Belly Tales

Bush has now nominated Samuel A. Alito to fill Sandra Day O’Connors shoes. While I’m a bit surprised that Bush has managed to turn around so quickly and nominate another candidate so hot on the heels of Harriet Mier’s withdrawal, I’m not that surprised by the nominee. Alito is a certainly a conservative’s conservative, sure to please the hard-core fundamentalists. Maybe this is Bush’s desperate attempt to draw attention away from the Harriet Miers debacle, the Libby indictment, and all the rest of the bad press he’s been getting lately. This is what NARAL Pro-Choice has to say about him:

In choosing Alito, President Bush gave into the demands of his far-right base and is attempting to replace the moderate O’Connor with someone who would move the court in a direction that threatens fundamental freedoms, including a woman’s right to choose as guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.

Samuel Alito’s record reveals troubling elements that place him well outside the American mainstream:

* Alito took pains to distance himself from the longstanding constitutional requirement that abortion restrictions must have exceptions when a woman’s health is in jeopardy. He did so when ruling on a law that effectively banned abortion as early as the 12th week of pregnancy and lacked an exception to protect women’s health. The health exception is a fundamental tenet of Roe v. Wade, and the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments about the need for the health exception this fall. Should Alito’s vote replace that of Sandra Day O’Connor, a fundamental right will likely be lost by next summer.

* Alito has argued that significant restrictions on a woman’s right to choose are constitutional. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, Alito argued that all of the proposed law’s restrictions on a woman’s right to choose – including a spousal notification provision struck down by the Third Circuit and, later, the Supreme Court – were constitutional. Alito dissented in part because he would have gone even further than the rest of the court.

* Alito would uphold state laws that place significant roadblocks in the way of women seeking abortion care. Alito concurred with the majority’s opinion in Casey that concluded that “time delay, higher cost, reduced availability, and forcing the woman to receive information she has not sought,” although admittedly “potential burdens,” could not “be characterized as an undue burden.” This opinion practically ensures that he would never find any burden to be undue. (In other words, more and more obstacles can be placed in the way of a woman obtaining an abortion, and that is acceptable.)

Personally, I am in complete agreement with Bill Clinton’s recent plea to Democrats to stand up and fight!

This is a fantastic article from Parenting.com, which was brought to my attention in one of the natural birth online communities I frequent. I am posting it in its entirety here, so that everyone can read it, even if you’re not subscribed to Parenting (although it’s well worth subscribing to). Can you imagine being prosecuted for first degree murder, just by refusing a cesarean? Scary scary article, just in time for Halloween. (Read on …)

A little administrivia. There are a few topics on this website that have no posts at all yet, or are otherwise a little thin. Which I would happily amend, but I need a few suggestions. I created the new products section because I thought it would be neat to review and discuss new products that have come out on the midwifery/parenting market, such as breastfeeding aids (pumps, shells, nursing bras etc.), the latest baby wrap that can keep the kiddo strapped to you in fashionable papoose style, the newest/bestest cloth diaper, or fastener etc. etc. The problem is, I don’t actually have any kids of my own yet, so I don’t really know what to review, and buying a nursing product when I’m not nursing is going to be sort of like a man trying to test out the latest greatest new tampon. So, does anyone have any suggestions for products which I can review? Alternately, if anyone would like to write up a review of a new product, feel free! You can e-mail your reviews to me at TheStudent@studentmidwife.org.

Additionally, there are still NO birth stories up in the birth stories section. And sure, I could certainly write about any of the amazing, beautiful births I have seen and attended, but I really was sort of hoping that other people would share their birth stories as well, either their own personal story, or the story of a birth they’d seen and attended. So, if anyone’s willing to bite the bullet on that one, we’d love to hear it! Send your stories to moi@studentmidwife.org, and I will post them sharpish (posts can be annonymous, using your first name only, or with your full name, it’s up to you). Otherwise, I will have to write up birth stories myself, which is fine by me, and it’s certainly nice to share the births I’ve seen with other people, but don’t you guys ever get tired of listening to me yap all the time? Yeah, I thought so. So, contribute!

Finally, if anyone has some lovely birth art they’d love to share, or any questions they’d like me to tackle, again, you know where to find me, and I am ready and eager to try to find answers to your questions, or post your artwork with loud praise. Full credit will be given to every artist, of course, and I can host the pictures on my server, so you don’t have to worry about bandwith.

Consider this an official call for submissions.

