Sexist violence "I was cracked unannounced": reports of obstetric violence (I)

Before you check I started poetry in fetale os nutriento dunha mazá formeprecious pleuravousír aí inside proclaiming avitor do instinctoe that or world vexa to hedra curl unlucky I do not brain and that they never loved choren to fíoair.

Olga Novo (2019)

Those of Patricia Martínez and Patricia Álvarez are the stories decuating the poems that lived inside, in the peace shelter of the amnestiotic fluid, they wanted to discover the rhymes of the world that expected them.They would have to be the greatest experiences of care, delicacy and respect for mothers and daughters, but they collided with a reality that staggered natural othems, which stole intimacies and that stripped them of the control of the own and maternal bodies: obstetric violence: obstetric violence.A Foreign Reality, which takes advantage of the ignorance of mothers and that acquires subtlerecarices sometimes or becomes evident and bodily in others, but always places women in the place of passive subjects, devoid of decision -making capacity.

Matriaactivist Jesususa Ricoy (2013) defines this type of deviolence as “the ignorance of the emotional needs of the mother and of the baby at any time of pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperioinmediato, as well as the authority and autonomy that the woman has about herxuality, your body and your babies. " It is also understood as obstetric violence "the act of ignoring spontaneity, the postures, rhythms and times required by childbirth to progress innormality." The dehumanized treatment suffered by women by some professional health is specified in the pathologization ofnatural processes and in the routineization of certain practices dictated without consent informed and/or without justification: episiotomies, ceases struggled, induced births, constant vaginal touches, abuse DeMedicalization, Hamilton and Kristeller maneuvers ... They also manifest their psychological form, through the infantilization of women and respect for any moment of motherhood. Patriarchy sparks that turn on the body of women once again.

According to the recipient of the observatory of sexist violence in the maternity of the Association Materfem, 86% of the participating women said they had lived this type of violence. More than 44%suffered it many times and almost the same on the same on few occasions. One of the practices that surprisingly still refer to 4.3% of women is the "husband's point": a point of suture at the time of sewing the capital of episiotomy that narrows the vagina with the sole objective to produce more pleasure in man in the following sexual intercourse. Another preliminary study on the knowledge of obstetric violence by childbirth care professionals, be prepared at the state level by the midwife Lola Ruiz Berdún and the psychiatristaperinatal Ibone Olza in 2014, offers two equally relevant data: 94% of The specialists surveyed was witnessing obstetric violence with training and Case 80% felt pressure to exert this type of practices in the partner. In the following lines, two women face the data through the experiences of their maternities.

The management of time: on Sunday it does not give birth

Patricia Martínez caused her first childbirth in week 38 of pregnancy and without prior notice. They used the so -called Hamilton maneuver, a vaginal touch in a circular motion that is performed to detach amniotic methods from the wall of the uterus and triggers contractions in a few hours. It remains a generalized practice despite the fact that intense causes and unbalanced the natural rhythm of pregnancy in cases in which it lacks justification, since childbirth is a physiological process that the body begins spontaneously. “He put my fingers in my vagina and I get a lot of damage, very much; It is as if something inside you were torn. They don't let you know what they do or that it will hurt that way, ”said this practice in the last obstetrics consultation in Betanzos before giving light in the hospital in the hospital Maternal of A Coruña. "When you have a tubarriguita, you feel the child move and everything is fine, that someone forced that way, for me it is a priest."

In the morning, when he got up to go to work, he discovered that he were going.She left for the emergency room and sent her back home for another two days in she suffered intense contractions derived from that touch.At the time that she could enter, she climbed her plant and, again without prior notice, they leaned a muscular relaxant in her leg."Suddenly I was ironed. I even had hallucinations because she had been two and a half days with a lot of pain." On Monday she did not give birth.The suspicion that is around the head of Depatricia- "I will never know for sure"-it is that that puncture in her leg had no intention that delaying the birth: from a holiday to a work.“I understand that they did how they suited them;The natural times, ”she says,” they never respected. ”

