Ep 47: Finding Justice in the Face of Obstetrical Violence

Laura Jansen shares her lived experience of her victorious hospital breach birth, tainted by both consent violations and obstetrical violence. A must listen for those passionate about women’s health and birth justice. Honor yourself, celebrate your strength, empower your transformation with your Yin-care®.

This is the Yin-care® podcast, and I’m your host, Margaret Jacobson, the mother Rising. When our sensitive tissues are off, everything is off. That’s one of the many reasons I absolutely love Yin-care®’s Herbal Wash. This incredible DAOs formula gently nudges the vaginal microbiome back into balance. Not to mention it feels amazing, so get your hands on some Yin-care®s herbal Wash today.

That’s Y-I-N-C-A-R e.com. Restore, rejuvenate, and refresh with in care. Hello everyone. Welcome in. I wanted to just take a couple of moments to introduce this episode, which will be covered in two interviews. We have only done one recording, the one that you’ll watch or listen to here in this episode, but there will be a second one as we didn’t have time to get to everything that we wanted to cover.

That being said, we do delve into the topic of obstetrical violence, and the weird thing is that I could say trigger warning here, but most of us are numb to any sense of violence that was inflicted in the birthing arena. It’s a very, very, very strange thing, but we are quick to protect those afflicted by domestic violence.

Racism, gosh, anything that we feel has truly caused harm, but for some reason, when we talk about birth. People completely irrationally, even in the face of really good, solid scientific research data, they irrationally defend obstetrical violence, manipulation, coercion, and more. And it really has become totally accepted.

In this episode, we actually get pretty deep on my guest’s experience and how bizarre and upsetting it is that we continue to perpetuate this absolutely unacceptable behavior. So what I would like is that if you feel that you are starting to go into a mindset as you listen to this, that is defending the obstetrical medical establishment.

Reflect on why that is, and you don’t get to just have the out of saying that this is all totally acceptable because we’re concerned about the baby. That’s literally diminishing a woman as mother to shadow That needs to be contained to propagate a breeder, providing more human resources for the powers that be.

The hospital should not be a prison where you are bargaining for your own choices, which is what is happening. If you have had a challenging birth experience and you are interested in receiving a birth trauma debrief session, I do offer this as a service. You simply go to the incare website under the services tab at the top, and you would sign up for an Awakening Womb wisdom session.

It’s not specifically called out there, but if you sign up for that and you can write notes, there’s a section there. We can certainly use that as a session to do a birth trauma debrief, and it can be very powerfully healing for a lot of women. I have been through birth trauma myself with a couple of my births, a limited degree to all three of them truly.

And I’ve also been through the radical birth keeper school training, so there’s that as well. And I’ve witnessed many other births and friends and family, et cetera, at my age. So it can be very therapeutic for women to just be listened to and to process what happened in their birthing situation. So anyway, that’s there if it is needed.

Additionally, you can also go to the resources tab and complete a medical incident report form if you have experienced any either obstetrical violence or any other type of medical or health incident that you feel that you’d like to just report. As we’re gonna find out in the second episode, more of what this guest went through in filing her complaint through a hospital.

A lot of that can be very difficult and overwhelming and frustrating, and oftentimes we’re in a position where we’re trying to heal. So this incident report is there to give you that voice. So be sure to check that out if that feels resonant for you and complete the form. You don’t need to go to the authorities.

You are the authority. You are your own authority. So with that, here my friends, is the episode. Hello everyone and welcome to the Incare podcast. I am your host, Margaret Jacobson, the mother rising. 25 years ago, this upcoming September, I became a mother. And as you likely have and will hear many women say, my plan was for a natural childbirth, a last something bizarre and twisted happens more often than not, where women are manipulated through intense coercion into interventions that they did not wanna have, or their will was slowly broken down during an incredibly vulnerable and intimate moment, and they then accept the interventions for me.

Each of my birds brought on different levels of growth. And asserting my own boundaries as best I could at that time. But there were definitely aspects about the first two births that I had as a woman with a Master’s in Health Services administration, that led me to delve really into the paperwork I had signed.

Looking at hospital policies and procedures, I’m wondering if what I had been through could be prevented or possibly reported. But taking this any further than basic research while nursing my new baby and recovering from a cesarean section was just. Too overwhelming, and that’s why I’m so incredibly inspired by the beautiful, strong, and new mother whom I will be interviewing today.

Her story is so rich and there’s so much to learn here and so much inspiration I believe you’ll take away. It has elements of both true victory and horrible tragedy and where she could easily have taken the route that most of us do when we have been through this, which is to focus on healing ourselves and take care of our babies and growing families as new moms.

This mama took action as her incredibly unique background, simply got her thinking about not only how to report the incident, but why these incidents are not taken seriously. I. Just can’t wait to have her share everything with you. Laura Jansen is a professor in sociology and a PhD. She’s an educator, a researcher whose work centers on gender law, education, and inequality.

She teaches at Grinnell College and in Iowa State prisons through the liberal arts and prison program. Her forthcoming book, sexual Violence on Campus, title IX and the New Era of Accountability explores how colleges adjudicate sexual assault cases under overlapping legal mandates. Laura is also obviously a Mother Laura’s birthing experience has opened her eyes to the importance of trauma-informed care during birth and the need for systemic changes to respect and prioritize women’s autonomy during childbirth.

She’s currently passionate about connecting her own lived experience to those of other women, so we can generate robust discussions around generating systemic change to improve women’s healthcare, specifically in birthing settings, but also beyond. So without further ado, I’d like to welcome Laura. Hello, Laura.

Hi Margaret. Thank you so much for having me. It’s so great to have you here. I’m so glad that we could make this happen. Obviously, I saw you on the Birthing Instincts podcast and you were interviewed by Bliss, and I was just so incredibly taken by your story. It was so moving and there’s so many elements to it that are so rich in experience and learning for everybody that I really want everyone to be able to hear your story.

That’s part of my audience, so I’m really grateful we can make this happen. Wonderful. And thank you so much for beginning by kind of grounding this episode in your own experience as well. I mean, the power, this is the power of storytelling and lived experience, right? Mm-hmm. Storytelling is a form of resistance, and it’s the way that we can start to challenge dominant narratives around maternal care and women’s experiences in a variety of realms.

And I just wanna start off this conversation by saying I, I love some unique things about Incare podcast. You know, I was looking into past episodes. I love that you can search it by topic. And I saw that your second most kind of popular topic is self-governance, and I think that’s such a rich area for discussion.

So I’m excited to contribute to conversations around that. Other related topics with your audience. Oh, that’s awesome. I’m so glad that you picked that out and brought that forward because yeah, that is really a big piece for me, and that really is such a huge part of what I see as a downfall within the whole medical structure and the whole medical system and our whole inner relationship.

And to me, fundamentally it starts at birth. So anyway, this is really interesting, but, you know, it’s really foundational for people to, for us to start this discussion. Everyone really needs to hear your story, and so speaking of stories Yeah. Um, you know, it’s, it’s a robust one and I don’t want you to feel like you have to Yeah.

Just share all of the details of it because there’s a lot of pieces to it. So I’ll just give you the four. Sure. Okay. Thank you. Um, so, you know, I. Had a, surprisingly, for me, normal pregnancy, I was shocked at how well the pregnancy was going. I am a MA advanced maternal age, so that was already a risk indicator.

And then kind of a layer to my story is also that I have a fairly rarely known genetic disorder called ERs, Danlos syndrome or EDS. Mm-hmm. And there are a bunch of different types of EDS and that causes all kinds of confusion for folks. But I have the most common kind, which is hyper mobile EDS, and that just means I’m super double jointed.

I was the kid who could put her head, her feet over her head and do all kinds of contortionist gymnastics and used to think that was a good thing. So. When I was thinking about getting pregnant, thinking about starting a family, I am a planner. I am a data nerd, so I tried to start getting information early on.

So even before conceiving, I had gone to a high risk maternal fetal medicine or MFM specialist before conceiving to say, Hey, you know, what are the risks? I’ve read some scary stuff that maybe with EDSI won’t be able to carry to term. Can you talk to me a little more about this? So they. Made me aware of some of the risks.

I thought that based on that conversation that I might have more difficulty carrying a baby to term or might have some earlier complications. Shockingly, I didn’t, I had early counseling in the first trimester from another maternal fetal medicine specialist who reassured me and said, Hey, you’re looking great.

I think you can deliver this baby vaginally. No problem. I have no specific concerns about your EDS. They anecdotally told me I was here in Iowa at the time at the Iowa Hospital. They told me anecdotally, we’ve had some EDS patients in the past who are hypermobile and they deliver wonderfully ’cause you’re already stretchy and so your, you know, your ligaments are primed for delivering a baby.

