absolutely okay and that he did nothing wrong. He was convinced she liked it as much as he did (she must like it, as it’s pleasurable for me, right?).
By your reasoning that again would not really qualify as rape, because his motivation wasn’t to rape her, it wasn’t even sexual gratification (he had NO idea he was having sex, it just felt nice, like scratching when it itches).
Your way of defining rape opens such a big can of worms that it makes me shiver.
Just FYI: The incident of breaking membranes without my permission happened during my second birth, not the one I discussed in my previous post. It made me mad but I wasn’t traumatized by it. I think we’d all do well to remember that conversations on the Internet only reveal some details and we rarely get the full picture. I would also appreciate not being told that I am in denial and need counseling to recognize it. I’m not denying your experience, which sounds horrific and traumatizing. Please grant me the same respect.
I assumed that you brought up your BDSM background because some people are quick to assume that being into BDSM negates the importance of consent, when in fact the opposite is true. I’m sure your right that this gives you a deeper understanding of legitimate and abusive power. However, I am not willing to grant that someone who’s not into BDSM automatically has a deficient understanding of the abuse of power. I have spent much of my adult life researching the history of childbirth, and a big part of that is documenting abuses of power.
The dictionary definition of rape is not especially helpful, since only the first definition has any correlation with the legal definitions of rape. (I say definitions in the plural, because each state in the U.S. has its own definition.) By the third definition, looting a shop during a riot could be considered rape! And no one today refers to abduction as rape; we call it kidnapping. Beware of archaic uses in the dictionary!
A perpetrator does not have to come or even receive sexual pleasure from the act for it to be prosecuted as rape, and I have never said so. Please don’t distort what I’m saying. My point is that rape involves sexuality (in however warped a form), whereas medical battery does not. BTW, there is no legal crime in the U.S. called willful torture. Assault and battery are the relevant charges. It is very rare for medical assault and battery to be charged as crimes; I think this ought to change.
I’ve written pretty extensively about how rape is defined legally and the gaps, problems, and possibilities in the law as it exists. I’m not a legal scholar, but I have an awful lot of students who have suffered sexual assault, and I’m very frustrated at their inability to get any redress. Their experiences are denied by their peers, trivialized by certain university officials, and in most cases impossible to prosecute successfully in the criminal justice system.
My interest is thus not in narrowing the definition of rape, but defining it clearly with the goal of finding remedies. So for instance, I’m interested in ways to increase conviction rates, especially for acquaintance rapes. I am mulling over a future post on the possibilities that a “criminal negligence” standard would offer, if applied to sexual assault. (Currently more stringent standards are applied.)
If you want to insist that a pedophile and a rotten-apple gynecologist have the same motives for abuse, I am not going to be able to persuade you otherwise. Of course many predators rationalize what they’re doing, but the rationales in this case are not the same, and only the gynecologist will find much support in society if his/her violates become public. I trust that most readers will indeed see a substantial difference, and that they will understand that strategies to reduce cases of childhood sexual abuse must accordingly be different than strategies to reduce the incidence of medical assault and battery.
Finally, on your example of the rapist with an IQ of 60: Of course your friend was raped. What happened to her is absolutely horrific. However, the law generally requires intent in order to convict someone on serious criminal charges, including rape. In this case, it sounds as though the perpetrator is not mentally competent to understand what he did. I do not think he should be free, but he belongs in a mental hospital, not a prison. This is not to trivialize what happened to your friend, only to say that the legal system rightly treats juveniles and mentally incompentent persons as having diminished culpability because they cannot properly distinguish right from wrong. (The U.S. often ignores this principle, of course, trying 13-year-old as adults in murder cases and applying the death penalty to perpetrators with profound mental retardation. But two wrongs don’t make a right.)
I can’t help but wonder how many of the people defending the term “birth rape” would find it okay for me to say that I’ve been raped because I was circumcised. It was done by a medical professional, without my consent (and as it turns out, against my will), without even a remotely urgent medical need, and it intimately involved my genitals. And it has caused me substantial psychological/emotional difficulties.
The thing is, I don’t think it’s appropriate to call what was done to me “rape”. It was still a horrible thing to do to another human being. And I think it can accurately be called medical battery and malpractice. But you don’t need to label something “rape” to make that point.
