I just had my first appointment with a new OB/GYN, my first time seeing a male doc for this purpose. To my surprise, he was awesome. My visit included not one, but *two* fully-clothed interviews with the doctor and the best pelvic I’ve ever had. He treated me like a person and sounded like a feminist the entire time. Not coincidentally, I believe, my blood pressure was 114/56, much lower than it ever was at my old OB’s office, even when I was not pregnant. She (and her whole practice) always made me feel like a cog in a machine and not an active participant in the process.

Oh hell, yes. One of the most relaxing things about my alma mater was that we got to ignore a big chunk of that for a while. A lot of other students worried that we lived in too much of a bubble and were not being exposed to the “real world” enough. Considering what some of the “real world” is made of, I didn’t think taking a break from all that mess was such a bad idea. It’s much easier to concentrate on learning and/or doing you job if you aren’t also always worried about being judged about stupid stuff like what you wear and being female. (I always found it funny when people assumed that we were always catty and cliquish - not that all that went completely away, but it was drastically subdued and I think this was in large part to the lack of being egged on by the “real world”.)

The “shock” of having to assimilate back into a world that quite often finds everything I do controversial wasn’t such a bad experience in the end, either. It’s like when my mother asked me during my first break home from college why we all referred to ourselves as women and not girls. I couldn’t say that we saw ourselves as adults because, since she and my dad were still paying for everything, I felt more kinda stuck in the middle than anything else. So I told her why I thought we really did it, which was that we were learning to become adults, and part of that is learning to expect to be treated as adults - and that includes respect as well as responsibility. We were learning to treat each other the way we thought we ought to be by graduation so that it would feel normal by then - and consequently, demanding the respect we deserved would feel more natural as well.

Nick, I recommend a swift elbow to the chops to the next fool that does that.

Yes, you will feel better. It’s very empowering.

too bad she didn’t get to tell the bastard that, good, his refusal to treat her makes it much easier for her to get *proper* medical care, and if he’s not competent enough to deal with his patients as individuals, he’s nowhere near competent enough to be a decent doctor, and ought to consider switching careers and working on an assembly line, which is more in keeping with his skills.

Kyra, we were both in fact thinking something along those lines at the time. But seeing as how he was in the same practice as the other OB that she was actually going to be dealing with, we decided to leave it lie. I got the impression that this was not the first time that a patient had gone from the first OB in that practice to the one we ended up with.

The OB’s she had the first time was an interesting team. The one who dealt with patients the most was a very empathetic and knowledgeable guy, very good at working with patients on what was happening, what was happening next, etc.. The other one reputedly was not much good at the bedside manner or patient counseling stuff at all, but when the fecal material hit the rotary distributor and things had to happen a) right and b) fast, he apparently was nonpareil with a scalpel in his hands. My wife’s C-section at his hands (after 21 hours of labor) went smoothly enough.

My wife’s second child ended up as natural as it gets. My son was born 3 or so weeks early and 20 minutes after we got to the hospital and her peripheral veins had collapsed, so she didn’t get so much as an IV. The delivery room staff is trying to get some history from us (we had had an appointment to go to the hospital the next day to get all that information into the computers there, etc.). Given that my wife was occupied, I did the talking. When I told them that our firstborn was delivered by C-section, the nurse said “VBAC!” and everyone froze for a second. But there were no complications.

What I hated during pregnancy was being treated like I was a dummy. Don’t ride in a car down a bumpy road! Don’t bend over! Don’t drink even a drop of beer! I was and am still smart enough to know when some “risk” is bull shit, or that one beer isn’t going to damage my baby. But whenever you read articles about pregnancy that deal with gas fumes, or coffee, or hair dye, cheese (!!) or even analgestics they always say: there is no evidence that it harms fetuses, but abstain just to be safe. And you’re so scared something will happen to the baby that you obey, just to have peace of mind. But it’s almost all bs designed to make the mother’s life as difficult and uncomfortable as possible, like you have to prove you really are worthy by ignoring your own wants and comfort.