So. I felt like I had done due diligence going into the later part of my pregnancy in understanding my risks. And as you mentioned, I was among those women hoping, really hoping that I could have a natural vaginal childbirth in my case. I also preferred unmedicated for a variety of reasons, partly due to my own history of sexual assault, but also just knowing that best practices was remaining as mobile as possible.

Mm-hmm. And knowing myself that part of my EDS is I react very strongly to some drugs and painkillers. So I wanted to experience childbirth to the fullest. You know, I wanted to benefit from the, all of those surges of hormones that help you connect to your baby. So I was really excited about that. So everything was going well.

I arrived into my third trimester, and we reached that point towards the end of the pregnancy, I wanna say it was around 32 weeks when they really start to care, the doctors start to care about the position of the baby. Mm-hmm. So the baby was breach and the baby was not turning. It was cons. He was consistently breached.

So at that point, it sort of became a problem, right? So immediately the medical institution, the medical community started saying, well, let’s just go ahead and schedule your esan. And I said, wait, wait, wait. You know, I wanna try all the options. So I tried something called external cephalic version or ECV, and that is a hands-on procedure that is designed to turn the baby.

And we gave it two really compelling tries. One without medication that, and, and tell, tell people about like, I mean that’s not like an easy procedure. Like what? No. Yeah. What what? Explain like what, what they’re doing. They’re, it’s a manual intervention, right? Yeah. And I had this, this is kind of what started me thinking about other possibilities outside of just, okay, your breach, we’re gonna c-section you, I started to search out podcasts about ECV.

Mm-hmm. And the rates of success. Mm-hmm. And I had heard about. It just all kinds of different experiences of women ranging from, oh, it wasn’t so bad to, this is really, really intense. And the medical recommendation is to do it with a couple of different medications to help relax you. Right. But I was reading there can, I don’t know.

I wanted to try first on medicated for certain reasons and then medicated and Wow, what a difference both were, I would call pretty extreme experiences. Intense. Especially having not yet experienced childbirth. Wow. It’s a very weird feeling to be with a doctor who you know is helping you and has, you know, has the healing touch, has the healing doctor hands.

Yeah. But everything they’re doing to you and everything you’re feeling feels like they’re trying to kill your baby. Yeah. Just to kind of put it bluntly, it, they’re putting extreme pressure, it’s very controlled and it’s done in a very safe way that’s not gonna hurt you or the baby, but. You have, we, we have that protective instinct when we’re pregnant, right?

About people touch about getting bumped. And so to allow someone to put very hard pressure on your belly, kind of, you’re, you’re, you’re trying to override your brain is trying to override this protective instinct. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, hard, no complications. Yeah. So I tried it with no medications where I was feeling everything.

We came close, I tried it again with medication where it’s still, you don’t feel nothing. So I’d say it’s still an intense experience. And, and, and is this in like a regular doctor’s office or is it in a hospital setting? Just out of curiosity. Yeah, this was done in a hospital setting. I had these done at University of Iowa and they ended up, they did them not in an operating room, but they did them in a C-section prep room that had lights and stuff, but it was, it was really kind.

But the doctor who performed these procedures was very patient centered, very consent centered. She talked to me about her own three children, about how with the first two, her own first two children were breached. Her ecds were unsuccessful and finally the third time was the charm for her. And on the third kid, the ECB was successful.

Wow. It was this wonderful atmosphere where everybody in the room, it was all women. They were all really advocating for me and very quietly, almost kind of chanting positive words to me. And the second time, several of us in the room were crying ’cause we really, they knew how much I wanted the vaginal birth.

Yeah. And. They knew that their hospital did not support a breach vaginal delivery. Mm-hmm. And that’s the whole story here at the end of the day, is because I was breach, most hospitals in the United States are gonna say vaginal delivery is not an option for you. And that’s because we stopped training doctors based on a flawed study.

We stopped training them to deliver, um, uh, uh, breach babies vaginally, and instead moved to a blanket policy of just delivering via c-section. I love moving through the day honoring all of who I am as a woman. That can be a challenge when imbalances such as damp, damp heat or toxic heat rear their ugly head vaginally, and issues such as yeast infections, bacterial vaginosis, and even HPV creep in.

When our sensitive tissues are off, everything is off. All the tools I may have in my repertoire to ground and center go out the window and I feel myself coming slightly unglued to say the least. Everything is so incredibly uncomfortable. But I was tired of finding product after product that completely obliterated all of a woman’s microbiome, and honestly was worried for all the other strange but natural culinary items I was testing out inside my vaginal cavity.

It seemed wrong to kill all the bacteria off and then work to build a healthy vaginal microbiome back up again. That’s one of the many reasons I. Absolutely love Yin-care®’s. Herbal wash research at the universities in China showed at the Petri dish level that at a 10 to 12% dilution, Yin-care®’s herbal wash would lice all yeast cells and other bacteria while still allowing lactobacilli to continue to proliferate.

This incredible DAOs formula gently nudges the vaginal microbiome back into balance. Not to mention it feels amazing. Its cooling properties, not only cool the very upset sensitive tissues, but cools my head and allows me to come back into my body and ground into my life and purpose. Once again, if you’ve never used our wash and you plan to use it vaginally, be sure you purchase the combo pack that includes both.

The 180 mil bottle of Yin-care®’s Herbal Wash and the 100 mil vaginal applicator, we now sell the bottle in two sizes, 100 mil and 180 mil bottles. So head on over to Yin-care®.com. That’s Y-I-N-C-A-R e.com. And by the way, Y Care’s Herbal Wash feels excellent after some rather hot and heavy love making, or even at a less sexier time, but incredibly important postpartum Y care’s.

Herbal Wash is excellent for postpartum care to cool things off, while also offering antimicrobial and antibacterial properties. So get your hands on some Y Care’s Herbal Wash today, restore, rejuvenate, and Refresh with Incare.

There are still doctors trained in this through organizations like Breach Without Borders. And most importantly, doulas and midwives, midwives specifically are the ones conserving this knowledge and practicing it. Um, but I was still very married to this mindset of this has to be medicalized, this has to be hospitalized.

I’m a high risk patient. You know, I’m advanced maternal age. I wish that it had been within my conception to consider something like a home birth with a midwife who’s trained in this. But my mindset at the time was, well, this has to be in a hospital setting, but I wanted to find one of the few, there’s only a half dozen or so hospitals left in the country where there are doctors who are still trained in breach vaginal delivery techniques.

Mm-hmm. I tried everything first. Back in Iowa I did moxibustion. Mm-hmm. Which is a traditional Chinese medicine technique designed to turn breach babies. I tried lying upside down on an ironing board, propped on my couch and putting frozen peas in one place and a heating pad in the other. Oh my goodness.

You know, encouraging baby towards the warmth. I tried the music trick. I tried. Um, uh, turning Babies website has all of these different exercises you can do. You do like a whole circuit where you’re doing different step ups and then lying down. Mm-hmm. I wanted to try it all, so I feel like I gave it the best effort I could and I realized after the second ECVI had kind of this mind switch where I stopped trying to make my baby do something that he was clearly.

Not wanting to do, and, and I just wanna, this is like where I kind of like more of, of my spin on this is like, I always like to go into like the spiritual component of the pregnancy and the birth. And I think it’s always, I, I just think it’s interesting that some babies, and it is, it’s nor it is, we say it’s an abnormality, but the fact is babies come out with their feet first, like, or butt first or what?

They don’t always come out head first. And so it’s an interesting way that the baby is sort of. Because the baby is working with the mom. The baby is choosing to come to be born that way. And so it’s just interesting to me. And that you’re, you know, Bodin, right? Is that Yes. Yeah. Bodin just, he wanted to have his feet on the ground.

Yeah. I’m so glad that you, he’s probably gonna be a runner or something, you know, maybe. Yes. He’s very active. He doesn’t sit, sit still, so, probably, yeah. Thank you for opening the door to that conversation. ’cause that is what it was for me, is it was a spiritual moment after the second failed ECB of me realizing, you know, why, why do I keep trying to push.

This child to, to do something that, you know, there for some reason that I don’t understand, he needs this position. Right. And later through looking so I kind of, you know, married my role as an academic with becoming a parent and going into my birth and the unusual situation that I ended up being in of, I, I traveled to attempt a vaginal breach delivery.

I put together all of this peer reviewed research on everything that was known about. S Danlos, women giving birth and breach vaginal deliveries and trying to make the connections between them. Turns out one of the things I found out is that Hypermobile EDS women are more likely to have breach babies.