Here’s my main question: what would you call it? As someone who’s been subjected to several intrusions in the name of medicine, there just is no term for these incidents at all.
Hi Sunset – I would prefer the terms medical assault and battery. Malpractice may also sometimes be relevant (in the realm of civil law), but if we’re talking about major assaults on a person’s bodily integrity, then I think we should see criminal prosecution. It should be possible to use existing assault and battery statutes, though I can see some advantages in creating particular categories for medical professionals. For instance, doctors, therapists, and other trusted professionals are subject to special provisions in some states’ sexual assault laws. Something similar could be done for regular assault laws.
I do favor tweaking the language and insisting that this be called medical assault and battery. Otherwise, the phenomenon tends to disappear into the great bulk of assault cases. Medical assault is most emphatically different from what happens in a bar fight, for instance. I also think that insisting on specific naming could help to raise public awareness.
Would be interested in knowing if you have any ideas on what you think medical violations should be called.
I’m not sure entirely. My main issue with words like assault and battery is that they involve direct physical violence, which is something that was not present in my own situation. (It might be relevant there that I was a teen and thus my consent was considered completely irrelevant to anything.)
I think the important point is, a lot of the work we’ve done around rape needs to be extended somehow. Feminists have done a lot of ground-breaking work on the nature of consent and non-consent, and what coercion can be. But so far many people are unwilling to generalize that beyond what is seen as strictly sexual. The use of the term rape, at least, seems to get some of that into people’s heads.
“My point is that rape involves sexuality (in however warped a form), whereas medical battery does not. ”
What sexuality? Whose sexuality?
Listen to women who have been raped in the labour and birth process. Listen to their stories about how their sexuality and sex lives and feelings about their bodies have been affected, and tell me that it’s not about sexuality.
Also don’t assume for a second that the people perpetrating birth rape have some sort of magical medical distance, that their crimes never involve any thoughts of sexuality. However – and this is a HUGE however – defining rape purely in terms of the imagined thoughts of the perp is a massive failure to understand that rape is about what is going on for the victim.
I’m just boggled that anyone can see nonconsensual vaginal penetration, with fingers and with instruments, often with the victim being physically restrained, often while the victim screams, says “NO”, physically fights, and call that “not real rape” because the perp happens to wear scrubs and have institutional sanction. Just … how?
Lauredhel, thanks for your comment. I’ve read and admired your posts on the blinkers that some medical professionals wear.
I absolutely agree that new mothers who’ve experienced violations of their bodily autonomy are usually traumatized in ways that affect their sexuality. I’m pretty sure I experienced PTSD after my first birth; the vacuum extraction plus fundal pressure (all without informing me of the risks) pretty well shredded my pelvic floor (sorry for the image). I felt completely broken and didn’t want to have sex for at least a year – and even then, I continued to feel broken.
I just see violence in labor as part of a much broader phenomenon within medicine. Yes, I know there are some doctors who get off sexually on their patients, but that’s by no means limited to childbirth situations or even to gynecologists. The aw-shuck, good-ole-boy family practitioner I saw in my late teens tried to feel up my sister, who was about 13 at the time. When I was diagnosed with an ovarian mass, he performed such a rough pelvic exam on me that I threw up. He said I was high-strung and nervous. Later, in surgery, it became clear that the mass had been a cyst, which he handled so roughly that it broke. So yeah – here’s one doc who married perviness with sadism in one charming package. (He did eventually get busted for feeling up young girls, and only then did we hear my sister’s story.)
But even in a case that for me combines sexual assault with medical assault, it’s not primarily rape culture that gives cover to practitioners like him (though certainly rape culture is at work when victims come forward and are not believed, or when victims fear disbelief). It’s a medical value system that says doctors can do no wrong.
The history of obstetrics and gynecology is absolutely rife with examples of terrible violations of women’s autonomy and bodily integrity. The violence used against women to restrain them in labor – the pain inflicted on the unanesthetized slave women who became guinea pigs for early gyn surgeons (most notably J. Marion Sims, the so-called father of gynecology), the display of indigent laboring women to a full auditorium of med students, the adoption of episiotomy as standard procedure – not all of these violations rise to the same level of seriousness, yet together they paint the portrait of a medical specialty founded on utter disregard for consent, privacy, bodily autonomy and integrity, and often even the patient’s best medical interest (assuming we could determine that objectively). I discussed the example of forced sterilization in my post, but really, it’s part of a much bigger problem.
