It is commonly said that a person is innocent until proven otherwise. If we move this phrase to the world of health and pregnant women we should say that a pregnant woman is a healthy woman until proven otherwise. However, until recently and even in many health centers, at the time the test is positive a pregnant woman becomes a sick woman, unless proven otherwise.
A sick woman who cannot gain weight because every month she passes the exam of the scale after which the pertinent anger arrives, a sick woman who cannot complain about the prick of an analytic because "girl, if you complain about this, let's see what you say the day you are going to give birth ", a sick woman who cannot complain about having nausea and vomiting because" that happens to everyone ", a sick woman who cannot assure that glucose cannot be taken because she is fatal because" no there is another one, you have to take it "and a sick woman because the day she will give birth everything can go wrong, unless healthcare professionals control everything to satiety and, if all goes well, mother and son end up safe and sound thanks to their help and protocols.
Weight control as if it were life
It seems that those in white are waiting for a woman to get pregnant to stay at ease telling her how bad she eats, how fat she is getting and how well she could do it. Midwives (many of them past kilos, but this is another issue ...) and gines obsocated in getting every pregnant woman to gain weight at a rate of one kilogram per month, as if after giving birth all women had to wear their tip before two weeks to wear the models of a famous designer.
And that is fine. The Kilo theory per month works for some, but not for all women:
- Women who have a low BMI (> 19.8) would have to increase between 12.5 and 18 kg.
- Women with a normal BMI (19.8 to 26) should increase between 11.5 and 16 kg.
- Women with a high BMI (26 to 29) would have to increase between 7 and 11.5 kg.
- Women with a very high BMI, considered obese (<29) would have to increase a minimum of 6.8 kg.
As you can see there are that the kilo per month may be too much (for the obese, that many even lose weight during pregnancy) and others fall short, very short, to the point that they may end up making dietary restrictions at a time when a woman cannot go hungry. Come on, it is not the time to stop to diet to lose weight or control weight. Common sense, if all goes well and the weight gain is logical, go ahead, as you can see a thin woman can gain up to 18 kg, which is 2 kg per month. Imagine the face of midwives and gines if you appear on the scale with that weight ... surely less beautiful, of all.
Complain about the tests
Doing blood tests, screening and various tests is something that nobody likes. There are those who get used to being sick, but healthy people don't usually like it, as a rule. A pregnant woman is a healthy woman who does some tests to see, simply, that everything is going well. That you do an analytical and have a bad time with the needles is something that happens to many people, pregnant or not. The difference is that the one who does not have a baby inside is told to breathe, try to calm down, and the pregnant woman is told that "well, you still have a few, and you still have to give birth."
These days we have commented that many women have a very bad time when taking the O'Sullivan Test, because glucose is very bad (although there are women who like it), because they feel bad, they get dizzy and end up vomiting . As we said, there are alternatives to do otherwise, there are young women (under 25) who do not even have to do it and there are times when the test would not be so badly carried, as in the afternoon, when the Morning sickness is not present. That hears, if you are sick, with something serious and you need the test to see how you are or what treatment to take, well look, do it even if it bothers me, but we talk about healthy women, relatively young women and that, despite being in a center sanitary, they are theoretically healthy. Healthy until proven otherwise.
In fact, it is even in a drawer, a woman is fertile while her body works in a harmonious and healthy way. When the body begins to fail, when the energies are not the same, when you are already more at risk of being healthy, then you are no longer fertile, then you can no longer have children. For the same, I could understand the treatment received and the various tests if we were talking about a seventy-year-old woman waiting for a baby, but that is not the case.
You are not going to give birth, we have a birth
And the day you arrive at the hospital you are not going to give birth. There is not a woman who is going to give birth and comes in case something goes wrong. You arrive, you do the entrance papers and as it turns out that you come bent by the contractions you arrive as a patient so that the professionals assume your birth. "I'm going to box 3, I have a birth." That is, I am going to see a healthy pregnant woman, unless it has been proven otherwise, to treat her like a sick woman because every birth can end badly if I do nothing to remedy it.
Then the woman is told to put on a white coat open in the ass. If you have the same fate, I even let you keep your panties on, but "just for a while that in 17 minutes they will make a vaginal touch, is it pretty?" If the hospital belongs to the modern ones, they may not shave you, if it is one of those that have not passed from the century, yes, we shave you so that the pubic hair that you have here that nature has given you does not produce you, I do not know what infection. That if it were true, okay, but it is not.
Maybe they give you a bed in a room while you are dilating, what will you tell me why do you want a woman dilating a bed, if you prefer to be anywhere but lying down, maybe you put a monitor with some straps on your belly and "don't move much, honey, if not, we don't hear it and your baby could be wrong without us knowing," when lack of mobility is the worst thing you can promote when a woman needs precisely freedom to choose at any moment the position that suits her and when it has been observed that discontinuous monitoring helps to have fewer caesarean sections without increasing the health risk of babies (The inventor of the monitor for continuous fetal control said long ago that he was very happy with the impact his invention had had, but that he would like it to be used only for moms who really need it, which is for those that were invented) .
Maybe they will put you down to give birth, in a bed that is articulated by a lot of places in case you want to give birth sitting, but that they leave it lying down so that it ends up being an articulated bed without articulating, that is, a bed like those of all life and you there with your legs up as if you were going to operate from there down, uncomfortable at best and not all because you are sick until proven otherwise.
Sick that "you have a very rigid perineum, honey, and the baby will not be able to leave, so we will help you" (and if you want to thank us later) making you an episiotomy, a beautiful cut the sea of useless in the Most cases that only serve to annoy and promote complications in the area, as many end up with a greater tear than would have occurred naturally. Notice that it is estimated that in a normal, natural birth, with the best possible conditions, tears occur in, more or less, one in three deliveries. Something like thirty-five percent against the 90% of episiotomies that were practiced in Spain less than ten years ago. The WHO states that the rate of episiotomies should be 10-20%, because it can be a useful intervention in case of needing to accelerate the exit of the baby for some reason of urgency, but from there to do it all there is an abyss, since I refer the figures.
Bringing a baby to the world is something impressive
I don't know because I haven't lived it and I will never live it, but Bringing a baby into the world is something that seems impressive to me. Yes, I know that almost all women do it and that this happens every day, but at the experiential level it must be brutal. It is not something that happens many times in life, in fact. My mother lived it up to six times, Miriam on three occasions, and it is such a brief moment if we compare it with the rest of our life experiences that should serve to make women feel somewhat powerful, grandiose, full of life , of magic, of ... I don't know, of feelings of self-confidence, of having done something big.
Of course, if you arrive at the hospital and they treat you like the opposite, like a sick woman about to go into a coma, that "as the thing turns we put you in the ICU," what do you want me to say ... I doubt much that a woman giving birth like this goes out with those feelings that I comment. At the most he will be thanking him because luckily he had some professionals who put the monitors at all times, who asked him a thousand times how he was doing, who did not know how many touches to see how it evolved, who did an episiotomy and even they had to squeeze her belly down because the baby didn't want to leave, and thanks to all this her son is healthy and alive and she is too.
Luckily something is moving, many things are already changing in some centers and this in a few years will be anecdotes of the level of infantilization or "sickness" to which women were subjected. Until then, there we go, fighting for women to be simply pregnant: pregnant yes, sick no.
Photos | Joelle Inge-Messerschmidt, Altus Geldenhuys on Flickr In Babies and more | "In the delivery care the emotions have been neglected." Interview with the doula Carolina Cerro, A pregnant woman is not a sick person ... but how is it appreciated that they give you the seat sometimes, How does the relationship between professionals and women influence the birth process