Really? Yes. I don’t think I heard that in the first interview. That’s No. That interesting. Didn’t come out. No. That was just like a little note from my own research notes that I was uhhuh, you know, preparing for my talk with my doctor is this is a normal feature. We also tend to have smaller babies on average.

Mm-hmm. And perhaps that’s because we are more prone to, because we’re so stretchy, we’re much more prone to tearing. During vaginal delivery. So, I mean, it’s kind of this wonderful thing where nature helps us adjust and has EDS women create smaller children who are less likely to harm us Yeah. While going through the birth canal.

So these things that were medicalized as abnormalities. Mm-hmm. The fact that he was smaller and eventually went, I think down to the 16th percentile in terms of his size, the fact that he was breached. If there were better knowledge about, and more comprehensive, holistic thinking about health, we would see that actually this was a normal, maybe positive feature for an EDS woman.

Um, well, I also love, I’m also thinking, knowing and, and I’m sort of foreshadowing a little bit here, but the, the full knowing the full story and the fact that you have this, it’s EDS, that’s, that’s the Right, right. Okay. Eed Yeah. It just, and because it’s related to flexibility, it’s like you had to flex like at every freaking moment.

You know, you, you had to flex mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Like, so you embody this like whole sense of flexibility all the way around. It’s, so it’s just interesting. So I just wanted to put that in there. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Flexibility in every sense of the word. Mm-hmm. Right. And yeah, I, it was a kind of a game changer.

I, so this is a brief side note on EDSI was only diagnosed in my thirties. Mm-hmm. And this is the case with a lot of EDS folks. It was after my fifth or sixth orthopedic surgery. After tearing yet another ligament, which this is a classic feature of hypermobile, EDS folks we’re so stretchy that our ligaments get torn from this overstretching and overuse.

But it was kind of a. In a holistic sense, it changed my whole mindset, my whole life. I had thought, oh, flexibility is this wonderful thing that I have the gift of. And I loved doing my little hypermobile tricks and mm-hmm. Contortionist gymnastics. And when I got diagnosed with hypermobile EDS, my doctor said, I want you to take this mindset moving forward.

I want you to think about living your life at 80%. Whatever your a hundred percent is of your flexibility, only use 80% of it. So I mean it, I think about that more specifically while doing things like yoga. Right, right. Um. But it kind of made me rethink even our broader conceptual associations with flexibility.

That stability is, and groundedness are also really important components that we need to balance flexibility with. True, true. And be able to expect. So anyway, that’s something else that I had been thinking about. Um, yeah. But I love that returning to the birth. All of the attempts to turn BO in failed and birth was rapidly approaching.

So I was already in my 38th week when I made the difficult decision to move from the state of Iowa to Milwaukee, where I had found a doctor who was willing to deliver this breach baby. This doctor was amazing in my initial consultation with her, seemed so patient centered and I was really excited to work with her.

But she said, listen, I am all about, she said, I love to nerd out on breach deliveries. I would love to help deliver your baby however. My hospital is not about breach deliveries. It is not supportive. So if I’m unable to get to the hospital on time, and it’s another doctor who sees you, they’re gonna wanna c-section you and they’re not gonna be happy to see you.

So she actually recommended that I reach out to another main hospital in Milwaukee where she said there are eight, or there are about eight doctors there who are trained in breach delivery. So I ended up going to that hospital and saying, I’m seeking a late transfer of care. And the doctor with whom I met was not supportive.

She called me while I was literally on the road to Wisconsin pregnant, 38 weeks pregnant. I was moving and relocating and she called me on the road and she said, have you had amniocentesis yet? To test your baby for EDS And I said, well, no, I haven’t, I didn’t get into the fact that we can’t, we don’t test, um, hypermobile EDS through genetic testing.

It’s not detectable and explained. There’s several different types of EDS, right? Yes. So that people know. So there’s another type. She was confusing my EDS with vascular EDS, which you can test that. For a genetic marker. However, currently there are no, no known genetic markers for hypermobile. That’s why we diagnose it clinically.

In other words, the doctor diagnoses it based on having you do these like thumb tests, hypermobile wow tests to see how flexible you are. So she was confusing my EDS with another, but that’s her first question to me is, have you had amniocentesis? So it’s a flawed question from the start, and I said No.

And she said, well, there’s a risk of your baby rupturing his organs and arm and arms during delivery and it’s too risky and I recommend that you do not do a vaginal delivery and maybe you just wanna stay home. Kind of wow was the vibe that I was getting. So I was. Totally shocked by this. This went against everything I had been counseled by maternal fetal medicine specialists.

So for those listeners who may not know, a maternal fetal medicine specialist is an obstetrics doctor who has had years of extra training just to know high risk situations. So their whole specialty is giving consultation and helping navigate high risk pregnancies. So it was shocking to me that she was suddenly telling me, you’re too risky to do this because of your EDS.

No one else had been saying that. So I was so confused, first of all. So she said, oh, do you just wanna cancel your appointment with me this Friday? And I said, no. I mean, I, I’d like to still keep it. So I kept it. I met with her in person. I. I brought pages of re peer reviewed research again with me about EDS.

And when you say you brought peer reviewed, like the way I heard you describe it in the Birthing Instincts podcast, like it was like a full on research, like, uh, uh, a professorial level research project, right? I mean, in, in some ways, right? Because that’s like, that’s the backbone you have, right? Yes, yes. So, I mean, this is really important too, to acknowledge is I, I am a birther who carries so many layers of privilege.

White, cisgendered insured, highly educated. A researcher who has access to peer, these peer reviewed journals that cost money to have access to, I have access because of my institution, Grinnell College and accessing through my library’s accounts. You know, there’s so many women want to get information and want to know what is best practices information that I can get to help me make an informed decision.

Right. Right. That’s the whole goal of any of this reform that all of us are seeking around birthing justice is for women to be able to self-advocate, to have their wishes respected and to be able to make informed decisions about their own, about their bodies and Yeah. And their birth. So I just wanna add in here one, one piece on that, and that is that I, I like to reframe instead of using the word privilege to using the word fortunate.

And the only reason why I like to use that is because. There’s a sense that if we use the word privilege, then there’s, there’s a sense that we are victims to some other system that is disallowing us to that. And, and, and, and in a sense we’re participating in a system that is, that we are a victim of and that we can’t get out of it.

So if we shift that to, yes, you are incredibly fortunate and part of it is that you’ve chosen a life path to be in this education position. And yes, it’s true that there are certain people that maybe wanted that but weren’t able to get there. Absolutely a hundred percent. But you, yes, this is you, this is you, this is who you are, this is what you brought to the table, and these are all of the fortunate things and resources that you have.

At your disposal. So yes, thank you for that reframe. I appreciate it. Yeah, so I, I did have those resources and so I mean, it, it was, I truly felt like it was another kind of powerful spiritual moment where I felt like there was greater and higher meaning to all of those years of grad school and having to do these literature reviews where a literature review is simply finding out everything that other.

Highly skilled researchers have found out about a topic, right? That’s what a literature review is, and it’s what we do to prepare ourselves to do our own research. We wanna find out, well, what has already been done, what is known, and what are the best practices? So I felt like, wow, I have, this is the one skill I have and I can contribute to my own birthing decision making, is I know how to put together the existing research.

So I put together all of this information. So, you know, part of what’s ironic about my birthing experience is I feel like I was I ideally positioned? Mm-hmm. Due to being fortunate of enough to have access to this information. For example, I was so well positioned to self-advocate. I was so well positioned to articulate exactly my birthing goals and to say, here’s exactly the scientific, the legible reasons.

Right. The medical community here are the reasons that are legible to your community for why I want, like, legible would be legal, right? When you say legible, no, like, uh, no. Yeah, I mean, I just mean understandable. Okay. Okay. Got it. Because I was trying, when I heard you use that word, I, I haven’t heard that word used that often, but Oh yeah.

I was like, is she saying legal or readable? You know, like, understandable. Okay, got it. Yeah. So I, I think so many times there, there are so many valid reasons why women can make the decisions that they make about their birth, right? There are spiritual reasons, religious reasons, personal reasons, family reasons, ethnic reasons.

There, I mean, just a myriad cultural reasons, but the reasons that a doctor might accept and say, oh, yeah, well that’s a good reason for making that decision, right? That tends to be kind of, if it’s scientifically driven, right? If it’s absolutely backed by, backed by a medical journal. So that’s what I was coming, I was trying to frame all of my decision making as less about, for example, I wanna be emotionally connected to my baby.

That’s why I’m pushing so hard for a vaginal delivery. So with the doctor, with my conversation with her, I was less about. Focusing on those reasons, although those are valid, but I knew that to her, you know, I was trying to speak her language. So you were speaking scientism, you were, you were going with the, the medical scientism, religious.