I didn’t get a chance to write about this yesterday, because it was a pretty busy day, but we had our check-out exams in the morning, and they both went very smoothly. There were de facto slip-ups, of course, but both my partner and I did well, even though I was so nervous that my hand was visibly shaking when I held up the penlight to check her extraoccular movements. I didn’t completely blank on anything, though, and I didn’t fumble too much, and the minor things which I did forget I was able to go back and correct on my own. The good news? Both my partner and I passed with flying colors, and even got a compliment from the professor about how organized we were, which is a bit surprising, since I felt so nervous, and we both felt like we had made lots of smalle gaffes. It took me three attempts to find the Southern Belle’s cervix during the speculum exam, even though I was always able to locate it right off the bat during all of our practice attempts! The even better news? It’s over!! We’ll be starting clinicals next week, and examining actual patients, instead of each other, so it feels a bit as if the really fun part is about to begin (not that examining your partner isn’t fun, but you know what I mean.) Our clinicals for this class will be held at an abortion clinic, actually, which should be a very interesting, and certainly a good way to get to examine lots of different women at different stages in their pregnancies. I’m a bit nervous about it, for sure, but mostly excited.

Worked last night…started out in antepartum, where I was taking care of one woman with severe pre-eclampsia, one woman with preterm premature rupture of membranes and oligohydramnios, and one woman with a complete placenta previa and vaginal bleeding. Then, around 3:00 am, I was transferred to postpartum to help with the sudden influx of admissions. Sadly, I didn’t get to see a single birth. It’s starting to feel like it’s been awhile since I’ve seen a one. I haven’t been working that often, and when I do work lately, either none of my patients deliver, or else I’m in postpartum. Hopefully a pattern that will break next week. It was a long, exhausting night, and I’m glad it’s over. Plans for the weekend? Sleep!

So, school has been pretty intense lately, and I haven’t been posting much about events happening outside of school for quite awhile. However, this doesn’t mean I’ve stopped reading the paper. The news of the day is that Harriet Miers has stepped down from her controversial nomination to the Supreme Court, and I, for one, and quite pleased about this. I mean, c’mon, people: this is a woman who had absolutely NO experience as a judge. She’d never served on any circuit. According to today’s BBC article on the subject, the written answers she gave in response to her initial questionnaire were “incomplete to insulting”, and required a Senate reprimand. Her biggest selling point was the legal work she’s done for Bush and his campaign over the years, but given Bush’s tendency to promote personal friends into positions of power that they’re unqualified for (such as Mike Brown, who’s experience prior to heading up FEMA included presiding over the International Arabian Horse Association), that’s not very reassuring at all. Then, of course, there was VP Dick Cheney’s chilling words to Rush Limbaugh during a radio interview, where Vice President Cheney was quick to assure ultra-conservative Rush “I’m confident that she has a conservative judicial philosophy that you’d be comfortable with, Rush,” and ending the interview with the following words: “You’ll be proud of Harriet’s record, Rush. Trust me.” (Radio Address, 10/5/05.) Riiiight. Don’t know about you, but that certainly sent shivers down my spine. The long and the short of it is, after meeting with staunch opposition from both sides of the aisle, she has withdrawn her nomination, ostensibly as a way of trying to preserve the separation of power between the White House and the Supreme Court (and less ostensibly, perhaps to protect Bush from a Senate confirmation hearing that would certainly stray into White House territory and probe into his administration’s record and files).

I do wonder, though: much of the opposition Harriet Miers received from Conservatives was over the fact that they weren’t convinced she was conservative enough. Not conservative enough?? This make me very fearful of whomever Bush will pull out of his hat next as a potential nominee—someone conservative and die-hard enough to satisfy Bush’s fundamentalist base of supporters. Someone, in other words, who will pose a very serious threat to the legality of abortion and women’s access to birth control and reproductive rights in this country. Very very scary. Stay tuned.

Just a brief update on the peer pelvic experience: overall, absolutely stellar. They were fun, intimate, very educational, and only marginally uncomfortable (we were in groups of three, which meant one person was examined twice by each of her peers, and let me tell you…by the end of the second exam…boy, were you ready to have that speculum removed!). The strangest part of the entire experience? Having a professor perform a bimanual on you. Honestly, I had totally forgotten about that aspect of it until this morning in class, but basically, the professor went in and examined each of us and recorded the findings so that she’d know what was there, and then the student would have a go at it. This way, if the student thought she was feeling the uterus to the left, and it was really to the right, the professor could correct her and help her find the right position. The recorded findings will be given to the professors who are grading us during the check-out exams, so that they’ll know what the student is supposed to be feeling/finding, if that makes any sense at all. Our professor (different from the one who taught us pelvimetry, but another good egg) was lovely throughout the entire thing, cracking jokes where appropriate, gently guiding us through it, putting us at ease. Amazing to see the beautiful variation in all of our bodies, even among only three of us. Women’s bodies are so neat! By the time we were up to the last person, we’d already gotten so much faster at doing the exams, and were much more comfortable with our speculums. We even practiced pelvimetry on each other. I found out that I have a totally adequate pelvis, mostly gynecoid, with some anthropoid features. So, in other words, when I finally get around to being pregnant, it shouldn’t really be a problem getting a baby through my pelvis. That’s always nice to hear! However, it’s been a long day, and in the interest of my sanity, I have decided to blow off the homework for an evening, eat some ice cream, possibly watch a movie, and get some sleep. My partner, the Southern Belle, will be coming over tomorrow night so we can run through the exams again and again and again until we both have it down cold, because…

