Birth Rape

This has gotten a lot of publicity lately. A piece ran earlier this year on salon.com, with a follow-up on msnbc.com, recounting one woman's experience with childbirth-related PTSD. The latest person to wade into the debate is Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory, a woman who, as far as I know, has never given birth. The article is on why "birth rape" is not "rape" and doesn't deserve to called such. Clark-Flory writes: "Far too many women are being subjected to this kind of medical mistreatment, and damn straight activists should be making noise about it. The experiences being described as "birth rape" are undoubtedly harrowing. How awful to feel so violated while giving birth. What a devastating way to have your child enter the world. Did I mention that it is profoundly, horribly and tremendously wrong? Because it is. But here's what it's not: rape. It is unbelievably horrific -- but it isn't rape, and the suggestion that it is seems like a violation in its own right.

Not to be all Debbie Downer, but there are countless ways to be abused and mistreated in life -- and that is true even just of modern medicine and our healthcare system. In a hospital setting, as your caretakers look after you, while also trying to protect the hospital from legal liability, it is easy to feel violated; and that's true whether you're giving birth or undergoing emergency surgery."

I normally only mentally note when someone who is childless comments on something related to child-rearing or childbirth; I think every parent has had that moment of "just wait and see" when a childless friend or stranger offers advice or opinions. But I think the point is an important one here: having not experienced childbirth, how can one possibly imagine all the emotional and physical reactions it brings? The same is true for survivors of sexual assault--it is not the place of anyone but the survivor to name what they went through.

I am not a therapist or a childbirth educator or a midwife or a doctor. I am not, thankfully, a survivor of a past sexual assault or birth rape. But I care about women and I care about birth. And I believe in birth rape just as much as I do date rape and marital rape, other notorious forms of rape that took centuries to be recognized.

This is Take Back the Night 101: if a woman goes on a date with a man and they start making out, but she says no to doing more and he goes forward anyway, we rightfully, comfortably call that sexual assault. Yet, if a doctor breaks a woman's water or performs a cervical check against her express consent--while she's objecting to it--that is something different. How? The woman in childbirth ostensibly chose her doctor, or at least the practice. The woman on the date most likely chose her date, too. The woman in childbirth may consent for certain procedures to be done; it shouldn't follow then that every procedure is consented to, just as consent to making out is not consent to sexual activity.

How do you arrive at the point where you can claim a violation during childbirth is not equivalent to a sexual assault? My first instinct is to assume a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge about what childbirth involves. If you think or have heard that cervical checks, amniotomies, episiotomies, etc are a mostly necessary component of childbirth, then perhaps a woman refusing one looks foolish to you, and thus the doctor or midwife going ahead and doing it without consent is only doing what's needed. Obviously, these interventions and often the interventions that lead to them are many times unnecessary during physiological childbirth, but as a culture it seems we've absorbed the birth attendant's "it's time to push!" cry in the movies and TV to the point where we assume it's required. It's not, and a woman who refuses to be checked (or to have her water broken artificially or to have her perineum cut) is within her rights to refuse it. And what is the birth attendant who proceeds anyway doing, if it is not assault?

My second instinct is to question whether the disconnect is in the event itself. The words "sexual assault" connote sex, some form of the act being forced onto another. Yet, legally the definition of rape in most states includes forced penetration with something other than just a sexual organ. If an instrument is used during rape, it is still rape. The key, again, is consent. If someone has not consented (or has explicitly denied consent) to have something foreign inserted into their body, regardless of the circumstances, it is assault.

Along those lines, I think the deniers of birth rape (or, in this case, the people who recognize that some women do have things done to them during childbirth from which they later suffer psychologically, but who dislike the label "rape" for it) may miss the most relevant connection between "rape" rape and "birth" rape: power. Rape is first and foremost about power, not sexual gratification. And I'm fairly certain that women who believe they were raped during childbirth do not believe their caretaker received any sexual gratification from the assault. So if we take the sexual pleasure aspect out of rape, we're left with one person doing something to another simply because they can. Take out the "for your/your baby's own good" argument (or, think about a woman raped by her date or her partner because "she really needed it") and there's not much of a difference.

Finally, as I said earlier, there is something distasteful to me about one person telling another what label to apply to their experience. If a woman feels she was raped during childbirth, it is not my place, nor anyone else's, to tell her that her rape wasn't "real" rape. We get nowhere, as women and as feminists (as I and Clark-Flory both identify ourselves to be) by applying our own prejudices and pre-conceived notions to other people's issues.

I don't think birth rape is black and white (not that "rape" rape is, either), and one woman's birth rape is another woman's fabulous birth experience. I am reminded, though, of something that was pointed out to my group when I did rape crisis counseling: there's a scene in Gone With the Wind, arguably one of the top five most famous, commemorated on posters and paperbacks. Rhett is drunk and Scarlett comes down to have her glass of whiskey and finds him at the bottle first. He expresses his frustration over her obsession with Ashley Wilkes, about how she shuts him out in favor of fantasies about Ashley. Suddenly, he grabs her at the foot of the stairs and tells her that tonight is one night she's not shutting him out. He sweeps her up the stairs as she pounds on his chest in anger. She wakes up the next morning, giggling and singing. Yeah, she had a good time, and yeah, she's happy now. But Scarlett said no.