Yesterday I asked:
What’s the difference between a doctor who performs a painful exam over a woman’s protests and a midwife who denies an epidural over a woman’s protests?
Hazard’s pious appeals are not about women; they’re about midwifery market-share.
I was responding to the claim by human rights lawyer Bashi Hazard that an increasing number of women are likening their experience of childbirth to assault by doctors.
I also posed the question to her directly on Twitter and she “responded” in the fashion typical of those who have been caught in hypocrisy — with a desperate effort to deflect:
I have arrived. A US RWNJ troll who claims to be an obstetrician has thrown down an imaginary gauntlet at me!
Is this woman really a lawyer? Most lawyers I know do research before responding so they won’t be caught uninformed. Hazard clearly didn’t bother.
I asked again:
If you care about women, you would be concerned about the widespread problem of midwives denying women epidurals. It seems you don’t.
Once again she tried to deflect:
Its you I dont care about. You are not an obstetrician. You are a troll and a RWNJ and a hired gun coming out of a country with a leader who bullies, trolls, lies and manipulates facts much like you. Your white self importance and entitlement is offensive. I waste no time on it.
Sure! If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t have responded, but apparently she was stung … as I intended.
The ugly truth — which Hazard is desperately trying to obscure — is that efforts to claim obstetricians commit assault/violence/birthrape have little if anything to do with women’s wellbeing and everything to do with midwives’ desperation to claw back market share.
Midwifery is an industry and midwives demonize their competitors. Indeed, much of midwifery philosophy is just reflexive (and unreflective) defiance of obstetricians:
Since obstetricians medicalize childbirth to make it safer, midwives de-medicalize it to make it more enjoyable, and, for added impact, declare childbirth was safe before obstetricians got involved.
Since obstetricians offer pain relief, midwives proclaim that pain improves the experience, simultaneously testing one’s mettle and making childbirth safer.
Since obstetricians whisk babies off to pediatricians to be sure they are healthy, midwives claim (without evidence) that skin to skin contact between mother and infant in the first moments after birth is crucial to creating a lifelong bond.
Since obstetricians placed the highest value on a healthy mother and a healthy baby, midwives place the highest value on a fulfilling birth experience.
In other words, no matter what obstetricians offer, midwives insist that it is unnecessary, disempowering and harmful. Midwives can thereby wrest childbirth back from doctors and give it to those to whom they believed it rightly belongs … the midwives themselves.
Wait, what? You think childbirth should belong to women? How naive. That would require holding midwives to account for their egregious behavior and apparently that’s not allowed.
A recent incident in New Zealand is emblematic of midwifery assault on women: Midwife disciplined after pretending to give woman pain relief during labour.
…[I]nstead of giving the woman the agreed pain relief of pethidine, the midwife gave her intravenous saline as a placebo but told her it was the pethidine.
…[T]he midwife said she “believed in the placebo effect”.
It gets worse. According to the midwife:
The way [the woman] was presenting led me to believe that she was transitional. Knowing this, I felt it was in the best interests of the baby not to give pethidine,” the midwife said.
“However, in the best interests of [the woman], I was to give her a sense of support and help in a difficult time, therefore I administered normal saline, leading her to believe it was Pethidine.
“I knew it would do no harm, and that pethidine could still be administered at any stage.
What did Bashi Hazard and her organization have to say about that? As far as I can determine, absolutely nothing!
Hazard has revealed her true goal — clawing back turf — in an article she wrote for Midwifery Today entitled Equality for Midwives:
Despite the knowledge and skills that traditional midwives have always used to serve their communities, there were medical emergencies that could arise in childbirth that they could not solve. Antibiotics, anti-hemorrhagic medicine, assisted and surgical deliveries and other medical technologies can prevent many of those deaths, and access to such technologies has saved many lives and massively reduced maternal and neonatal loss since their invention. But the terms on which these tools were offered to women, in the US and in many other places, created new forms of risk as all women were asked to place themselves in the care of medical professionals for pregnancy and birth, whether or not they needed medical treatment. Midwives were often disempowered (my emphasis)…
Midwives lost turf and income and they want it back:
Inequality exists in economics when doctors are rich, while midwives are poor. The valuing of, and compensation for, midwifery services should appropriately recognize their contribution to maternal health, enable midwives to continue in the field and develop experience and skills and construct midwifery as a stable profession that enables a woman to support her family, as doctors are able to support theirs.
Hazard’s pious appeals about assault in childbirth are not about women; they’re about market-share. Her goal is not the empowerment of women, but the enrichment of midwives.
That’s why Hazard has no interest in protecting women from assault by midwives, and was stung when I pointed out her hypocrisy. She felt compelled to respond, but her response merely confirmed my claims.