I say, obey the common sense of the smart woman. You are not an incubator, and considering yourself won’t hurt your baby.

If you get heat over not breastfeeding from a stranger, you can look mournful and tell them you’d love to breastfeed, but you had breast cancer and a double mastectomy, and can’t. This not only exempts you from their expectations (and shuts them up; always a plus) but makes them think twice about attacking another woman, in case her reason for not breastfeeding is the same as “yours.”

I love this discussion. I’ve really just entered the baby zone (two best friends with freshly hatched ones, three good friends in various states of preggers). I will certainly point them towards this article as they’ve been talking about these very situations and their rising frustration with this altered attitude towards their state of being. Well, the two with the fresh babies are more upset about breast-feeding nazis making them cry at the hospital, but that is another story all together.

For the record, I love the idea of breastfeeding and want an amazing supportive environment to help women feel comfortable and able to access information about breastfeeding. I just cannot STAND women being made to feel like crap because somebody has decided they didn’t try hard/long enough to breastfeet. And I cannot abide by anyone who snarks and threatens a woman after her having three days of labour, a c-section, an infection, and a 12lb baby (turkey?) A special place in hell, oh yes.

m.

I certainly don’t mean to imply that all, or even most, natural-birth advocates are like this, of course–just that the mentality that women are incubators doesn’t start or end in medical school.

I suspect that they might have been the types that can’t handle disagreement and wanted to convert you to our side by laying on the guilt. If you had “seen the light” and embraced natural birth, they probably would have switched to being just as concerned about you and your feelings as they were about the baby.

There are risks associated with the use of drugs during labor, but obviously those drugs are not killing babies left and right. The risk we all expose our children to every time we put them in a car is probably greater than the risk associated with using pain medication.

I’ll buy that *you* see childbearing as an opportunity for female empowerment, etc. When I was pregnant for the first time, virtually all of the lecturing and Think About The Baby You Selfish Bitch advice came from the crunchy granola natural-birth crowd.

When my best friend’s mother went in to the OB for her ninth pregnancy (she’s Catholic), the doctor told her, “After this one’s born, we’ll fix your problem.” The “problem” (in his mind only) was her large number of pregnancies, possibly coupled with his judgement on her financial situation; the “solution” was sterilization. She told him off but good and now has a different OB.

If I had been in Kim’s shoes with the dentist refusing to treat her, I’d have pulled a World-(can’t say it; the card game)-Tournament-worthy bluff and told him, “All right, let’s schedule it for the week after next; I can have an abortion by then” and upon his expression of protest, informed him that he had limited my choices to either four months of pain or nine more months of pregnancy, and that I found it better to start all over again with the pregnancy than suffer for four months, and that HE was the one who had made the much-preferred choice of small risk + relief unavailable to me, and I was making the second-best choice. If he didn’t fall for that, I’m sure there’s some dentist somewhere in the general area who would’ve. Repeat as necessary, and that’ll teach him to use pregnancy as an excuse to treat me as less than human!

RonF—too bad she didn’t get to tell the bastard that, good, his refusal to treat her makes it much easier for her to get *proper* medical care, and if he’s not competent enough to deal with his patients as individuals, he’s nowhere near competent enough to be a decent doctor, and ought to consider switching careers and working on an assembly line, which is more in keeping with his skills.

Re: “How are you and Mommy doing?” Me: “Well, I don’t know about *it,* but *Mommy* is extremely insulted because someone has apparently decided that someone who cannot hear or understand, much less answer, is more competent to answer their question than she is!”

If I am ever pregnant, I will probably respond to people touching my stomach with threats to break their fingers.

Ledasmom—”Crib lizards.” I love it.

I was pregnant with my fifth and had to have dental care and the dentist wanted me to have x-rays. I fought it at first till he assured me he could not proceede with the treatment until he took the x-rays and that he wouldn’t proceede with them if they did endanger the child’s health, the risk was more minimum at that time.

