As dystopian as this sounds, Doyley’s story is one among several of its kind, where pregnant people are being forced to undergo medical procedures such as C-sections. And it’s right on theme with the broader ways the US government is working to strip women of their bodily autonomy and their rights.
Gosh. As opposed to our Own Dear NHS whree babbies die because the madwives insist upon natural birth, right? But:
Doyley, who worked as a birthing doula, had been clear that she didn’t want a C-section unless there was an emergency. At an hours-long online court hearing conducted from her hospital bedside – while she was in labor – a judge ruled she could continue to labor, but if there were an emergency, the hospital could operate whether she wanted it or not. Hours later, she woke up to find herself being wheeled into surgery – doctors said the baby’s heart rate had dropped for seven minutes overnight – and she gave birth via C-section.
There’s at least an argument that such is a medical emergency, no?
Researchers have also found that Black and white patients declined care at the same rate, yet practitioners were more likely to accept the wishes of white patients, and more likely to go ahead with the procedure without consent when it came to pregnant Black people. This disparity falls right in line with the ways that Black women have historically been subject to all kinds of reproductive abuse, from forced sterilization to unethical experimentation.
And yet everywhere – well, everywhere there are decent statistics – black babbies die at a higher rate than white. Perhaps there’s something about the physique etc?
Ahh, here’s what it’s really about:
Another deeply troubling and dangerous aspect of all this is the way the fetal personhood crowd positions pregnant people as incubators,
….
It’s also a sign of just how far the government plans to go in stripping pregnant people of their bodily autonomy.If more states dig their heels in on the fetal personhood movement, that will mean even more vulnerable patients at risk of being forced into procedures they don’t want.
Medical intervention means the babby is being thought of as a person, a person whose interests must be taken into account. If that happens then what happens to abortion rights?
Pregnant people?
Yeah. What language is this person writing in? And what’s a “doula” FFS?
Birthing coach. from some ethnic tradition, now being adopted by white middle class women and girls from Richmond
So….. “midwife”.
… but less trained and more insane even than an NHS midwife.
…which wold be quite hard to do, in my experience.
Oogabooga, as Steve might say.
‘Doula’ comes from the Greek word doulē (δούλη), meaning ‘female slave’, ‘handmaiden’ or ‘servant-woman’. A feminist anthropologist, Dana Raphael, changed the meaning to cover non-medical care-givers who assist mothers during and after childbirth.
“non-medical care-givers who assist mothers during and after childbirth” *IS* “midwife”. It’s the ****** definition of the ****** word.
Not true. Midwives are ‘health professionals’ ‘qualified’ to administer ante-natal injections, pain relief (including Entonox, diamorphine, and pethidine) and to perform episiotomies and suture perineal tears.
Doulas are completely unqualified, apart from their feelz.
The only thing doulas and midwives have in common is that both tend strongly to be femiloons.
That’s not what a midwife was when my great-grandmother was a midwife, and when my mother was having me. That was stuff you called the doctor in for.
Times change…
Indeed. Sets the cunt klaxon off.
Pregnant people.
Does she mean women?
Doyley, who worked as a birthing doula,
Crank, in other words.
Doyley the Doula ?
Cut price Minnie the Moocher
‘Doyley may be a Black woman living in a red state, but her experience of medical coercion didn’t only happen because of her race (although the statistics clearly show her Blackness probably contributed greatly to why she wasn’t listened to).’
Bugger the statistics, what about the facts of the case..?
“Pregnant people”? The capitalisation of “Black”?
Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist
Ah, yes. I see.
Another deeply troubling and dangerous aspect of all this is the way the fetal personhood crowd positions pregnant people as incubators …
A bit reductionist, sure, but not entirely off the mark. When Linnaeus and his successors set out to classify all living things the only criterion they had to go on was morphology. If two things looked similar they were probably related. An understanding of genetics was still far, far in the future. Because of this, there were actually a number of entomologists (not a majority but also not none) in the nineteenth century who believed that before a caterpillar entered its chrysalis it was one species but the emerging butterfly was another species. They thought that metamorphosis involved changing species. After all, it had a completely different form.
