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Responsibility & Empowerment

I've had several conversations over the last few days about the notion of responsibility for birth. The conclusion I've come to is that until women are willing to take responsibility for their actions regarding birth choices - they won't get the empowerment.

So let's say you have a particularly awesome birth. You had nearly every one of the desires met from your birth plan and you were in charge of the decisions. (Notice this does not say how or with whom you gave birth - but it was your choice.) You feel the empowerment because you took the responsibility.

But so many times women abdicate this responsibility by handing over the decision making ability to their care provider or make decisions that lead to a place they don't want to be and rather than accept the responsibility for that decision - they blame someone else. That person can be their practitioner, their husband/partner, their doula, the labor nurse... the list goes on.

For example, a woman says "The doctor saved my baby!" Great! I mean that's why we pay doctors and midwives - to be the life guards of birth. But a question that is often asked is - Why do we hear this statement so much? Are babies really needing to be "saved" that often?

The problem is two fold.

1) Women aren't as often standing up and making choices for themselves as well as making choices and then not accepting the responsibility for the outcome.

2) We have care provider who set up situations where they go from life guard to life saver. (Think of the arsonist who starts a fire only to rush in and save everyone and become the hero...)

The system is broken in many ways. This is but one angle. But it really points out the need for careful selection of your practitioner as well as the mental and emotional energy to delve into the decisions that you need to make as a parent wholeheartedly.

By robin@birthacti... at 06/30/2008 - 5:06am | robin@birthactivist.com's blog | add new comment | email this page

Responsibility

I couldn't agree more, but the follow up is, that taking responsibility requires knowledge and confidence. A woman cannot easily take charge of her birth when she is full of fear, not being given accurate information, and not supported by those around her in asserting herself. Which is not to say she shouldn't fight, but first, she has to know how and why she should fight if it's going to make any difference.

By emjaybee (not verified) at Mon, 06/30/2008 - 5:54pm | reply | email this page

Yes...

What emjaybee said is very important. Women who are uninformed, actively prevented from making their own choices, and who have no position of support or knowledge from which to make decisions are not just deficient in mental and emotional energy.

I think women internalize a lot of responsibility for the pregnancy and birth process—probably more than we realize, more than we would even think entirely healthy. Even if there’s someone else to partially blame (a doctor who missed something, a midwife who made a wrong call, whatever), society itself always-already places responsibility for the carrying and birth of a healthy child on the mother in a variety of ways. You need only pick up any of the mainstream pregnancy books to get a full dose of that. Even if it’s not a woman’s decision-making that is called into question, her body is often the locus of all kinds of blame-setting by doctors and midwives. Your pelvis. Your placenta. Your cervix. Your weight. Your ability to push. Your will. Your dinner. Your genes. Ultimate responsibility for birth is a tall order. When things go wrong, a woman who has made informed, conscious decisions to choose, let’s say, a non-hospitalized, unmedicated birth without intervention is held ultimately responsible (to the point of legal responsibility) for the birth to an extent that probably isn’t right.

I agree that this it often not accompanied by informed decision-making or responsibility-taking, but that seems an issue of education and information rather than whether or not the woman is WILLING to be responsible for her decisions.

And part of what we do when we hire someone who claims to be knowledgeable about birth IS to abdicate some of our responsibility. If we thought we knew everything, if we were completely comfortable making confident, independent choices and taking complete responsibility for birth, we wouldn’t need a doula, a midwife, a doctor. I am the ultimate decision-maker for my body and my birth, but I do pay these people to be responsible as well. I pay them for their ability to be responsible for things outside of my purvey—to note signs of a problem with the baby, to analyze bloodwork, to be informed and, at the moment of birth, conscious, logical, and knowledgeable about what is happening in a way that I CANNOT be.

By Tinker (not verified) at Wed, 07/09/2008 - 4:31pm | reply | email this page