Organization. Yeah, exactly. Let’s just put it that way. You did a great job. Exactly. So, you know, I, I told her I was aware of the risks, but to me those outweighed the risks of a c-section. And, you know, I kind of countered her. I said, listen, you are not talking about the risks to me as a woman with LERs Danlos of a C-section.

Mm-hmm. People who have EDS, especially Hypermobile. Our skin is different. It’s very stretchy, it’s kind of weird. It heals really funky from a variety of things. And after six orthopedic surgeries, I can say I am one of these people who I almost always have complications with my surgical incisions. If you think about this for a C-section, you have a huge incision in a vulnerable part of your body.

Mm-hmm. Vulnerable to infection. I know that I am highly likely to have complications with that incision. I really wanted to avoid that, to be able to care for my baby properly. So there were a bunch of reasons why I also, I wanted a vaginal delivery, but I also wanted to avoid the risks to me and to baby of a c-section.

So, so smart. I love how motivated you and for all of, all of the, all of the reasons, the, you know, for the baby, for you, for, um, spiritually, you know, kind of this connection. Like all of these reasons you’re so. I just love the way that you bring yourself so centered and focused to just knowing. Oh, I love that your cat are my cat sleeping next to me.

That’s so awesome. Yes. This is Obie. Oh, hi, Obie. Oh, I love that obs there. Okay, cool. Anyway, carry on. Sorry about that. Oh, no. So we had this conversation with the doctor. Mm-hmm. She made it clear. She said, listen, if you show up on our doorstep ready to give birth, we will not turn you away. But she also made it clear that she did not think it was a good idea.

So. I went away from that conversation having two choices. I could run back to that first doctor at the other hospital, the one who was so warm and so patient centered and so gung-ho about supporting a vaginal breach delivery. Right. So do you go with the provider who’s supportive in an institutional environment that’s not, or do you go with the institution you perceive as more supportive, but there’s a provider there who’s not supportive?

Right. And I thought to myself, I said, listen, there’s 10 doctors at this hospital. She’s one of 10. What are the chances that she’s the one on call when I go into. Into labor? Well, the spoiler alert is that she was the one on call when I went into labor. Oh, good golly. So, and and to be clear, you also had a doula too that you had hired?

Yes. Okay. Yes, I had a doula and I can’t emphasize enough how crucial she was to the positive experience that it was, and me able to ultimately being able to achieve a vaginal breach delivery. I give. So much credit to her and also credit to her and to, so this is a shout out to Hasta la uh, Lagos was my doula and she connected me with Christine Luria from Breach Without Borders.

Both of them were so generous with their time. Imagine a random, very pregnant woman reaching out last minute, right before delivery to say, hi, I’ve relocated. Is there any way you could help me navigate the, you know, Milwaukee medical system? Right. And so you went from, so just to be sure that people are picking up on this, you went from Iowa, where in Iowa is where, where is the town that you’re living in?

I am in Grinnell, which is Right. Okay. In Grinnell in the center of the state. Okay. And then you went all the way to Milwaukee, correct? I did. Yes, I do. And how far is that exactly? Oh gosh. It was I think a five or six hour drive. Okay. All right. Yeah. Yep. And you got a Airbnb there basically? Yep. I’m very grateful to have been able to stay for a week because, oh, so the reason was I thought, oh, we’ll schedule, I said.

Oh, you know, I’m, I didn’t wanna get induced, but if I wanna go to Milwaukee, I’m gonna probably have to get induced. ’cause they’ll wanna schedule it. Mm-hmm. Well, it turns out with a breach delivery, you do not want to induce, you really want a natural progression of the labor. So you want what’s called spontaneous induction, which is where your body just starts going into labor.

So that’s a little tricky, right? Mm-hmm. It meant that I needed to run to Milwaukee as soon as possible, since I could give birth at any point, right? So I went, I think a week before my due date, and then I. I was just hanging out in Milwaukee doing yoga classes at this incredible yoga studio that I found in Milwaukee.

That’s awesome. The Milwaukee yoga community was incredible. Yay. And I was just, yes, doing everything I could to, you know, start labor. I was doing the curb walks, I was eating all the dates in the world and, you know, trying to try, I didn’t go too far past my delivery date, so thankfully I was able to, but that’s another area.

See where the medical community was trying to pressure me. I did go past my due date, and especially in advanced maternal age, they’re trying to tell you, oh, well, you know, at, at this point, surely we should c-section you. Can I ask, how old are you then that they’re considering advanced maternal age? ’cause you’re not looking advanced maternal.

What? What are you, so anything past 40, I believe is the cutoff and I’m 42. Okay, got it. Yeah. That’s so interesting. So just side note, I was thinking about this because my mom and I had done some research about my grandma, my, where my grandma was born and she was a preemie and her mom was over 40 when she had her.

And they were traveling, they were moving from, oh gosh, it was across, they basically had to take a ferry through to Milwaukee across, and then they were heading south to Illinois. Oh my. So I, I’m for, anyway, but this was, you know, gosh, in 1920s or something like that. 19, yeah. Right around there. And she, so she was born just outside of Milwaukee.

My great grandma. Was That’s really that you have that story. Yeah, I know. So anyway, I was thinking about this ’cause I have no association with Milwaukee other than this. And it just came into my like field of of knowledge recently. So, and I kept looking, there were no hospitals. There were no, there was no place to birth.

So she, she had to have just given birth like in some house that they were staying at in the middle of their travels. Yes. Which is weird, right, because you were like traveling too. Yes, yes. But that was, you know, that was so normal back then. And this is part of what Christine Luria talks about in her work is we have made childbirth and pregnancy into a medical problem.

Mm-hmm. And she says it’s not a problem. This is women’s bodies. It’s a natural thing. Women used to just. Pop out a baby, you know, at home and it’s not a problem. That’s to be managed. So, uh, yeah, I was hanging out in Milwaukee waiting for spontaneous labor and getting more and more nervous because I had already made this.

Risky decision to attempt vaginal breach delivery. And then there the doctors are pressuring you that there’s added risks every day that you’re past your due date. Well, the peer literature says that due dates are very approximate and especially first time moms like myself, usually give birth after our estimated due date.

So sure enough, I ended up going into labor three days after my due date and delivering on the fourth day after the due date, I believe it was. And so now that we’re kind of at the, at the birth story, um, from start to finish, it was not a patient centered experience. It was from the doula side of things.

But I was paired with this doctor who I knew was just unsupportive of a vaginal breach delivery. I was denied access to. Water therapy, which, you know, I did not. So unmedicated means I did not do an epidural, nor did I do any intravenous IV pain meds. I did break down at one point and ask for nitrous oxide, which I side note I did not find to be particularly health helpful.

I felt like I was suffocating. You have to, you know, like hold this mask to your face to breathe it in and breathe out and you kind of feel like you’re suffocating yourself, so, right. I don’t know that it ended up helping at all, but I was trying to do an unmedicated labor and I knew that water therapy, the water tub at that hospital was going to be crucial.

They ended up denying me. They were not letting me go to the water tub and they ended up the first time. When I was begging them, they said, after you do 30 minutes of continuous fetal monitoring, then you can go, that’s an illegal quid pro quo that they’re putting forward for a basic relief from pain that I was requesting.

That’s and the reasons for this. That’s interesting. Why. So explain that. Why is it an illegal quid pro quo? What? ’cause I’m, well, yeah, I wanna understand that better. They were basically trying to bargain with me as a patient, right? So when I initially arrived, I was all for continuous fetal monitoring with wireless electronic nodes.

So they had these stickers that they put all over my belly. We got them all applied. The nurse was wonderful. She was so caring. I explained, Hey, I have EDS. My skin is super sensitive. Usually I get rashes for weeks from things like the electrodes during surgery. So she was very gentle in scrubbing me down beforehand, took all this care, got the whole set on me.

The doctor who was gonna deliver me came in for the first time and she was very annoyed. She said, take that all off. ’cause she wanted to do an ultrasound to check baby’s position. She didn’t ask the nurse, she didn’t ask me. She didn’t ask the nurse anything about this. The nurse had just taken 20 minutes to apply this.

Wow. So the doctor has this all torn off my body to do her quick ultrasound, and then I was waiting for over an hour and a half for another set of these wireless monitors. After an hour and a half of my pain escalating and me screaming and crying and begging and asking, where is this monitoring? They tell me that was the last set in the whole hospital.

They said that the set that had been put on me and torn off was the only set in the whole hospital and that it had been used up. So at that point, that sounds like seriously suspicious, to be honest with you, it sounds very suspicious. Their official report, you know, I, I did eventually submit a complaint and part of their reply to me said that due to supply chain issues, they had run out and they were going to try to fix their system.