We can laugh (unfairly, I think) at those entomologists’ ignorance. But take a baby in the womb. What species is it? Is it as yet a non-human species, and so able to be sacrificed to the desires of its human-species mother? Does it somehow change its species to that of a human being in the birth process? Or is a foetus a human species from the beginning, regardless of its form? If the latter then what we’re really talking about is the competing rights of two human beings. And as Timmy says, “If that happens then what happens to abortion rights?”
Well said, PST.
Well said. But now that there are c.26 scientific definitions of a species, where does that leave the theory of evolution? At what point has a new species evolved? The genetic difference between the hooded crow and the common crow is tiny, but they are different species. Yet the genetic difference between a Caucasian and a Negro is larger, but they are considered to be the same species…
It’s OK to insist that Darwinian evolution applies to all species except, strangely, humans. The behaviours of other species is also accepted to be the result of evolution, and indeed species physical and behavioural characteristics evolve in tandem, as you would expect of organisms competing for resources and exploiting ecological niches, and as you say, minor differences are regarded as different species.
But try to assert that physical and behavioural differences in humans might somehow be linked and see how far you get. It seems human behaviour was a fully-formed virgin birth.
Yet the genetic difference between a Caucasian and a Negro is larger, but they are considered to be the same species…
Not always. At least not historically. Thomas Jefferson gets a lot of stick for writing that ‘all men are created equal’ but yet being himself a slave owner. What gets missed in all that moral outrage is the state of science at the time.
Jefferson was arguably the greatest natural scientist of his age. His notebooks are full of his experiments with crops, notations about the weather and so on. And also one of the big questions of his time – whether whites and blacks are the same species. As I said, morphology was the only criterion available. Blacks had an obvious different form from whites. And there upon hung a huge question: if whites and blacks were the same species then the legitimacy of slavery was a moral problem. If they were different species then not so much.
…if whites and blacks were the same species then the legitimacy of slavery was a moral problem. If they were different species then not so much.
But:
1]. White and black slavers being pre-Darwinians didn’t think of black slaves as a different species but just as slaves. Indeed, many slavers thought that they were taking the slaves to a better life than in Africa, despite the cruel Atlantic passage. And they weren’t wholly wrong, as the life of an enslaved African in Africa was grim.
2]. In the 18thC and much of the 19thC, few thought in terms of a hierarchy of races or of races as species, all of which was post-Darwinian. Slavery was simply seen as ‘natural’; and slaves were seen as human, though also as property. There was little moral conflict between ‘property’ and ‘human’ until…
White and black slavers being pre-Darwinians didn’t think of black slaves as a different species but just as slaves
Generally speaking, yes, that’s true. But among the, for lack of a better term, more educated classes, such as Jefferson, the humanity of black slaves was an open topic of discussion. His notebooks show him trying to work out just that moral question.
If they *can’t* interbreed, they are *not* the same species. Note: this does not imply anything about the three possible opposites.
Are we going to have a Guess The Weight competition? I’m starting at 18 stone.
You’re off by half a landwhale…
“Researchers have also found that Black and white patients…”
Why does “Black” have a capital letter but not “white”?
And what do black and white patients look like? Are they striped or check?
Michael Jackson
Researchers have also found that Black and white patients
We should take them serious when they capitalize ‘black?’
It never ceases to amaze Gamecock that blacks, being treated so horribly, don’t go back to where they came from.
I’m currently on hols in Kwa-Zulu Natal. I can safely say American darkies wouldn’t last 5 minutes over here before they are crying to go back to the land of whitey.
Wow, the “fetal personhood crowd”. That’s me, that. So, I’ve just found out I’m in a cult.
My father was an obstetrician. There were times where he had to overrule the mother (don’t ask me for details, I don’t know, let’s just say a long, difficult labour).
From the little he would say about it, a lot of that was not about the baby, but protecting the mother. The days of mothers regularly dying in childbirth weren’t that long ago.
His opinion on natural childbirth I’ll leave to your imagination.
We had ‘natural’ childbirth for half a million years. The results were a great many dead babies and not a few dead mothers. But medicine was so much better when the only treatment available was leeches.
It’s very easy to sue the medical profession if something goes wrong during a natural birth. The question “could it have been prevented in a C-section was performed?” is an easy route to compensation. A much harder route is proving an unwanted C-section did not stop an adverse outcome from arising.
The mother gets cut to avoid the lawyer getting his cut.