It's time to talk about integrity in birthwork.
As birthkeepers it is our duty to BELIEVE WOMEN and expose the harms being committed against birthing people inside AND outside of hospitals.
▪︎ Integrity in Practice: First and foremost, we must always align ourselves with providers who value and demonstrate 100% transparency.
▪︎ As ethical professionals, we must endeavor to FULLY inform our clients by sharing critical information about provider outcomes (morbidities and mortalities).
▪︎ We must empower our clients with truth, no matter how inconvenient that truth may be.
▪︎ It is not our duty to "save" our clients from making choices that place them at greater risk of adverse outcomes, but it is our moral obligation to make those we serve aware of the peer-reviewed research evidencing best practice.
▪︎ Transparency and professional integrity are cornerstones of a compassionate, trauma-informed birth movement.
▪︎ As birthkeepers it is our duty to speak up when we are aware of harms being done. It is our duty to be truth tellers, even when that puts us at odds with certain providers.
▪︎ We must always remember that we are beholden to the birthing people we support. It must always be their trust and wellbeing that we place paramount.
▪︎ When we support our clients through complicated births and/or births that result in adverse outcomes we can feel immense pressure to align ourselves with providers over their patients. However, we have no duty to protect reckless providers or the systems that tell us to keep quiet about the negligence we may witness.
▪︎ We must BELIEVE SURVIVORS when they share about the traumas they have endured. We must stand in solidarity with survivors and call out substandard care.
▪︎We owe negligent providers NOTHING. To our clients we owe EVERYTHING!
▪︎ EVERYDAY we must challenge ourselves to reflect critically on the service we provide and labor to ensure it is integrity and client safety that motivates this scared birth work.
The Giving Voice to Mothers study: inequity and mistreatment during pregnancy and childbirth in the United States
""Recently WHO researchers described seven dimensions of mistreatment in maternity care that have adverse impacts on quality and safety."
~ "an online cross-sectional survey to capture lived experiences of maternity care in diverse populations. Patient-designed items included indicators of verbal and physical abuse, autonomy, discrimination, failure to meet professional standards of care, poor rapport with providers, and poor conditions in the health system. We quantified the prevalence of mistreatment by race, socio-demographics, mode of birth, place of birth, and context of care, and describe the intersectional relationships between these variables."
Results
"Of eligible participants (n = 2700), 2138 completed all sections of the survey. One in six women (17.3%) reported experiencing one or more types of mistreatment such as: loss of autonomy; being shouted at, scolded, or threatened; and being ignored, refused, or receiving no response to requests for help. Context of care (e.g. mode of birth; transfer; difference of opinion) correlated with increased reports of mistreatment. Experiences of mistreatment differed significantly by place of birth: 5.1% of women who gave birth at home versus 28.1% of women who gave birth at the hospital. Factors associated with a lower likelihood of mistreatment included having a vaginal birth, a community birth, a midwife, and being white, multiparous, and older than 30 years."
"Rates of mistreatment for women of colour were consistently higher even when examining interactions between race and other maternal characteristics. For example, 27.2% of women of colour with low SES reported any mistreatment versus 18.7% of white women with low SES. Regardless of maternal race, having a partner who was Black also increased reported mistreatment.""
Read more here:
https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12978-019-0729-2
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