Your Body Should Not Be A Battleground

Coercion is not care--a damning history of childbirth

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Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding bans on health care for transgender kids means that over half the states in the U.S. will make it illegal for kids to get access to life-changing — for many, life-saving — health care.

Erin Reed

has this deep analysis of the SCOTUS ruling, which is devastating for trans people, creating a patchwork of state-level bans that exacerbate risk and fear across the country.

Of course, a similar state-by-state set of bans are in place for abortion care. These are twinned right-wing assaults on bodily autonomy. Leave people’s bodies alone.

Alison Yarrow’s new book, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood, weaves together hundreds of stories of another kind of bodily coercion: the experience of birthing parents.

To be blunt, the book is damning: it describes a system of coercion and abuse, in which birthing people are given few choices over their own experience of pregnancy and birth.

But it’s also a hopeful book, because we have so much information about what works better to support people – all people – in their birthing experiences.

When we talked about the book, we discussed everything from to the overuse of fetal heart monitors to the possibility of more gentle c-sections to how to respond when coercion is disguised as caregiving. I edited the conversation for length and clarity.

You can order Allison Yarrow’s book here

This book is packed with data and interviews, and it reads like a manifesto. The goal you’re seeking is “human rights in childbirth – every birthing person at the center of their care and experience.”

This, you say, would be “complete shift in who has the power in childbirth.”

So, my question is – why isn’t it this way already?

If you asked most people, they wouldn't say that human rights are denied to people in childbirth. But what I've come to see through the evidence is: We are coerced. We are abused at a time when we are incredibly vulnerable.

We put our trust in people who are dedicating their lives to being healthcare heroes, who go into this field because they want to take care of people, and they want to be part of life coming into the world.

But this is happening in a system that is intended to take our rights away from us, because that is more profitable.

More than 90% of births occur in the hospital, and you may have a great relationship with your provider, but the goals of that system are to move you through that place as quickly as possible.

And so every intervention is offered, or coerced, or forced upon people to move them through an assembly line. Because the rooms that they're in are incredibly profitable rooms, and moving people through is what creates profit.

Most people can give birth without intervention. When intervention is needed, we definitely know how to do that in the hospital. We have the best technology, certainly in this country, but it's being overused and applied to every birth.

And in that model, human rights are being taken away.