If it involves women, it’s a feminist issue. Right? *possible triggers – rape mentioned*

It’s Reclaim the Night 2011 this week. I thought I’d dust off this older entry in the hopes that one day all feminists might see that birth is worthy of notice and that violence done to women during birth is a feminist issue just as much as all the other venues where violence occurs.

This year the theme is Consent. I also live in hope that the organisers will see past their prejudice from a few years ago and start to see that consent is important in all areas of women’s lives.

Yes means yes, no means no,

However we dress, wherever we go.

Disclaimer: Obviously this doesn’t apply to hospital gowns, nudity or hospitals. (sigh)

I also noticed tonight as I’ve noticed over the last few years how the crowds are dwindling away to fewer and fewer women. There are more men in the body of the march, including up the front, the route through the city is smaller and we were so few in number we could cross the whole parade with the traffic lights. The concerns are different in some ways from the late 80s and early 90s when a transwoman proudly declared “Whore of the Year” would probably not have been speaking to urge us to embrace prostitution and lobby our local MPs for decriminalisation to remain in NSW. I found it interesting that the regulation of birthing women’s bodies and the rape of birthing women is of no interest but the unwanted regulation of whore’s bodies is supposed to be a paramount importance to us as a movement. If sex workers wish as a unionised organisation to oppose the regulation of their industry, I have no issue with that. I’m just curious about why some feminisms have embraced this as a more pressing issue than the ongoing unrelenting assaults on women’s bodies and autonomy in maternity hospitals or via regulation and legislation designed to prevent us exercising our human rights to birth as we choose.

Naturally there were few children there tonight when children used to form a large part of the night. Mothers, it would seem, are perhaps becoming more and more fringe to the new feminisms which embrace prostitution and raunch (rape?) culture so freely unless it’s agitating for childcare or maternity leave. Feminisms have obviously survived embracing kyriarchy, trans issues and prostitution. Will it take rights away from those who seek them if we can further embrace women who give birth? I think not.

It makes me terribly sad. When will women wake up and see they’ve been lied to about birth?

It was very revealing listening tonight. I think a lot of us still think rape is about sex, so we think that rape cannot occur where there is no likelihood of sex occurring ie during childbirth. But if sex is about power, and a lack of consent, and people doing stuff to your body without your consent, birthrape is just really rape. Not as people would have it, not rape rape, like there’s Rape and rape and we’re obviously confused.

If women say “I felt like I was being raped.” I have to believe them because only women can define what is, and isn’t, rape.

One speaker even made mention of how until the 1980s rape by a spouse couldn’t be considered rape which made me go all kinds of colours trying to not blurt out “Well why can’t you all think about rape by a doctor or midwife then??” I’m sure this crowd would recognise a doctor raping a woman with his penis in the office so why can’t they recognise a doctor raping a woman with a hand/instruments in another room? The eternal question.

Perhaps we need to look to the FBI for their new definition of rape:

Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration of a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.

If it involves women, it’s a feminist issue, right?

Well it depends, apparently.

If it’s related to abortion and contraception, women in developing nations, refuges, domestic violence, rape (only certain kinds), equity, disabilities, pron, reproductive technologies (only certain kinds) refugees, perceived minorities (only certain kinds), misogyny, footballers, maternity leave, childcare, sole parents, equal party political representation, indigenous women, depictions of women in the media, fashion, sexuality, the environment, animal rights, FGM, people trafficking, prostitution, women on the front line, women in the clergy? Then it’s a feminist issue. (Not an exhaustive list, mind you, just a quick grab bag) And rightly so!

This year’s Sydney Reclaim the Night tells me:

Our demand this year is Stop Violence against Women at Home, on the Streets, in School and at Work.

So in hospitals it’s not violence against women to make a birth look like a pack rape or in Parliament to legislate women’s bodily autonomy out of existence while implementing the personhood of the foetus. Hello anyone listening out there?

In the meanwhile, we’re all being sold down the river because birth isn’t a feminist issue.