The history of ob/gyn presents particularly vile examples (IMO because of women’s historical subordination), but the paternalism and disregard for individual rights that enables these abuses can be found in other branches of medicine as well. Certainly Cessen’s example of routine infant circumcision falls squarely in this history. I went through an experience with my 7-year-old son last winter that I still haven’t blogged about, but which basically showed me how little regard some pediatric specialists have for the pain of children.
Again, I do not think something has to be called “rape” to be called an atrocity.
If you’re willing to weigh in on this, can I pose a slightly different question – to you, Lauredhel, or to anyone else? How would you want to name forced sterilizations, for instance? Or routine circumcision? Or refusal to give pain medication for excruciating procedures (which are too often described to the patient in advance as “merely uncomfortable”)? Do you have a better answer to Sunset’s question than I did? I am open to creative ways of naming the problem of medical violence, though at the same time I’d want any new nomenclature to tap into existing legal categories so that victims could actually seek redress.
There seems to be some confusion here in the comments between the objective and the subjective.
If someone feels they have been violated, and that, in terms of the power exercised upon them, and/or its impact on their sexuality, they feel “raped”.
However, from an outsider’s point of view, legal criteria about ignoring consent and the abuse of power need to be precisely drawn in order to secure a conviction. In that context, the notion of “medical assault and battery” seems to me much more likely to act as a deterrent to those who think their expertise places them above questions of common consideration for the feelings and pain of others, male or female.
To feel raped is not the same as being legally raped. Justice as the outcome is surely the important thing, as if any adequate redress for those who suffer rape, or medical battery were possible. But trials and successful convictions might at least make those who feel inviolate in violating others think twice before doing it.
I disagree. I have almost never had the impression that people using the term “birth rape” are seeking legal recourse. In almost every case where I’ve seen it used, the person is seeking validation for their feelings of violation.
For whatever it’s worth, I am extremely skeptical that some sort of “medical assault and battery” charge will ever exist and if it were to exist, that it would secure many convictions. We simply give too much authority to the white coats.
Believing that there most likely will never be any legal recourse, I’m pretty sympathetic to the desire for emotional validation. It’s the only approximation of justice that most of these victims will ever get.
You’re not word-policing; you’re drawing a distinction, an analytically valid distinction at that. None of the counterpoints on this thread resonate with me. The “anti rape activism” rhetoric is not helpful to victims of rape or to victims of medical assault. I happen to agree that medical assault during birth is part of a bigger issue much more complex than rape, from both an ethical and policy perspective.
Sunsetz comments are compelling. Why promote medical assault involving birth over other types of medical assault? Why not generalize the ethical groundwork laid out by feminists in regards to rape/consent?
And one more thing:
Is anyone talking about constructive measures women can take to guard against this? What do you think? Obviously home birth is one way to guard bodily integrity and I’m all for promoting awareness of home birth as an option, but realistically, many women would prefer a hospital.
When I reflect upon my personal experience, I wish I had more information on the front end. I went to birthing class, but it was part of the hospital program and didn’t inform me about the cascading (and unwanted) interventions that eventually took place. I also wish I had a home birth or a birthing center birth. Last, I wish I said “no” to Pitocen.
If people want activism, I suggest an awareness campaign for expecting mothers; that would go a long way in my opinion.
A LOT of people are talking about this and have been doing it for years. There is a lot of information out there. There just aren’t a lot of options. Women can be educated all they want, but when you get into the industrial mill that is most American hospitals, your desires get replaced by what the institution demands. The problem is structural, and individual education is one piece of the solution, but it’s never going to solve the problem by itself.
I really hope this comment isn’t meant to say that birth activists spend all their time trying to convince others to use the term “birth rape” instead of doing “useful” activism. Because nothing could be further from the truth.
Of all the things that have frustrated me about this conversation, the most aggravating is the way so many mainstream feminists who have never bothered to write two words about birth choice (not Sungold!) all of a sudden have an opinion about a term that gets used every now and again in obscure corners of the blogosphere.
Good to know, and that’s why I asked about the discussion surrounding education, rather than presume. Personally, I do not feel that anyone did anything without my consent, but my experience (with my second child) was nevertheless awful, and in my mind, education (on my part) would have made a big difference.
