More respectful care for women

My experiences relate to my pregnancy after which my overwhelming feeling was that we need more respectful care for women. I was a ‘geriatric’ mother i.e. over the age of 35 when I got pregnant. First off, let’s put pay to that label.

I had my birth induced, which was a painful process in and of itself. After induction I was in labour for about 20 or so hours. During that time I had different midwives coming in on different shifts which was tough going. I didn’t feel I had support during the labour. At one point, when my waters broke and I told the nurse – she insisted that they hadn’t broken (they had). When I was brought into the labour room, the doctor called me a ‘good girl’ for pushing – I’m a fully grown woman giving birth – please do not ‘good girl’ me. This was an indicator for me that more respectful care for women is needed.

I ripped during the birth and was brought straight to surgery. My husband was left in the room with our daughter – and was feeling pretty helpless. However, he remembered to do skin-to-skin and started doing that. When the nurses saw him they laughed at him and asked what he was doing. This was a teaching hospital!  At the start of the surgery the assistant giggled at me telling me that I didn’t ‘look like a mother’.

Post-surgery when the midwife was examining my daughter she pointed out that she was quite a low weight and immediately asked me if I had worked all the way through the pregnancy  – tutting when I confirmed that I had.  Somehow the weight of my baby was my fault – in reality she was small from the get go and I had been scanned all the way through the pregnancy only to be told 2 weeks before the birth that she was ‘of small constitution’.   I was at a loss to say anything because I was so shocked, and also weak post-labour.

We were told in the Antenatal care classes that we needed to fight for ourselves during our birth. I didn’t imagine that I had to fight to just be treated like a human. Far more respectful care for women is needed throughout the health system, but especially at some of our more vulnerable moments.

I’m not sure what the solutions are other than an overhaul of our society! In the short term perhaps training of healthworkers on more respectful care for women. In the longer term I hope that some of the tech advances we hear about for all other areas of health is applied to women’s health care and needs.

GG, United Kingdom