So at least they would know that they had run out in the future. So that’s their official line is yes, they had run out and somehow they didn’t have any clue that they had put the last set in the whole hospital on me. But they tried to switch me. I call it, I forget the medical name, but any woman who’s been pregnant mm-hmm.

Will recognize the hockey puck. Yeah. Fetal monitors that get exactly strapped on you with an elastic. So this is what they wanted to do. I told them I’m fine with intermittent monitoring, not continuous. And it was because it was so painful. Can I ask you, like also your, did you, were you okay with being monitoring just because you were in their sort of world?

I mean, if you did, did you want the monitoring for your own kind of, you know, reassurance that everything, yeah. Like what was the reasoning behind choosing that for yourself? For me, I, or being okay with it. Yeah. I. I did want some periodic monitoring just to make sure. Okay. Baby’s not in fetal distress.

Originally, I liked the idea of the continuous electronic monitoring, maybe mostly because it was wireless, so I knew that I could go in and out of the tub. Right? These hockey puck monitors are just like, you can’t do, they’re the movement. Terrible. They’re terrible, they’re terrible. You can’t do the movement you wanna do.

So it, with the continuous wireless monitoring, it wasn’t so much that I wanted continuous, it was more I wanted the benefit of wireless, then that wasn’t available. So I said, okay. But intermittently, it became this battle where this doctor constantly was ordering the doctors to put the hockey puck on me.

I was trying to tell them that every time they were doing it between contractions and. I was having back labor, the whole delivery, so I was pretty much scream. I lost my voice during delivery. I was screaming through every contraction. I never thought that. I could scream that loud. And my only relief was I usually only had like anywhere from two to four minutes of relief between contractions.

And the pain was feeling overwhelming because again, I had not been given any hydrotherapy and had no medication. So it was getting worse and worse and was escalating. And every time they touched me with that hockey puck, they started a new contraction. My baby would react and kick. Yeah. That’s right because he was breach and they kept trying to put the hockey puck right where his head was.

Oh, poor God. And I knew from, yes, I knew from my whole pregnancy that he kicked and reacted whenever those were put by his head. And I was trying to tell them, put it somewhere else. Please don’t do this. They, it felt like they were robbing me of the only pain relief I had, which was the break between contractions.

Right. So I was telling them, no, I was. Having to swat them away. What about your doula? Was your doula able to stand up for you or not? I mean in that, in that she was specific? Yeah, not, I’m not saying she wasn’t there for you because I heard you say how powerful she was and how important she was in this situation, and I know in the other interview I heard you say that she was always making sure that she was right in front of you in your face because you were often on your hands and knees because that’s helpful in breach, but that, was she able to actually advocate for you or was that something that she It was just.

She was over prob maybe overwhelmed in that capacity too. You know, I think she was maybe overwhelmed. I think her focus was more on supporting me and helping me to breathe because I was having so much trouble with the pain. She was really focused on coaching my breathing right, and. Yeah. And my partner, you know, my partner knew my birth plan also and knew my preferences and, and didn’t really, I wanna mention that too.

You just mentioned your birth plan. Yeah. So two things we wanna, we wanna mention what your birth plan and how you brought that to the hospital and made it Yes. Basically a document that is part, you know, a crucial document that became part of this. And also we need to go into your history too. Yes.

Because we’re getting to the point where that’s gonna be important. So, yeah. So I knew, you know, I’ve done years of therapy for it, but I am a sexual assault survivor from an assault in my twenties when I was on a study abroad program. And I have lived with PTSD for years and years now, and I feel like I have a.

Great understanding of it, a good handle on it. And I feel like I know how to get ahead of things and be aware of setting myself up for success in situations that could be triggering. And I was feeling in a really great place going into birth in terms of not being re-traumatized, feeling wonderfully connected with my body, feeling really ready for birth and feeling really confident.

’cause you know, I had faith in the hospital that if I just advocate strongly enough, my wishes will be respected. So I came in with a birth plan. I uploaded it to my MyChart. It was an official document and in it I specifically added, I tailored it and I added a blurb to the section on the doctor touching you, where I said, patient has a history of sexual assault, sexual assault, survivor, please only touch.

After notifying me and if medically necessary. Mm-hmm. So I was asking, please only touch my private parts if medically necessary. And this was also a good thing to have in my birth plan. Mm-hmm. Because everything that’s known about vaginal breach deliveries says that unlike cephalic deliveries or head down deliveries in a breach delivery, the main.

Ethos is doctors need to sit on their hands, keep your hands off. ’cause when you touch the baby, you can startle the baby and you can cause complications. Mm-hmm. So the number one rule is, unless there’s a serious complication, a doctor shouldn’t be having their hands on the birthing person. Anyway. So this was, I thought this is a great thing to have for a number of reasons.

Please don’t touch me. That, that, that adds a whole new, I didn’t know that. And that adds a whole new kind of spiritual element to me that your baby actually was gifting you the opportunity to have this birth without people invading your space by doing it that way. I didn’t think about it that way.

That’s a really lovely way to frame it. It’s true though, like, yeah. I mean spirit, I mean the, the, the baby, the baby’s spirit. Is working with who it’s coming into, right? Yeah. And so it’s has some level of communication there. Like, okay, my mama needs this, so I need my mama to be strong. I’m gonna come this way.

But also, you know, of course the experience. Well, you, you keep going. Yeah. Oh, I just love the way you framed that. That puts a really positive, positive lens on what happened. And that’s what I try and keep in mind. You know, we can hold that there are negative things that happen to us in birth and we can also still hold that.

It’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to us and all the wonderful aspects of it. Like that. You just mentioned, and the nurses told you when you came in, you mentioned to them, I have uploaded my birth plan. Yes. I heard you say in the last time, I didn’t get, hear this drawn out, but they, that they, their response was great.

We’ll, we’ll see if we can get the doctor to look at it. We’ll see if we can get the doctor to look at it. Well, I don’t know. I, I don’t know if I was directly quoting them, but they were supportive ’cause I asked them, I said, can you please make sure that my doctor sees it? And they conveyed all of the best intentions, the nurses.

And I truly believe that at this hospital, the nurses felt caught, the nurses wanted to care. They wanted to give good care, consensual care. This doctor was telling them loudly to, for example, docu. She told them loudly, document that the patient is declining fetal monitoring. Right. When I would say, please don’t, please, no.

So just to close the loop on the hydrotherapy and the quid pro quo. Sure. So I was laboring in great pain for about two, two hours without the access to this water tub that I had requested. Because we were waiting, ostensibly, we were waiting for me to get the monitors on and then go to the tub. So I was hanging out for an hour and a half.

Then they tell me, you know, there’s no monitor left for you. That’s wireless. You have to do the hockey pucks. So I said, okay, intermittent. So that’s when they said I, and I said, I wanna go to the tub. When the second they told me there’s no monitors available, I was like, like, okay, I’m not waiting anymore.

Let’s go to the tub. And they said, first doctor wants you to do 30 minutes of continuous monitoring and then you can go to the tub. So this is a quid pro quo. They’re saying You only get pain relief if you do what we want. Not, not the patient’s wishes if you do what we want, which went against my request for intermittent monitoring.

And so I begged them and I like, I was just crying and at that point I think my doula was advocating for me and so we went to the tub. The tub was amazing. Amazing. Right, right. It did. Yes. Oh my God. Especially water is so magical. Yeah, and that’s where, you know, my doula really shined. She was doing all the right things to maximize the water relief and pouring it on me and coaching me.

So that helped for quite a while and I reached the point my labor was progressing really well. I will say that unmedicated and without the epidural, I reached the point they say that women, I was prepared for the point where, you know, all women. Give up and we’re like, I can’t do it. And that’s when they say, oh, you’re crowning and here’s your baby.

So it usually happens towards the end, almost right before the woman gives birth. I, I, I said this in the other podcast as well. I reached that point well before, well before he was being born, where I was absolutely desperate. And it was really the lack of pain relief. And I think it was the fact that I was denied the hydrotherapy for so long.

I had already reached my pain threshold. Early into the labor. So I had exhausted my reserves for what I could tolerate, and that’s where I really do credit my doula with helping me cope because I was absolutely desperate. And you know, she, she told me, you just, you have to get through it. The only way out is through this, this delivery and, and through this pain and breathing through it.

So I credit her, um, but I was progressing really well with this coached breathing, gentle breathing from my doula. She was helping me keep, and I would feel the benefits of her coaching. When you’re in a lot of pain, you kind of go up into this high screeching, or at least I did, right? I think all women are different, and she helped me ground it into the low sounds that really encourage fetal movement.