CHECK OUT EXAMS ARE ON THURSDAY!!!!!

Right. Where’s that ice cream??

Just saw this on All About My Vagina. The lucky vulva coin purse! How cool is that?? Complete with pearl to polish! We wantss one, yesss, preciouss, we do. I love the satin labia minora, and the faux fur on the outside. Awesome. If any crafty person was wondering what to get me for the holidays…well, there ya go.

Our peer pelvics are tomorrow, and the check-out exam for my partner and I is this Thursday, which is when we’ll perform our head-to-toe assessment, pelvics and all, in front of our professors! So, I’ll be seeing a lot of vaginas this week (although, given my job, I tend to see a lot of vaginas anyway…but I’m never the one inserting the speculum, and certainly never graded on it *eep*). Aaaanyway, I thought I’d mark the occassion by sharing two of my all time favorite vagina sites EVAR: All About My Vagina and Vagina Pagina. All About My Vagina is a fantastic site which is exactly what it sounds like: a young woman’s detailed exploration of absolutely everything having to do with her vagina—arousal, sex, orgasms, smells, ovulation, menstruation, health and wellness, yeast infections—you name it, it’s in there, and all done so well, with tons of humour and frankness and curiousity. Vagina Pagina is a great place to ask and find answers to all of those vagina-related questions that you’ve always wanted to know about, and the Live Journal community is full of bright, fiesty vagina-lovin’ women, with a ton of support thrown in for good measure. They’re both fantastic places to visit…often. I’ll leave you to enjoy them; I’ve got to go study.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pain and birth. Or actually, pleasure and birth. Kimberly Bobrow’s website is what first got the wheels turning. In addition to the article on the language of breastfeeding that I was raving about last week, I also discovered this very interesting discussion about the eroticism of birth (a discussion that was so controversial it needed to be removed from the forum board it was originally on, and placed somewhere else). It’s so rare to even hear about stories like this! Almost invariably, when people talk about birth in this country, the focus is on pain. First time mothers spend sleepless nights worrying about it, birth education classes spend most of their time trying to prepare you for it, nurses measure your painscale while you’re in labor, modern obstetrics (and modern anesthesiology) is devoted to providing you with modern pain relief so that you can enjoy labor while numb up to your waist, and even celebrities like Britney Spears are so concerned about pain that they’d rather undergo major abdominal surgery than labor. Our culture can’t dissosociate pain from birth; they’re nearly synonymous, the horror story that grandmothers scare their grandaughters with (”just wait until you’re in labor someday”) or the guilt-trip sometimes used to keep children in line (”I went through 36 hours of excruciating pain for you”).

However, apparently it’s not painful for everyone! For some women, labor is an intensely sexual experience, amazingly erotic, and sometimes quite pleasurable—the ultimate turn-on. What an amazing idea that is! The sexual and erotic aspect of birth is something that is not even acknowledged in most of the literature I’ve ever seen, let alone something you would ever encounter in the hospital, which has been carefully designed to be as frightening, clinical and un-sensual as possible. This is something Robbie Davis-Floyd touched upon in her book, Birth As An American Rite of Passage: the cultural necessity of removing the sexuality from the obviously sexual process of birth. She writes:

It is precisely female sexual functions that the technocratic model finds threatening and labels both “defective” and “tabu”. So effective are hospital routines at masking the intense sexuality of birth that most women today are not even aware of birth’s sexual nature. For example, stimulation of the laboring woman’s breasts and clitoris has been proven to be extremely effective in strengthening labor, yet is utterly tabu in most hospitals, where the snythetic hormone pitocin is administered intravenously instead. The routine performance of episiotomy is another excellent example of the desexualization of birth in the hospital: an effective alternative recommended by many midwives is perineal massage with warm olive oil, far too overtly sexual a procedure for most obstetricians.

