Taking Action to Improve Birth

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Dr. Nancy

It has been a year since I dove into childbirth activism with my live online home birth of Oziah.  (His birthday is tomorrow!)

I hadn’t thought of my decision to birth live as a “social activist moment”, as my dear friend and midwife Betty-Anne Daviss would call it.  I simply wanted to show women their potential in childbirth.  I wanted people to see, with their own eyes, just how empowering and peaceful an undisturbed birth could be.  I wanted people to see that what happens to women giving birth on TV, movies, and in most hospitals is not because that what birth looks like, that is what the system around birth has created.

Today I have great news. We are going to change that system!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vSeHjDc_LPk

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vx-VGXbZP_0

Over the past year I have been volunteering with the informed choice coalition to organize the CHOICE: A Birth and Baby Film Festival.

The CHOICE Film Festival is all about women learning about their choices in childbirth. Through this festival we hoped to create a dialogue about what is possible in childbirth and how to fix what is happening in birth today.  Our current birth practices have developed into a system that is routinely abusing and assaulting women and violating their rights.  These violations are so ingrained into the fabric of our ideas of birth that they most often go unrecognized as trauma and just accepted as part of the cross we have to bare as women to have a baby.   

Today we begin changing that!  I have been moderating the panel discussions we have after each film.  This has been the best part of the festival as we have been able to share ideas on how we can protect the next set of birthing women.  As a result of the Freedom for Birth film screening and a wonderful lawyer who sat on our panel, we now have a group of lawyers who are willing to move forward to changing the human rights violations that Canadian women are experiencing today in birth.  

Every women has has the right to choice in childbirth but most are not often given that right.   

You have the right to informed consent without pressure, coercion, and with having all the information to make a fully informed educated choice, including the alternatives to the proposed treatment or procedure.  You also have the right to informed refusal of consent, which means you can say “No” to anything and everything.  We know that most women (almost all) have had some aspect of their informed choice violated in birth and we need you to share your story.  

No matter how big or small the violation was, we need to hear from you so we can make a change in the system.  We need to collect the stories of women and have them sworn as legal affidavits.  Once we collect a good number of women’s stories and have them commissioned by a lawyer into affidavits, the goal is to force a government public inquiry into the systematic abuses of women’s right to informed choice in childbirth.  
This could be a game changer!!! Please check out this action and share freely, share this with every woman you know who has given birth.  When you meet people who have given birth, ask how it was and encourage them to fill in this survey.  By filling out the survey, you are not committing, you are merely sharing your story of how your right to informed choice was not respected.  You will be contacted by a lawyer to move forward.  

There is strength in numbers.  The more women willing to share their stories the better we will be able to show the government that these are not unique isolated cases.  There is s system at play here that is set up in a way that it routinely abuses women and that needs to change.  You can BE the change you want to see in the world.  Please share your story.  Please read here for more details:

Please leave your comments below.

About Dr. Nancy

Dr. Nancy has been practicing family, wellness chiropractic since 2001. Her focus in practice is prenatal and pediatric chiropractic and caring for the whole family. She is also a childbirth educator and has coached numerous women through their pregnancies, births, and in caring for their young children.
This entry was posted in Birth Stories, Childbirth Activism, Western Birth Practices and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>