I did not sleep well last night. I made the mistake of reading this story of a traumatic birth just before bed, and all I could think of was how my wife had three children, and how much could have gone wrong, and how lost I’d be if she hadn’t survived, and how much our kids would have missed, and it gave me unpleasant, morbid dreams. It’s well written, but don’t read it if you like being complacent. I need Mary around, and it smacked me right in the what-could-have-been anxiety center!
If you choose to avoid the tale of emergency surgery and blood and exposed organs, you should at least get the main message.
When Senator Lindsey Graham showed his hand and proposed a national abortion ban, he condemned an entire population to medical trauma. When he and his GOP cohort grandstand about “preserving the sanctity of life,” they do not seem to include the onslaught of death from placental abruption, placenta previa, uterine rupture, ectopic pregnancy, chorioamnionitis, stroke, preeclampsia, amniotic fluid embolism, cardiomyopathy, suicide from PTSD or postpartum depression, and various other freak shit shows that happen to those of us in stirrups.
The “culture of life” is a cult of maternal death. To claim otherwise is to turn away from medical fact, which, of course, has been the right wing’s entire modus ever since Trump decided face masks were itchy. To entrust reproductive healthcare legislation to the same politicians whose criminally negligent pandemic response killed over a million people is to sign the death warrants of untold Americans.
Those vile right-wingers who claim to be pro-life are wrecking medical education, shackling doctors’ hands, and condemning women to death. Don’t let them get away with it.
Well, if you want real nightmares, perhaps you’d enjoy Benson & Pernoll’s Handbook of Obstetrics & Gynecology. While the edition I referenced is a bit dated in regards to labs and some tests, it does well describe everything that can go right or wrong with the female reproductive system.
https://www.amazon.com/Benson-Pernolls-Handbook-Obstetrics-Gynecology/dp/0071356088
I learned from the 1980 edition, back when my wife was first pregnant.
And full disclosure, she did end up with severe Fallopian tube scarring from an ectopic pregnancy that a Roman Catholic hospital didn’t want to abort.
The “Pro-life” label for the anti-abortionists and the crass politicians who exploit them is one of the most Orwellian phrases in our civil society. War is peace, baby.
There’s a reason Texas’ maternal mortality has been going up.
It’s not a cult of death; it’s a cult of division and domination. That it leads to death is merely an acceptable side effect.
More and more people have ditched the fake label pro life for them.
They are forced birthers and female slavers.
If you don’t own and control your own body, what are you? A slave.
They are also huge hypocrites.
The abortion rate among the fundie xians is higher than the general population.
Source for the above fact.
This is from a fundie xian organization.
The reasons why the oogedy boogedy xians have high abortion rates is partly known. They are less likely to use birth control, especially when they are younger.
A frind of mine had something similar happen to her, only the fact that she ws already open having a caesarian saved her life, but she did have a stroke because she was bleeding out faster than they could push the blood in while trying to fix the bleed. She had to relearn to write as it fucked up her left (writng) hand.
This hits home hard. When my Mother was pregnant with my (older) sister, she had serious complications at childbirth. At the time, she was in a maternity ward run by catholic nuns, who by catholic (vatican) dogma were obliged to save the child rather than the mother. She survived, but the resulting anti-vatican stance of my Pa may have contributed substantially to my atheism.
In the above capital letters only where absolutely deserved.
Marsupial mammals may have it easier, as the final stage of fetal development takes place in the pouch, outside the body.
This means the young are very small at birth and the pregnancy presumably does not impose the same stress on the organism as for placental mammals.
This hit home for me too. When I was in first grade, my sole friend, a boy named Davy, ran screaming across the street to our house, saying, “There’s something wrong with my mommy!” He’d found his mom collapsed in a pool of blood when he came home from school. She died. A few months later, Davy, his older sister, and his dad, moved to Cincinnati, leaving me without a friend. The same thing happened to me a couple of years later, but my mom lived. She did, however,, spend a couple of weeks in the hospital. If she’d died, she’d have left six kids motherless. This was in the 1950s, when birth control and abortions were illegal. I’m 70 now, and have nightmares to this day of huddling fearfully with Davy, while we both cried, not understanding. Grown-ups muttered about “miscarriages” and other mysterious things. These horrors are what the forced birthers want to return us to. How many dead women? How many motherless children will it take? BTW, both Davy’s family and mine were Catholics. Dead women were, I guess, just collateral damage for the goal of getting more Catholics.
Something similar happened to a family member who died before I was born.
She died young. She was always the shadowy person of the family. Everyone knew about her but no one talked about her.
The old people are dying off now and some family history is being revealed.
A few years ago, some distant relatives came out with what really happened.
She had an illegal abortion in her 20s. At that time, all abortions were illegal. She ended up in a Catholic hospital, bled out, and died. The relatives claim the hospital knew why she was bleeding out and did nothing. Maybe, it was a long time ago.
Along with the list of all the various pregnancy complications in the article, I’ve got another one for you that I didn’t know until it happened to me: pregnancy can make brain tumours grow faster. Like the author of the article, it’s lucky I had a scheduled c-section, as a vaginal birth could have caused all sorts of neurological problems (actually the tumour had started causing symptoms before baby was born, but it wasn’t diagnosed until afterwards).
I’ve probably had the tumour for years, so I was always likely to have ended up needing surgery and with the consequences of that – but if it wasn’t for this baby there’s a reasonable chance the tumour would have been picked up when it was smaller and then maybe I would still be able to hear out of that ear. Baby is lovely and wonderful, and I don’t resent her for what happened – but she was very much wanted. I’m not sure how I’d have coped if it wasn’t.