Mm-hmm. Everything was going great. We moved, we reached the point where we moved back into the laboring, the tiny laboring room that they put me in, and I was on my knees facing away, um, like, uh, holding on to the bed that was propped up. So I was kind of facing away from where the doctor was and facing the back of the room.

Um, and on my knees laboring and. At a certain point things were progressing great, and I’m the one, when I was in the tub, I felt my baby’s foot and it was the most magical thing to feel and to know like, wow, this is working. And we hadn’t been touched, you know, we were doing this just, just boden and I were working through this together and it was the most magical thing where, you know, I was like, it’s happening.

So that’s when we moved in into the hospital room was once I felt the foot, because unlike some other hospital, a few hospitals that I’ve heard of. Mm-hmm. This hospital allows hydrotherapy but does not allow vaginal delivery in the water. Right. Right. Because there are certain risks as that the medical community associates with it.

Right. Absolutely. I understand. Um, so we moved back into the room, pushing was going great and then. At a certain point, the doctor who always stayed behind me, so I’m facing away from her. I never see her face. I just hear her kind of loudly telling me things. She started telling me, hold your breath. Push, push hard, hold your breath.

And I thought. I, part of my birth plan was, no, it’s called purple pushing. Mm-hmm. When you hold your breath, it’s, it’s kind of like, you know, you’re taught not to hold your breath when you have a bowel movement. Right. It can really tear out your pelvic floor. It felt that same way. It felt wrong to do.

Mm-hmm. And I knew from my prep that it’s very bad for EDS patients to purple push because it leads to increased rates of tearing. But I’m in, I’m way past my threshold of pain, right? I’m in a vulnerable position. I’m in the middle of pushing out a baby. So all that goes through my head is, oh, it is something going wrong.

Something must be going wrong. Why is she telling me to purple push? I, and I just went into like comply mode. Mm-hmm. I was like, I just have to do what she’s telling me and she’s saying it so loudly and ordering me and nobody else was telling me otherwise. So I just started purple pushing and looking back like the normal non.

Past her pain threshold, me would’ve said, absolutely not. Don’t you see my birth plan? Right. I don’t wanna be purple pushing right now. I’m gonna tear, which I did, I did tear I to, I tore badly. But your instincts, I just wanna add like Yeah, I mean that’s like such a, a natural at that point, if you think about it in terms of nature and like if, if, if, uh, an animal is giving birth in the wild and they’re being, you know, invaded in some way, their space is being invaded and there’s basically no turning back.

You can’t pull that baby back in at this point. There’s certain things that happen in birth where when there is in, in kind of invasive procedures or invasive people or whatever, the labor will literally just stop. And yes, mom will just stop everything and they’ll call it. Failure to progress, you know, or whatever.

But there was no turning back at this point. And that’s, and that would, if an animal was in the wild, they would basically see, I, the only way out of this situation is to have this baby and whatever I need to do to get the baby out at this point, and then get the baby in my hands and then get the heck outta dodge.

Right. So you were, I just wanna honor the fact that. As we all, I think everybody that’s, that will be watching this can see how powerfully connected you are to your voice and to advocating for yourself and the hard work that you’ve done behind being a survivor of the trauma that you went through. But when we’re in that vulnerable place, and it’s terrible.

It’s terrible. And this is where I wanna just introduce the word and we’re, and we’ll get more into this, but this is obstetrical violence that is about to come to the table here. Yeah. And we need to take those words seriously. Everyone. This is not, this is, we’ve heard the words domestic violence, you know, that’s a very common term.

Or what are some of the other ones in your line of work? Other types of violence. I mean, you know, sexual violence, sexual, the whole spectrum of sexual violence. Right. Which includes so much, but yeah. But we haven’t really been ex exposed to this term obstetrical violence, and it is a real thing. And we, and that’s what I want to bring forward.

So anyway, carry on. Thank you. Thank you. And I’m so glad that you introduced that term, and you’re absolutely right. I was so fortunate to be connected with a lawyer who I spoke with, who she’s, she might be the only lawyer in the whole country who specializes in helping women whose consent has been violated during labor.

Really? Wow. Yes. Incredible. And she made the amazing point that. Birthing is like this area that feminism left behind. Exactly. Because we went through third wave feminism was all about asserting the right not to mother not to have children. That you don’t have to do this, you can be more than a mother.

Mm-hmm. And so we moved our efforts outside of this domestic realm and the birthing realm, and we kind of left it untouched and left the way women are treated while birthing, untouched by the efforts of feminism. And this is, you know, unfortunately obstetric violence has a long history and we’re only now starting to talk about it.

So it’s really important that we do. So the purple pushing was kind of the first thing where in my mind I was just confused and trying to figure out. I was like, well, she must have, again, I defaulted to doctors are the authority they know and defaulted to. Well, she must have a good reason for overriding my wishes and making me purple push.

It turns out I spoke with the doula later. The doula thinks this doctor was just bored. You know, the doctor didn’t, the doctor wanted to do a quick C-section and be done with it. That was, yeah. She wanted to c-section me at any opportunity that she could. And she just, luckily, thankfully Boden showed that he was strong, never gave her the opportunity to say he’s at risk and had a strong delivery so that she had no opportunity to try to c-section me.

But, you know, I think that was probably her wishes. And she was just ready to get the baby out. Mm-hmm. Is what it seemed like. I don’t know. Hundred percent. I, I, I wasn’t able to have a conversation with this doctor. Well, she would spin it, she would spin it another way. It also makes me sick to my stomach that it’s another woman.

Yeah. Yeah. So again, I’m faced away from this doctor. At no point am I seeing her. She doesn’t kind of treat me like a person and come around to the front to talk to me, you know, to go within, there’s so much research showing that birthing women, you’re so, you can’t see me, but your, your realm of focus becomes very narrow.

Yeah. And you’re on your hands and knees just reminding people this, so like your, like literal backside is to her, like she’s just looking at your bottom. Exactly. Exactly. And my doula is the one, you know, right in front of my face coaching me, and I’m just having these barked orders at me from behind to purple Push.

I’m progressing so well it, nobody is conveying any emergency situation. There is no emergency. The baby is progressing exactly as he should, probably faster than he should because I’m purple pushing. And we get to the point where his whole, everything came out except for the head is the last part. So it’s the final moments of the birth.

And again, I just wanna say it was on, they captured this on video and it’s behind the paywall on the Birthing Instincts podcast for educational purposes. They break down with another woman. I, I forget what her credentials are, but she’s specializes in breach, I believe, and the different maneuvers, and they’re breaking that down and.

It’s such a beautiful birth. It really is. Like, he’s just like sliding out so perfectly. I just wanna say like, it’s so, so sweet. Oh, thank you. It, it was, and, and I’m also so. So fortunate that my doula recorded this birth because, you know, the official narrative of the hospital was nothing went wrong.

Everything met standard of care, and the doctor left. What I’m about to describe, she left it off of her own medical notes about the birth. So in her official account, this never happened, but the video shows that after his whole body comes out, you know, the head is what needs to come out next. Now, a main risk in a breach delivery is something called head entrapment, but that’s where the head is stuck and there’s no movement and it’s clear the whole body has come out and there’s a long, like, there’s a minute going by.

There’s no head coming, right? That’s not what happened. The body came out and then with almost no pause, this doctor did something called a ricken maneuver, which is supposed to be done only in an emergency where the head is trapped and it, what I experienced is that at the moment of my son’s birth, she.

Violently shoved her hand inside of my rectum and pushed really hard. Mm-hmm. Uh, this was hands down the most painful part of the entire delivery and I did tear during delivery and I kind of explained on the podcast, the other podcast birthing instincts, but I was, because the pain was so intense when she did to me, I was convinced that I had torn in that moment.

Now I understand that is probably not the case, but it’s an indication of the pain that I felt that it was actually more painful than whenever my tearing happened. And there’s a couple pieces to this too, like one, your sexual assault history involved. Anal rape. Yes. And so people need to understand, I’m sorry to be just blunt about that.

Yeah. So I just, but I think it’s an important piece that people understand that you clearly put this on your birth plan. Yes. And, and there’s no need for the doctor to do this maneuver because if you watch the video, it’s super clear that the baby is on its way out. His face, his face, his nose is out. He can breathe if he needed to, if he chose to start taking Aaron to his lungs right at that moment, he could do it.

And it’s at that point that she not only goes in your backside, but she’s pushing on the most sacred part of a baby’s head. Which is like where your, the soft spot is, you know, which is still open. And in many cultures that’s considered really quite a sacred space. It just, it reeks of absolute violence, not just towards the mom, but towards the baby too.