So … a few thoughts that may serve to confuse the issue more than to clarify it …
I find the argument that violation of bodily integrity in childbirth is an extension of medical culture that puts physician authority over almost every other value the most persuasive. I think the issue is exacerbated in childbirth because of the historical subordination of women (as you note) but also (or maybe as well as) because so much value is placed on the baby that the woman is practically erased as an independent human being, because our media consistently portray birthing women as screaming, crying wrecks incapable of rational thought, and because the birth of a child carries so much emotional and psychological weight that trauma during that experience might have more of an impact on some people. I’d also throw in that women having babies generally are younger and healthier than other people in hospitals and this might be their first experience with dehumanizing treatment in a medical setting, and it occurs during an event that is supposed to be happy and joyous, so they are particularly off guard. But you are correct that that doesn’t make it different in the big picture from other types of medical violations.
I find the attempt to disentangle sex and power and sexualized power unsatisfying, even as I recognize the distinction you are trying to make. It seems to me it boils down to a “I know it when I see it” distinction, and birth rape doesn’t make the grade for you. I don’t know that you could come up with a definition that adequately describes some real difference between someone using a bottle to rape their victim versus inserting scissors into someone’s vagina and/or anus and cutting them open.
It seems to me that in this semantic issue, feminist analysis of rape runs up against our lay understanding of rape. My entire life, I’ve heard that rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. But now it’s about sex again.
I doubt that “rape” will ever gain currency to describe forced sterilization or routine circumcision. (I also doubt that rape will ever gain mainstream currency to describe medical assault during birth, fwiw.) But I think lauredhel is right to ask you exactly what you mean by sexuality and whose sexuality we’re talking about in this argument.
We will never describe a vicious beating as rape, but if you read the accounts of torturers in South America’s Dirty Wars, more than one will say he beat his victims until he ejaculated. And then the session was done for the day. And when rape is used as a political weapon or a weapon of war, it often is done with objects and presents no prospect of sexual gratification for the perpetrator. The object of the rape is purely political – to terrorize a subject population, to humiliate them, to ensure compliance.
Conversely, assault in birth can be very sexualized. Not just or even primarily in the sense that the injuries can affect a woman’s sexuality or involve sexual organs. I don’t know if you are familiar with the blog My Ob Said What?!?. It catalogs outrageous things that practitioners say. It regularly features comments along the lines of “this is what you get for opening your legs.” The ancient idea that pain in childbirth is punishment for sexual knowledge – even among married women who don’t have too many kids – still has a lot of currency, with the modern innovation that if you are not experiencing sufficient pain on your own, nurses and doctors are entitled to mete it out.
Recently, a woman recounted that a (female) doctor told her “this will teach you not to have another one anytime soon” before cutting a 4th degree “episiotomy” with no anesthesia and sewing her up without any anesthesia. The woman was 16 and unmarried at the time. I have a very hard time not seeing this violence as sexualized. The OB plays the enforcer of sexual norms and punishes women who deviate, in this case with the express purpose of ensuring that sex would be painful for this woman. That has been a use of rape for millennia.
@ Laura (for some reason it won’t let me reply directly)
I’m sorry I got defensive. The sad truth is that every year thousands of women who did educate themselves go into hospitals in labor and end up with the same cascade of interventions they didn’t want and “knew better” to avoid. Hospital staff and doctors and nurses have a lot of practice at getting us to do what they want, and most of us only have a few babies. It’s nice to think that if we just knew and said and did the right things, we could make the system work for us – and some small percentage of women do – but the problem is the system – not you or me or any individual woman’s education or lack thereof.
Venezuela has included “obstetric violence” in its law on violence against women. The definition includes both not paying attention to and responding to obstetric emergencies and not obtaining informed consent for procedures, as well as separating mothers from their babies without a medical reason. It’s punishable by a fine, and the evidence from the criminal case is referred to the governing professional body.
I’m not sure how well it would be enforced (the more leftist Latin American countries have a tendency to put really expansive rights into law, but have a pretty big gap between what’s on paper and what happens in reality), but it’s an interesting approach.
Via Unnecesarean.
[...] Your average public-transit groper might fall into this gray area. (And while we’re at it, some cases of medical assault – in childbirth or otherwise – could fall under this expanded definition, too, as long as they involve intent to humiliate [...]