It began with eroding trust in community midwifery, an ancient lineage of women supporting women supporting women, chosen by the village for their skilled hands and divine guidance. Unsafe, unclean, ignorant they said, scared of anywhere women could be and men could not…
Then you could only be a midwife if you went to their training schools, studied under their rules, wore their badge, swore allegiance to them. Insurance only granted for one path of medicine, one way… monotheism and monomedicine. Doctor as God. Diligently erasing the sacred, the autonomy, the precious bond between women like a natural forest is razed to the ground.
It’s progress. It’s safer this way. Trust us.
My own grandmother in the sixties after three home births, told by them she must go into hospital for number four as at 29 she was considered geriatric.
My mother, two abusive hospital births and one home birth only achieved by ignoring everybody else in the room.
I think the world is waking up to the fact that we’ve been sold a damn lie, with the induction wards rammed with everybody there for their “safety”, isolated from family like animals in a testing facility, left to languish in a climate of fear and misinformation and I’ve been saying for years now -
Women are in an abusive relationship with the NHS.
Like a domineering partner who cuts off all your other relationships so you only rely on them, then has you reduced to gratitude for the scraps of support they throw your way.
I’ve been holding space for stories of abuse for years now and the words that fall from my lips are now “shocked but not surprised”. How else to contain the outrage and simultaneously the deep knowing that this is happening everywhere to women? That these stories are not unusual but they are also horrific?
This morning I feel heartbroken that the only option right now for women in Cardiff is a high risk consultant ward or birthing alone. The smoke and mirrors game “they” are playing with women. And undoubtedly somebody will read this and make a comment about staffing and being grateful, to which all I can say is… trauma bonding is real.
All empires must eventually fall.
Ahava
Jenny x
