Pictorial History of Betrayal of Women

In the past seven years of study of birth psychology and in healing my own birth and the births of my four children, all born in US hospitals from 1975-1993, I have come to observe what I call, “The Feminine Betrayal.” It came up in my healing as the “Feminine Betrayers in White” – those nurses who participated in taking the power away from women in birth. Nurses who held my mother down, drugging her, watching and supporting men to violate her, and then it happened to me in birthing my first child, and to lessor degrees in each subsequent birth.

My father was present in my birth, rare for 1956, but common now. Which is worse? To be out in the waiting room for hours and hours and not know what your wife has gone through -- drugged, unspoken violation, but that he'll have to live with thereafter as she lives and acts out her feelings of betrayal and powerlessness. Or, is it more demoralizing to be a witness to the violation of their partner and unable to intervene as men are now?

I am concerned for the men who powerlessly watch their wives tied down, drugged, overpowered, probed by strangers, and their baby treated with careless brutality (in the name of medicine to do unnecessary interventions such as weighing, scrubbing, eye ointments, etc.) How does this play out in intimacy between the couple and in how their baby feels protected and nurtured by them, or not? NO WHERE else in society will a man watch strangers do what medical caregivers do to his partner and child without becoming a raging protector. Parents of a newborn -- tired, exhilarated, hormonal -- watch helplessly in a daze the brutal treatment of their baby that would be hotlinable behavior in any other situation.

Women in white (now green, blue, and purple) brutalize a baby in his or her first moments of life -- the neonatal nurse who laughed wickedly and loudly to my grandson (who had resisted even the gentle checking of the male neonatal doctor) as she stuck tubing down his throat, “You can ruuuuuun from the doctor, butcha can’t hide from the nurse.” – they are betrayers of the feminine.

Forty years of indoctrinated training promoting the drugging of women in labor and birth, and our society is oblivious to the harm to the newborn baby. Look at the pressure on the cheeks of this baby to the right. Look how his arms are in a helpless posture, his abdomen sucked in. He is being traumatized. He is not breathing. He is in shock which will stay in his NERVOUS system as his body, brain, and soul is recording everything.

Is it possible we don’t trust each other as women because of the generations of violation to us women and our babies by WOMEN in medicine? Are they themselves not extremely wounded? On a really bad day (like watching the violation of my grandson or other babies) I liken them to Charles Manson’s girls, and some days more victimish themselves, like Patty Hearst. None of these young women started out to be killers or a bank robber with her kidnappers.

Either way, ppowerlessness begins with the simple, with trust or lack of options, and is coupled with increased brainwashing, and it simultaneously creates women who carry out the dirty work against other women.

None of the woman who fell into bad situations with violent men, nor those in white, those angels of mercy, and wonderful women who were the first nurses planned or intended to harm other women. Quite the opposite. They intended to be caregivers. The treatment of women in the male dominated system (feelings denied, voices silenced) leads to the mistreatment BY WOMEN of OTHER WOMEN in the medical birth machine. It is a condition of the male dominated usurption of birth from the realm of women. Sadly, it is institutionalized into the medical and nursing training so that it is SO ACCEPTED as NORMAL-- for forty years going on one hundred -- that women numbly do it and never question authority -- even today in 2006. Where are the feminists? And, why are they denying the attachment research and focusing on women's workplace rights and child care for working women?

These are actual pictures used in the early sixties to propagate male dominated medicalized birth in the hospital as the safest and most respectful. No wonder valium was prescribed like candy to women and shock treatment kept women's emotions under control during those days.

This is the legacy of American obstetrics -- control, shame, and covert violation of women's bodies and womens' souls. From the time men took over birth at the turn of the century there was a marked decrease in death due to many factors such as sanitation, antibiotics, and surgery.

What is so overlooked in the senseless, personally demeaning, betrayal in the debate of birth is the fact that AT THE SAME TIME that male dominated medicine improved mortality, it is also true that the misuse of lifesaving gifts to humanity have been misused. Obstetric medicine improved maternal and infant mortality rates -- to a point, and then began another problem. Control and misuse of the technology. Seems obvious to me -- neither homebirth or hospital birth is safe without looking at the needs of the baby and all caregivers working together. Other countries prove this.

The disregard and disrespect towards womens' bodies and souls in the process is a major wound in our culture.

Disempowered women participated to force these new way on other women and it’s easy to see how that started. It is easy to see how it perpetuated when one reviews the historical culture. It’s even easy to see how it continues today – how callous we have come so that a woman’s body and psyche are sacrificed in the medical machine.

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We have to start with seeing that women are hurt, humiliated, manipulated, and shamed in the medical machine . We have to start with seeing what she feels is critical to how her labor and birth will progress or not. We have to see that babies are sentient beings that feel and remember what they and their mother felt, and they are fully engaged with their environment being imprinted in their brain.

From my perspective, BIRTH and making birth SAFE for WOMEN and BABIES is a feminist issue – because birth is that last place a woman should be made to feel like a doormat.

Birthing her baby is the absolute last place a woman should be dominated by a man, shamed, and violated, or drugged. Betrayal of women by other women in the male dominated system has profoundly harmed us women and our babies (sons - boys and men). What is being acted out in obstetrics?

Coming next ... the BABY'S EXPERIENCE of birth