Posts tagged choice
Reclaiming Birth
13
I wrote a guest post over at The F-Word last week, getting the word out about a march and rally called Reclaiming Birth, which took place today. The aims of the march and of the participating organisations can be read in this handout. In summary, they are:
- Ask the health service to provide more midwives so that every woman is supported throughout her labour and never left alone
- Provide access to at least one stand-alone birth centre in every local area
- Disseminate good information on and the option to choose home birth, birth in a midwife-led unit or birth in an obstetric unit in every area
- Maintain at least one case-loading midwifery group, free at the point of use, for every area
- Launch an inquiry into maternity care at King’s College Hospital Foundation Trust, London, which recently terminated its contract with the Albany Midwives Practice
Here are some photos from the event.
I was really impressed with the number of people there, including quite a lot of men and many, many children. One little girl, no more than 7 or 8, was leading chants and blowing a whistle while shouting “Choices! Choices!” and “We need midwives!” There were grandfathers, great-grandmothers, teenage boys with shirts reading “Born at home,” mothers of all different ethnic backgrounds…it was really fantastic. I felt inspired, empowered, invigorated and part of a community and a movement that really cares about women and their families.
If you want to help Reclaim Birth, please write to your MP, the Secretary of State for Health and to the Maternity Services Liaison Committee at your local obstetric unit. You can email letters directly through the NCT website. Please take a few minutes to send a couple emails, and then pass it onto others who care about birth and ask them to do the same. This is our chance to demand real change to the maternity services, providing women with the choices, continuity of care and positive birth experiences that every one of us deserves. Let’s make our voices heard!
Blog For Choice: Trust Women
1
Blog For Choice Day 2010
Each year, NARAL Pro-Choice America poses a question to pro-choice bloggers before the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and then asks them to blog their answer on January 22.
Blog for Choice Day provides us with an opportunity to raise the profile of reproductive rights in the blogosphere, all the while celebrating Roe’s 37th anniversary. Plus, it’s a great way to let your readers and the mainstream media know that a woman’s right to choose is a core progressive value that must be protected and advanced.
Last year more than 500 people participated in this effort. We hope you will join us this year!
If you don’t have a blog, you can still participate! You can post your response in a Note on Facebook, or tweet your response on Twitter and use the hashtag #bfcd.
This year’s topic
In honor of Dr. George Tiller, who often wore a button that simply read, “Trust Women,” this year’s Blog for Choice question is:
What does Trust Women mean to you?
I don’t know about you but I’m loving this year’s topic. To me, trusting women is the crux of the abortion issue and all of women’s reproductive rights, really. Because if we can’t trust women to make their own decisions about their own bodies and lives, what in the world is the government and our society doing even pretending that they consider women fully sentient human beings who should be afforded the same rights as men?
Regardless of what some people might think, the decision to keep or terminate a pregnancy is not an easy one. Sometimes a baby is wanted but not feasible and sometimes it’s the other way around. There are as many different reasons for choosing to carry a pregnancy to term as there are for deciding not to. Not all of them are selfless. Not all of them are selfish. But really, it shouldn’t matter why a woman exerts her choice to reproduce or not – all that matters is that the choice exists.
Trusting women to make the best choices for themselves, their health and their families extends not only to abortion, though, but to all aspects of their reproductive processes. Informed consent and real choice in childbirth is also being threatened with alarming regularity. The technologies invented and the methods adopted in the last several decades in an effort to improve outcomes and maternal satisfaction with the birth experience has swung from the useful, life-saving end of the pendulum towards the other side, where maternal and infant mortality rates actually rise instead of fall with excessive interventions and unnecessary surgeries performed, leaving scores of health-impaired babies and traumatised or dissatisfied mothers in its wake.
Trusting women means trusting them to know whether they’d like to or are able to become mothers, and when, and how many times. It means keeping public scrutiny and laws and judgment off their pregnant bodies. It means providing them with the tools, knowledge and support to make their own decisions in childbirth and allowing their instincts to flourish and guide them, with confidence. It means accepting that sometimes people will make choices that we wouldn’t make ourselves and trusting that they were the right ones for them at that time.
What does Trust Women mean to you?