I’m also confused by your statement that eating well was relayed to you in terms of the babies health. I had always heard the opposite, and it was my own health that could deteriorate if I didn’t take care. I do believe there is information on the use of folic acid as being beneficial to the fetus (in terms of less chance of miscarriage or birth defects but as my last child was born 6 years + ago and I’m unlikely, at 47 to have another one…)

But as a pregnant mom I wanted to know the benefits risks to my child to be. I would be the one caring for the child…I would have to know that the potential risk was less than the potential benefit to me. Similarly a woman who chooses to have a child later in life should know the risks of “older mother” pregnancies and should feel that the risk is worth it to her. A woman who is neither willing to raise a child who is born with Down’s syndrome (in the above case) nor willing to abort if that situation should arrive should probably not become pregnant.

If stress has been determined to have a negative effect on the potential child (and it is known to have a negative effect on people, at least stress at a certain level, a certain amount is good) then I as a mom to be would want to know that and, as I am ultimately responsible for my own health, have to see that I subject myself to less stress. I also think that the mom-to-be’s partner and family should know not to stress her out.

As far as society taking care not to stress out pregnant women, how would that work? Would their be laws against annoying a pregnant mom? Would they only take effect when mom shows? How would that work in the work place?

Who else can the burden fall upon but the one who can control it best; mom-to-be. But ask me about Post Partum Depression and I’ll give you a different answer.

Some doctors get very offended when someone questions their opinions from on-high. They’re not worth the paper their diploma is printed on.

When my wife had our first child, she had high blood pressure. It was especially high the first few minutes she walked into a doctor’s office; she finds them very stressful. The doctor checked her blood pressure a while after the first time, when the nurse did it. Then he taught her how to use a blood-pressure cuff. She would then monitor her blood-pressure, and if necessary go lie down for a bit. She did this, and everything worked out fine.

When she had our son, I had a different job and a different health plan. In she goes to the doctor. The nurse had taken her blood pressure, and it was high. He prescribed blood-pressure medication. He refused to take her blood pressure again. He refused to discuss her previous pregnancy and how that was managed.

She brought the script home, quite upset and skeptical. I’ve worked in health care for a while. I looked up the drug, didn’t like what I read, and made an appointment with her prevous doctor, paying for that visit on our own because he wasn’t in the HMO. He took a look at the script, pulled down a couple of books, and we looked at the articles together. The consensus was that she shouldn’t take the drug.

We went back to the HMO and informed the doctor that she wasn’t going to take the drug. This was quite a surprise for him; this was back in the 1980’s, and he (and her relatives, when we told them this story) was shocked that she would have the gall to tell him how he was going to treat her. He then refused to treat her further. Fortunately, there was another OB at the HMO’s office that would take her on and treat her on the basis of the last pregnancy. Everything came out fine; little bugger damn near was born in the front seat of the car on the way to the hospital, but that’s another story….

Interesting you should interpret your first comment on this thread that way. You said:

It is fascinating that someone on a “progressive” Blog would wonder why a midwife or OB would care more about someone who cannot look after his or herself than one of the two people who should be looking out for the child’s well-being. Every other time it is the end all be all for society to take protect the unprotected.

You seemed to be saying that it confused you why “someone on a progressive blog” would want a midwife or a doctor to care more about the pregnant woman than about the fetus. This may be your way of saying that most people do care more about the pregnant woman, but that it confuses you why anyone “progressive” would.

As for vicodin — my wife and I were drinking and partying for three months before she found out she was pregnant then the drinks slowed down to two or three glasses of wine a week. Our first born has been an honor student (a real honor student), speaks three languages, and is a star athelete. I say tell them — “Mothers have been giving birth for thousands of years, without giving a damn about the unsolicited advice of others, so it should not start now, especially not with me.”