Why isn’t birth a feminist issue?

Is it only performed by women?

So explain to me why birth isn’t a feminist issue then?

If I conceive an embryo because of a rape, it’s a feminist issue.
If I desire to discontinue a pregnancy because I simply wish it, it’s a feminist issue.
If I want to put the children in state-run childcare when my paid maternity leave finishes and I rejoin the paid workforce, it’s a feminist issue.
If I want to avoid bearing children, it’s a feminist issue.
It is appropriate that these concerns are feminist issues.

But that bit in the middle when the embryo turns into a foetus and the foetus leaves my body and becomes my child is not a feminist issue.

At the rally in Canberra I looked out over the crowd from my vantage point next to the stage where I was privileged enough to actually be able to hear the speakers, and pondered if I’d asked many attendees “Is this rally a feminist issue?” what they’d have responded.

Probably stuff like “Well you know, I’m not a feminist but….” or “No of course not, feminism’s gone too far, you know!” or maybe “Well I don’t really call myself a feminist because I’m not hairy, angry or lesbian.” Note to self: look at next lesbian sighted and see if she’s a. hairy b. angry and c. feminist. There might have been a few of us who’d have said “Hell yes! This is the greatest dismissal of women’s human rights in this country since a bunch of whitefellas drew alongside and started oppressing the locals.” A few more of us may have wept because a crowd of several thousands should have been swelled by all those who also support our right to abortion which is just another reproductive freedom but not the only one.

It’s time to move on from this idea that children are the enemy and that breeding makes us collaborateuse. Plenty of childless folk are quite capable of pushing Big Daddy Patriarchy onto us, and having children can actually be a pretty radicalising experience for some of us. When you realise your parents trained you to heteronormativity, to pink and being saved by a prince, to believing your vagina stank and must be Kept Nice for a husband, and you have children in front of you who you know deserve better, you may start making serious changes in your life.
See here for some thoughts around feminism and parenting which really made my heart sing!

Some of us have been radicalised by the knowing and naming of the trauma inflicted on us by the birth hierarchy which should be the object of much hissing from feminists who care about equal rights and safety in all places.

Supporting women to birth safely doesn’t mean supporting a mindset that raising children and making families is all women do. I’m not a forced birther, I learnt feminism from working abortion action campaigns in my early 20s!

Supporting women to birth safely doesn’t mean I think childless women are weird. I actually admire women who can recognise the desire to remain childless in themselves and act on it despite the enormous pressure on women to do what’s deemed “normal” and produce babies in an appropriate way, with an appropriate person with whom one has a legal arrangement. I don’t particularly like the pressure on me to honour this childlessness just because somehow my experience of parenting means I have some privilege in the eyes of patriarchy. I wish!

Here’s news: no one but men really have privilege in patriarchy.

The sick feeling in the gut as you dismiss me for my politics, my commitment to birth or feminism, is the knife you’ve just plunged into your own back for we are all on the same team here, sister whether you like it or not.

We are the Not Men and our bodies are up for discussion here.

We seem to be trying to move away from being women who birth because that way lies the road to really revealing we are the Not Men and we don’t want to go there. We want to be on the level playing field with men, we don’t want to be treated differently when we bleed. We want equal pay,

But this can only be the problem when we posit the male body as the norm from which we deviate. This is not how I see women. As a woman I deserve all that stuff that men have but I deserve to do it while living in this body which is marked Woman.

As I once noted when reading about breastfeeding and drugs, doctors are often eager to tell women to wean in order to imbibe certain drugs but this is because we view the male, nonlactating body as the norm. If we could open our minds to having not one, not two, but many bodily norms in our world how much simpler would it be? Why must we be like men by ignoring the realities of our bodies and their potential?

I don’t mean in some creepy essentialist way, I just mean my body has the potential to do things men’s bodies don’t, and so there are a few things men experience differently. Just because my body has the potential to grow people and then feed them for years at a time doesn’t mean I think every woman must do this, that it is morally superior, that it makes me a better person, or that life is lacking for those who choose not to use that potential. It’s just the reality of my life and the lives of most women in the world for I figure that most women do bear children. Men’s bodies don’t do what mine has the potential to do, fact.

