dear sister outlaw midwife,
oh i was just working on a blog post last week about this whole safety/consent thing. cause after i wrote that to you, i did want to develop out my thoughts on it.  so i got about 2/3 through and like too many blog post put it in drafts cause i couldnt figure out the ending.  ugh…
i love this: For me, having people obey my wishes about my own body is safe.
part of me just frustrated that all of these arg’s in midwifery comes down to proving such and such a thing is ‘safe’.  or safer.  frustrated that we prize safety so highly.  frustrated when i hear mw’s say, i am hired to make sure this person has a safe birth.  like, srsly?  or to make sure that the mama and baby are safe.
i guess it is because i think of safety/security as an illusion.  there are no guarantees in life.  and playing the statistics game (deciding ones protocol based on what has proven to be statistically safest or most effective) is a fools errand.  because you can easily find yourself in a situation where you do all the right things and the outcome is horrible.  and you can do all the wrong things and in the end everything turns out just how you wanted.
and if something is 99 percent effective, and you turn out to be that 1 percent, do you really care that 99 other people had difft outcomes?  and what if you are the mama and you lose your babe, because you are the 1 percent?  is your grief any less? probably not.
but yr grief probably is harder if you were told to go against your own motherwit, because the stats said xyz.
and if you did follow your intuition, and the outcome is not what you expected, then at least you can take responsibility for what happened.  rather than blaming mw’s and obgyns etc, ppl who have little accountability to you, and will go on doing their jobs barely remembering you existed a couple of weeks or months later.
i dont know.  i tell mamas, look, everything will not be perfect.  but if you follow your own sense of what to do, then you are taking responsibility for your own life and choices.  everybody has to be who they are.
and from what i have seen if you follow your own sense of what to do, then you will have more self-respect, self-love, self-empowerment.  and the more that we value ourselves, the more we are able to value others around us, including/especially our children.