Once prepared for childbirth, already on Monday and after Lamatrona would have explained the internal processes that were going to take place in Sucuerpo, Patricia could only decide whether or not to want epidural anesthesia. She did not take many to practice, without using the informed consent, another of the most conflictive people: Kristeller's. It is a practice that consists of exerting pressure towards the uterine bottom so that the baby comes out more quickly. It is prohibited in countries such as the United Kingdom for the risks that may involve for women and babies and is contraindicated by authorities such as WHO or the Ministry of Health due to the lack of scientific evidence. Even today, six years after childbirth, Patricia had not named and surnames this maneuver, but she does clearly remember how to position her and pushed down. "The feeling you have is that you simply an animal." This practice was then the use of forceps - instrument to facilitate the output of the baby's head - and the realization of an episiotomy - incision in perineum -, not informed. “I was very torn and forbidden blood. I knew, already afterwards, what were the forceps and that the cut in the perineum is assignified. Somehow, they had to justify all the tear they had made to me, ”says Patricia, at that time she was the first time. “I had no experience and they should have drew what they knew. You are opening all your intimacy to a lot of people: gynecologists, nurses, midwives, auxiliaries ... respect, care and affection have to be present. ” If she could go back, she would like to have had a childbirth where to participate in Ortramanera, being her aware of what and why of each step.

Once with his child in his arms, the birth plan shining by his absence.They did not explain when they were going to proceed to suppress washed or where they took him when they left with him.He trained a lot to be desired.“In fact, when making their first poop we ask for help and we denied.They even laughed at us.We feel very little sensitivity.Give the feeling that they did their job mechanically and that we were bothered, ”he recalls.Seeing her face, Patricia forgot everything bad, but now, with the walked time that allows you to remember in perspective, she realizes, she says, in her childbirth, many "irregularities" could have occurred..

Maternar in Pandemia: Goodbye to the classrooms preparation

This other is a more recent story.Patricia Álvarez gave Luzantes to get out of accounts, at the beginning of December last year, in the middle of the Covid pandemic.In her last review, the gynecologist also tried to make Hamilton's maneuver, but when she began to feel pain she told him to stop immediately."I had informed me before just in case, because I know that if you don't know knowledge about you, they want."Patricia was one of those almost twenty women from O Couto, in Ourense, who ran out of the right to prenatal education following the Pandandemics.A "abandonment situation" by the Sergasque lasted during the final months of 2020, already with very advanced the Pandemia and most of the services adapted to the new context."I ran out of midwife towards the tone of childbirth, and I arrived at the hospital with fear of what I could find ... I lost quite a few and I had to inform myself on my own," Patricia speaks.

When the time comes, everything that the midwife could notice and everything she learned on her account quickly vanished. "When you apply reality you see that they don't fulfill anything they should." This other mothering in a shared room in which she even had to sleep with Lamascarilla on. The contractions pass them inside the bathroom, "which are not more than four tiles." "I leaned on the sink and collided with the wetter. “They do not let you out of the roomni either have with you the dilation ball to relieve pain. Tepon paste for everything: to give you a mask if yours breaks, paratraerte a cushion to put between your legs, to bring a blanket to tuparaja ... ”. At one point, she without prior notice, she managed to accelerate contractions. "When you are in those notion you see no other alternative to give in, for fear and because they tell you that if they are put by childbirth, it does not go forward." Hours later they would have to complain because she "was causing tachycardia to the girl."

During the childbirth, obstetric suction cup parasachad the baby of the delivery channel and made a cut in the perineum. None of these techniques was consulted. Patricia did not even know what was a suction cup at the time they were placing it; But she bothered him, above all, the practice of episiotomy without notice or consent given: “Merajar and did not tell me. I found out by chance, when I saw that they lexplic a kid kids how the incision was seated, ”she says. The skin with skin with her girl was, she explains, one "total lack of control." “They constantly took it, they took it, they brought it to me, there were hands on all sides; She is not respected. " The first phrase she received when she went up to the plant was: "If you don't give her the lobiberon to enter neonates." The abuse of power from the healthy field makes it especially perceptible in terms of breastfeeding. "They did not leave me time or calm" - criticizes - "to see if the girl took my chest. The only thing that mattered to them is that I did not cry And it will not bother. This was what we acted giving him a bottle. Before they take it, do whatever. ”

The comfort of the women who give the light is subject to, in a lot of occasions, to the comfort of the professionals themselves - the most venual example we have, without going any further, in the usual position in which women stop.The lack of resources and means in Galician hospitals also hinders human average to women who maternal.Patricia Álvarez, weak after elparto and with the wound of the episiotomy still very recent, remember to have to break and climb on the knees of the half -broken stretcher of it.He could hardly even take his child while he was in the cradle of the hospital room. Obstetric violence sneaks up even for the slightest cracks, and the women who pass through her ask for the next human, respected and designos births, where who wearsTo his creature inside he has a voice and is heard, physically and psychologically.