Some of us do it under truly vile conditions, in places where we’re enslaved, in households where our lives are not our own because of abuse. A very small number of us do it joyfully, with full embrace and try also to improve the world while we do it.

Regardless of this, it is because it is done by women that it must be a feminist issue.

We have institutionalised abuse of women occurring in this country in maternity hospitals and no general outcry. My personal experience of raising it in feminist groups has been to dismiss it because clearly I’m deranged, everyone just knows birth is dangerous and has to be the violent struggle it is in labour ward. To dismiss the violence as “medical violence” and no different from being harassed at work as if this is acceptable… To dismiss the idea of birthing at home because it might “make women feel bad”. To dismiss birth as a topic because it makes the childless “unsafe”.

Inadequate responses, each and every one.

What is it when we dismiss the voices of those women who say they are violated by a powerful system which supports patriarchy at every step?

What dialogue is needed, what logic leap needs to be overcome? Germaine had it worked out in the 1980s in “Sex and Destiny”, Dr Sarah Buckley’s “Gentle birth and gentle mothering” opens with the statement that birth is a feminist issue. Sheila Kitzinger and Robbie Davis Floyd have written compellingly about the violence done to women in the medical model of external careprovision. You can read in the newspaper of women dying after caesareans in this country. And yet?

I invite women who work in reproductive rights to join this struggle because my right to birth autonomously is on a par with my right to terminate a pregnancy and whittling away at one is an attack on the other.

If the personhood of the foetus comes upon us via birth, what will abortion providers do? I’ve written before about how the possible new guidelines for homebirth and the speeches of parliamentarians and the press releases of doctors all tell us that women are not to be trusted and outside authorities have to be responsible for overruling women’s wishes and forcing us into hospitals and surgery if they deem it.

Here’s Tony Zappia, Member for Makin:

http://www.openaustralia.org/debate/?id=2009-09-07.13.1

…I am aware that there has been some concern and some opposition to these bills because, as the measures contained within them do not apply to homebirthing, mothers wrongly believe that they are being denied choice. I just want to speak about the issue of choice, because it is an interesting matter. I ask those people who talk about choice: what choice does the newborn child have in the birthing and what rights should that child have? On other matters, I frequently hear members opposite talking about the rights of the newborn or unborn child. Today I have not heard one single member opposite talking about the rights of the newborn child. I accept and respect that mothers have choice, but I think that as a society we should also accept and respect the fact that the newborn child should have rights. If the newborn child is not in a position to express those rights then we collectively, as a society, also have an obligation and a responsibility to that newborn child. It is my view that every newborn child should have the right, wherever possible, to the best birthing services available at the time.

Tony then quotes Dr Lavender, head of the AMA in SA:

Home birthing is a dangerous choice, which pays no regard to the rights of the unborn child to a safe and healthy birth with the best care available.

Are we really willing to let this happen to each other? I’d lay my body on the line, and have done so many times, in the struggle against forced birthers and yet who is speaking for me when the same lobby groups invade birth?

See my previous blog entry for the kind of rules the government is seeking to place around women birthing at home for more places the foetus is becoming a separate legal entity from women and to be protected in the eyes of careproviders.

This reworked poem speaks so well to me of the ways in which patriarchy tries to divide those who are natural allies.

First they came for the unassisted birthers, but I did not speak out, because I do not free-birth. Then they came for those who birth at home with lay midwives, but I would would not speak out, because I would not have a home-birth with a lay midwife. Then they came for those who birthed with Certified Professional Midwives, and I would not speak out, because I would not have a home-birth with a CPM. And then they came for those who birthed in birth centers and with Certified Nurse Midwives, but I would not speak out because I would not have a birth in a birth center or with a CNM. And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

Who among us is going to be left bereft of sisterhood because she saw no connection with those who went down before her?

Tweet