When I watched it, yes. I was just like, oh my God. Yeah. So I understand they have to do that in some situations. I do get that. I do understand that. Yeah. Like it, that, that, that, I, I guess I shouldn’t say have to because it’s always the mother’s choice. Yeah. It’s all, it just always is gonna be the mother’s choice and she’s gonna pick the situation and the providers that she’s around that are gonna potentially be respectful of her choices in that and that there’s good communication.

But tell us about. The the lack of consent. Yeah. And also the lack of the fact that you were not on any pain medication and so therefore there was a lot of pain. Yes. So even if there had been an emergency, like let’s say that this was a warranted maneuver, there’s always, as, as the trained midwives in breach practices say, there’s always time to go up to the mother’s face and say, Hey Laura, the head is stuck.

I need to do a maneuver to free him. Are you okay with that? You know, this needs to happen now. Mm-hmm. To check in to, or to at least, even if then the next layer, if you’re not gonna ask for. A heads up, a warning, any kind of verbal information. So I wasn’t taken completely by surprise, and this truly felt like it, it ruined what was the most perfect, magical delivery that I could have asked for.

You know, I didn’t even care about all the other violated consent around the monitoring, the hydrotherapy. The fact was, you know, Boden and I had done this delivery together. Nobody had touched us. We were laboring together. And then at the most magical moment, which is when your baby comes out out of your body completely, that’s when she assaulted me.

Yeah. And it just, and, and part of the pain. So Christine Lauria is the one who, the midwife with Breach Without Borders, who kind of walks through that video and explains what happened. She explained that. You women usually don’t feel as much pain when it is a medically necessary procedure because the baby is pressing on the rectum and it can actually provide some relief because the head is entrapped at an angle pressing on the rectum.

But when the procedure is unwarranted, that pressure isn’t there and it’s simply painful for the mother. Yes. It isn’t providing relief. There isn’t counter pressure from the baby pushing up on the rectum. Right. So it was simply an unwarranted, painful procedure. And my guess is in that case, it might’ve stemmed just from the lack of familiarity and comfort that doctor had with breach deliveries and maybe nervousness.

I don’t know. I don’t, I mean, I don’t know. My sense is, I mean, I believe it to be a power dynamic. I just believe it’s inherent. It’s it an, it’s a sad place. That is built into the inherent structure of the obstetrical industrial medical model right now. Yes. Which is that I am in charge, I deliver the baby, I gotta have my hands on this.

She doesn’t get to do it herself. She will be thankful that I saved her. And that is the dynamic and what bothers me the most about it is that it, one, it traumatizes you regardless of the trauma that you’ve had before, which makes this all the more terrible. But it also traumatized because of that.

There’s like an energetic trauma that is, that is being infused into the baby at the same time around. Mm-hmm. The medical system that sets up this structure of this savior complex and a space of being beholden to a medical system for the freaking rest of your life. That then you therefore think that you can’t take care of yourself.

You have to go to somebody else, that your intuition is not good enough. You know? And obviously I. I, I know and I know it with you. You know, you, this will have the absolute opposite effect. You’re probably gonna do everything you can to stay away. Yes. But I’m so glad you’re bringing it to the systemic problem.

’cause it, it’s, first of all, it’s not just this provider. It’s a system that, you know, they’re, they’re used to. I, I felt like I was treated like cattle. And I honestly think that I, it was kind of this exception because she like forgot that I’m not the default who has an epidural. So I think the default in this system is it’s okay to treat these women any way you want because they have an epidural.

Right. So I think her, the, there. That hospital system is used to treating, birthing women, kind of like cattle first, convincing them they need the epidural, convincing them they need the sec C-section. And then when they’re numbing, these women that sort of in their mind eliminates the need to have these conversations around consent.

Like, how else do you think it’s okay to do this to a patient without even talking to the patient first? Yeah. And then why is it that the doctor’s notes are so detailed about every other procedure that happened in birth and she left this off of her notes, like it didn’t happen. Yeah. That also, yeah, and that’s another piece that she did.

She did not put in that she did this move, this written move. She, yes, she left that out of her notes. So if I didn’t have that video documentation, it would be a medical doctor’s word against mine. Right. About this having never happened in her mind and me having evidence. So that’s kind, I kind of view that as counter surveillance, right?

In the face of a hospital system that wants to deny doing obstetric harm. Mm-hmm. I am very fortunate that this was documented, and I have to be honest, that’s a primary reason why I finally, you know, in my assault that happened in my twenties, I was just in a different point in life where I didn’t feel capable of advocating for myself after it happened and it was just so complex on a study abroad program thinking about accessing police structures and more.

But this was a circumstance where I felt. I wish it were en enough without the technology evidence, but the technology for me was what tipped it over. Having that video evidence was enough to say, it wasn’t in my head because initially before I saw the video I was trying to tell. Even my partner, I was trying to tell him, I said, she did this to me, she did this to me.

And he said, well, I didn’t see it. I believe you, but I didn’t see it. Right. Oh wow. That’s brutal. And I feel like that’s kind of how it is. You know, we don’t believe women and the hospital system, the medical system, we know, there’s so much research that shows that systematically and historically, it denies women’s pain and doesn’t listen to women’s own stories about what their condition is.

Right. We negate that knowledge, so I feel really lucky to have that video evidence. Yes, absolutely. And I know, I know you, you only have childcare. Like we’ve gone beyond, we didn’t get to the next part of this. So I mean, it, it, I really would like to. If we need to reschedule this or do, I mean, do it, do a second episode, I think.

Yeah. I’m happy to follow up, important that we do a second chat on this regarding your choices to pursue this, and I’d love to hear all of the updates if there are any, you know. Sure. But you did take it, you did decide to file a complaint and there is a whole other piece of this story. So should we just Yes.

Take this to part two at a Sounds great. At another point and reschedule. Sounds wonderful. I feel really good though. I feel like we did a good honoring of your whole story by taking the time to go through that. How are you feeling about that? I’m feeling good about it. Thank you. And I appreciate the time in the space to properly contextualize what happened.

Okay. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, okay great. Lynn, you and I will be in touch and we will, we’ll set another time. Sounds, and thank you so much. I just, I know you’re gonna wanna rush off and be with Boden, but I just wanna say thank you so much for coming on and I really am so grateful for you just sharing your heart and your, this very intimate moment and this very vulnerable space.

And yeah, you’re a beautiful woman, a beautiful mother, and I’m just really honored to know you and continue this relationship. Thank you Margaret. I really appreciate it and I have loved getting to know about your podcast and I just love the work that you do and love that so much of the emphasis is on returning people to their intuition, to our ancestral habits and knowledge and valuing these other forms of knowing that are the forms of knowing that are devalued by the medical community.

So I really appreciate everything you do. Ah, well thank you. And you’re a big part of this. I’m so, so, anyway, have a wonderful day with Boden. You too. Thank you. And we’ll be in touch real soon. Okay, sounds good. Take care. Bye. So grateful for Laura and her willingness to come forward with such deep sharing around her experience.

There is so much more to her story that follows. So there’s just a lot of teasing out of what transpired her choice to pursue. Holding accountable, the doctor and the hospital, and all of the challenges that are in a path for true accountability to be obtained. There are jurisdictional issues for law enforcement at play and multiple layers of politics and contractual agreements and licensing.

It’s my wish that Laura and I get to discuss all of this in a second episode, which I know we’re gonna be able to do, so you’ll just have to come back and listen to that one and stay tuned. We will try to get that set up sooner than later, and we’ll just know that it will happen in divine right timing as we wanna honor Laura’s special time with Boin during her maternity leave as well.

Laura shares in this episode that hospital birth was what she was most comfortable with. But she also acknowledges in the podcast that she did with birthing instincts, that there are midwives that are okay with her breach birth situation, and she could have opted for those, but she chose to find a hospital because that’s where she felt most comfortable given her story.

The other piece I would like to point out is that when the doctor comes over to ask for consent, oftentimes it has seemed to me when it’s been put forward by people, even with what I think Laura shared in this episode, that it’s really framed in the form of a statement and not a question. So what I mean by that is that the doctor will say, I’m going to perform this move now as it is needed.

And so they’re informing the patient. That doesn’t really feel like consent to me, but everybody seems to be talking. This is just what I’m hearing people say that they’re comfortable with. I hear this on I, I feel like I’ve heard this, so apologize if I’m misquoting, but I feel like I’ve heard this on the Birthing Instincts podcast too, where it’s sort of standard procedure to be accepted.