She goes on to discuss how this desexualization was something that was consciously desired, partly to avoid the embarassment of women performing sexual acts and acting sexually towards doctors or hospital staff during birth, and also partly to avoid the embarassment of something other than a penis giving a woman pleasure…in this case, the baby’s descending head! You could see how many people would find this not only controversial, but outrageous, bordering on sinful, and evoking ideas of incest. One nineteenth century doctor even went so far as to suggest that the purpose of the pain was to keep women from experiencing the underlying ecstasy of birth, and that birth should always be unmedicated in order to prevent women from discovering just how sexy it really was.

I think that my own thoughts on this subject need some time to ripen; pain and birth has been hardwired into my brain as well, and it will take some time to undo the pattern. Women are capable of experienceing birth as erotic and pleasurable. I know that Ina May has been quoted several times as saying something about how the same sexy energy that got that baby up there in the first place is the same energy needed to get the baby out. I wonder if this is something you see more often in a homebirth, becuase this is certainly something you’d never see in a hospital! I wonder how many of the sensations of birth are interpreted as painful just because that is how we’ve been socialized into thinking about it. I wonder if there are ways to keep a woman open to the possibility that birth may not necessarily be painful.

There will be a lot of milestones along this journey towards becoming a midwife, and two pretty major ones happened this week. The first one was on Monday during our pelvimetry lesson, when we measured each other’s hands with tape measures to find out how long our fingers are. The length of my right hand from the knuckle of my thumb to the tip of my middle finger is 13.5 cm. The length of my fist from one knuckle to the other is 8.5 cm. The length from the tip of my middle finger to the first joint is 2.5 cm, and the length from the tip to the 2nd joint is 5 cm. These numbers are the span of my hand, the measurements I’ll be using to gauge a woman’s pelvis from here on out. They’re important numbers, and it was an important moment; it seemed like it needed a ritual or ceremony to mark the occasion—the first time a student midwife measures her hands. My knowledge of a woman’s pelvis is only as good as the knowledge of my own hands, and with time, I will hopefully get quite adept at measuring with my hands, judging space and shape and proportion, learning that certain touch, knowing how to help a woman birth a large baby through a smaller pelvis, learning where the give is, where an extra millimeter of room can be squeezed out of a tight pelvis if she changes positions or squats or rocks, and knowing that this mililmeter can make the difference between a vaginal birth and a cesarean. These hands will be measuring diagonal conjugates, pelvic outlets, cervical length, the thickness of a woman’s pubic symphysis. These hands will be doing pap smears and collecting specimens and checking cervical tenderness and dilation. These hands will hopefully be catching babies someday.

The second milestone happened today: I inserted a speculum into a woman for the very first time! It was nervewracking and beautiful and humorous and tense all at once. I was so concerned that I would accidentally catch the walls of my partner’s vagina in between the blades of the speculum when I was trying to close it that I accidentally panicked and pulled the entire speculum out without closing it first. Good thing I had a very understanding patient! I was able to find her cervix, though, on my very first attempt. I opened the blades, and there it was, popping into view. It was adoreable: small and round and glistening, like a tiny, pink button mushroom with a small dimple in the center. Sadly, we didn’t have a mirror, and my partner had never seen her cervix before. I’ve made a note to bring a mirror with me next time we’re doing pelvics on each other, because it’s such an amazing experience to see your own cervix for the very first time. I can still so vividly recall seeing my own cervix for the very first time, only a year ago, when I was letting another student midwife practice her pelvic exam on me, and we happened to have a mirror. Afterwards, this is what I wrote about the entire experience:

It was much smaller than I thought it would be; I was expecting a big, plump, juicy pink donut, when in fact it was a rather small and prim looking pink donut. But still very cute, and very….good. I don’t know how to describe it, but seeing my cervix was unbelievably empowering. Like looking inside yourself and finding this secret, hidden part to you that you knew about but had never actually seen before, and then coming face to face for the very first time, and recognizing it as “you”, in a very deep and fundamental way. If that makes any sense at all. My cervix has been there all along, just humming along, doing her thing, but now I have actually *seen* what she looks like. Men are in love with their penises, for good reason; penises are amazing things. But women…women: love your cervix, because it is the heart of you, and every bit as amazing! It changes position each month, and opens just slightly to let the uterus bleed, and will someday keep a baby tightly sealed within for 9 months, and then miraculously dilate, the first gateway to the world. To quote Nzoake Shange: “I found God in myself, and I loved Her, fiercely.” That’s what it’s like to see your cervix for the very first time. Honestly, every woman should have a chance to look at her own cervix at some point in her life (just ask for a mirror next time you’re having a pap done). It was truly astounding.

Damn straight. Wow, today has been a good day.