If you just tell, tell your client or your patient what you’re gonna do, that’s considered consent, but that just seems like information to me that doesn’t feel like consent. Consent to me is more like, I need to do this maneuver right now. Is that okay with you? That really puts the mother as the ultimate authority and they get to say yes or no.

Now, there’s a lot of pieces where. The practitioner or the doctor or the care provider, whatever, they will feel like they have more medical knowledge or more basis for making the correct decision around that. And therefore, in a quote unquote emergency situation, they will, they just need to be able to act and perform that move.

But that’s not consent. To me, that’s not the mother is the ultimate authority. And they’re basing this really on this idea of a very materialist, scientism based medical industrial framework, if you will, in that. They’re not taking into consideration the fact that the mother may be in tune with the baby on a more spiritual level, on another non materialistic based description of what’s transpiring between the mother and baby.

Maybe she’s getting messages from the baby that says, no, we gotta wait five minutes. Or maybe the baby. And again, this goes back to being comfortable with death. Birth is gonna involve death. And I feel like we talked about this in the couple of episodes I did with talking with a death doula, and then my episode on death.

I’m forgetting the name of that one, but you can go back and listen to it. But even when we’re talking about birth, it’s so important to be comfortable with the fact that we don’t get to. Nobody gets to play God. And then it leads into your own spirituality. Who’s the one to decide this? And in my opinion, the baby and the mom are making that decision.

They are the ultimate authority. And unfortunately, we have allowed these other structural systems to invade that very sacred space, that sacred moment, that sacred bonding of a mother and a baby, and given away that power for these other entities to make decisions on our behalf because they supposedly are the experts.

And I absolutely disagree. The mother is the ultimate authority. End of story. They try to manipulate a mother into believing that everyone else knows what’s best for the baby, and that she should listen to everyone else and she might put her baby at risk. And no one else besides a mama is going to be in touch with this aspect.

So yeah, the mother is the ultimate authority and I would really love to inspire all those of you that are possibly pregnant or know someone who is, remind them of this. Remind them that they are the ultimate authority, and it’s not just in birth, but in all aspects of our medical choices. We are the ultimate authority.

We know what’s right for us. So they, there’s a lot of weird coercion and threatening that is inherently based in this medical model, which is why, in my opinion, it’s best to stay out of it at all costs. So in staying out of it, we’re removing ourselves from a system and therefore in some ways we’re recreating the system of ultimate authority in our own health, right?

We’re doing that. We’re building this new system of health creation at the same time, but we still have to take into account that there are gonna be times where there are little pieces where we choose to enter into that jurisdiction, if you will, and making contractual agreements with these entities.

Because of that, we need to be aware of how to advocate for ourselves and how to navigate those situations, and unfortunately, sometimes it’s gonna end not so well, and I’m sad to say that has happening. Very often these days. So it’s not just obstetrical violence that I’m talking about, although that is such, to me, that’s like the ultimate, that is the ultimate piece.

This is the trauma that we need to stop immediately. We stop this trauma, we stop so much of the proliferation of this. If we can empower, really the moms at this point, but the fathers too, the fathers are being traumatized by this as well. So it’s not, let’s just not forget that. That’s a whole piece that we can talk about with Laura too.

There’s got to be some kind of level of trauma that was there that her partner probably felt like not able to protect her from this situation, and that happens. That happens no matter what with Laura or other aspects of obstetrical violence. It’s hugely terrible for a man who is the protector generally in the relationship.

To have that peace. So there’s a whole fracture that happens right there that’s really important to breathe life back into. And so one of the ways we do this is by exposing it, right? And so right now, obviously, like we’re gonna hear from Laura, but her experience with bringing this to the medical, her medical complaint process, her filing of a police report, all of these things.

And her, and again, she’s very familiar having done this, and she’s interviewed these types of agencies as part of her sociology research that’s very specific that she’s. Interacted with these systems, so it’s gonna be really interesting to talk to her about that. But that’s obviously really hard for a new mom who’s wanting to build the family, et cetera.

I touched on that in the interview, and so I wanna give you guys a place, which I mentioned previously in episode 43 when I interviewed Patricia Hernandez Stalder, that if you have, uh, a medical incident report that you wanna file just on the Yin-care® Podcast, on the on Yin-care®’s website, we’ve moved it to be more accessible.

It is now under the resources section, just as a dropdown, you’ll be able to click through, you can share with us your medical incident report, whether it’s an obstetrical violence incident or another incident, and I wanna extend. This whole idea of things that happen during the birth to post-birth. So it’s happening to women once they bring their babies home.

If they chose not to give their babies injections, then oftentimes child and protective services will come and follow up. Or not just with that, but if they chose to come home early, they left before certain mile markers were met by the procedures of the hospital, et cetera. They are reported to Child Protective Services.

So I wanna hear about those incidents. I know everybody does. We gotta freaking project Veritas. This shit basically. Okay, so share this episode with people, direct them to this resource. Let’s get these reports filing in, let’s. Start making, there’s a link in there to put in any images. If you have, like Laura said, one of the most powerful tools was her ability, her doula video, I wanna say videotaped all the time.

So old school, whatever, recorded it. So even if you have an audio, you need this for your protection. So if you’re going to a hospital that’s saying you can’t bring in, you can’t video that. That needs to like set off, first of all, an alarm bell. And then secondly, you gotta bring in some kind of secret camera, I’m sorry to say, but you have to be able to record these things to protect yourself.

This is about your own, you’re not bringing in, okay, I know that there’s controversy over guns, right? I live in Wyoming, so it’s a totally different place here for that. But you literally have to protect yourself at this point. So. Arm yourself with a freaking private camera. It’s for your own good. Okay? So figure that out.

If anyone finds a great, I don’t know, hidden camera, then you gotta show it to me and tell me so I can let people know where to get these things. Anyway, share with me your health or medical incident report. We also have a sovereign health choice report. So if you have chosen to not take the advice of your usually Western medical professionals and have decided to be guided by your own womb wisdom, your own intuition, I wanna hear about that too.

So there are two different forms on that, under the resources page that you can go to, so please fill that out. We really have felt for too long, like our hands are tied in these situations, coming home and wanting to be good. Mamas we are with our babies and reeling from the traumas that took place and then.

Guess what? It just keeps happening because we are busy, but it’s not getting any better. In fact, it’s actually getting worse. Okay. Horribly worse. So please use these. All right, and let’s see. Alright, shameless plug here. Please subscribe to the channel like this episode people. This was really a powerful episode.

Comment on it. Let us know what you think, what questions you have. What was the most interesting point for you? What specifically did you like about it that you wanna hear more about? Let me know. This is something I’m deeply passionate about and would love to bring more to the table, so let me know about that and share, share, share this episode around.

We really need to get it this out there. It’s such a deeply and profoundly important message. If you haven’t already signed up for the newsletter for Yin-care®, which also gets you the free WOM empowerments, please head on over to Yin-care®.com. It will be the first popup that you see, so you can just sign up super easily.

It’ll just come right on your screen. Um, and we wanna get you access to that free meditation and affirmation so you can really fortify your journey in connecting deeper to your own womb wisdom. And also be sure to check out on Yin-care®.com. The Yin-care®s Herbal Wash is now available in our Womb Wisdom Store for the 100 M bottle and the 180 mil bottle, this is particularly a time of year when you may be wanting to use incare.

It is an exacerbated time of year for damp and damp heat conditions, and oftentimes in the vaginal area and rectal area, you’re just gonna get a lot of extra damp. Damp heat conditions. So if you find that things are just. Not quite in balance. You can just nudge them right back in balance with In Care’s Herbal Wash at that 10% dilution.

If you have any questions about that, you can always fill out the Contact us form and we will assist in directing you in how to use it appropriately as best we can, or suggest that you work with usually a Chinese medical care provider that’s familiar with our product or other. Okay. We also have a whole new line of supplements that will be coming very soon in the coming weeks, have patients, but they have great names like Estro Harmony, agile Essentials, radiant Essentials, UT Clear Sena, pause, RU Balance.

UT Support Blossom Biome and more. Yes, it’s gonna be amazing, all in the Yin-care® line. We also have our signature Yao formula for high altitude sickness. It’s a wonderful remedy. Excellent. If you’re going hiking in the mountains, doing some of those bigger, higher altitude hikes over the summer, or if you’re sensitive to altitudes when you’re flying, Altogen is excellent for that.

That is also on our Womb Wisdom store, and be sure to check out the affiliate store as well. While you’re there, thanks everyone for listening today. It was excellent sharing this all with you. Until next time, I’m Margaret Jacobson, the Mother Rising, and you’ve been listening to the Yin-care® podcast. And remember, honor yourself, celebrate your strengths.

And empower your transformation with your Yin-care®.