Content and Trigger Warning
Please be advised that the following testimonial contains descriptions of sexual assault and rape, which some individuals may find distressing. Please engage in self-care if you choose to read this article.
Naked from the chest down, I was held down against my will. While I was screaming and struggling to get free, a stranger forced something inside my genitals. I believe that everyone in the room that night was trying to help. I believe that they saved my daughter’s life. But that does nothing to change the fact that what I experienced that night was a rape.
My birth trauma story began over a decade before I got pregnant, when I was sexually assaulted at 20 years old. Fourteen years later, when I was pregnant with my first child and started thinking about birth, I realized I wanted to avoid an epidural. For me, to be unable to move and fully feel while something that monumental was happening to my vagina – while people were looking at and touching my genitals – that was horrifying. For me, preserving my sense of safety meant being able to move freely. I was afraid that an epidural would make me feel trapped and helpless. I looked around for providers in my area who supported unmedicated births, and I found a wonderful small midwifery practice. From the beginning I trusted them. I felt seen, respected, and safe with them.
I got my unmedicated birth, and it was one of the most empowering experiences of my life. In labor, I was completely in and of my body, and that was so healing. After my son was born, for the first time in 14 years, I could see and touch certain parts of my body without feeling disgust. Medically, that birth was simple. (My water broke first, but contractions quickly followed. Early labor took about 18 hours, active labor around 4 hours, then 45 minutes pushing.) Yet that birth was even simpler emotionally. I had been there, united with my body, as we did something awe-inspiring. I felt powerful and whole.
When I got pregnant with my daughter two years later, I was so excited to get to give birth again. At my 32-week appointment, I remember feeling like everything was falling into place. I had passed my gestational diabetes screen, my daughter had just turned head down. Then, at 33 weeks, my water broke.
I was admitted to the hospital and I received antibiotics and steroid shots. I learned that my baby was breech, necessitating a c-section. I didn’t give much thought to the c-section; I was too worried about my daughter’s well-being to care about my birth experience. My goal was to stay pregnant for at least one more week. For five days, I stayed in the antepartum wing, anxious and afraid for my baby. Every time I shifted, sat up, or rolled over I felt more of her fluid falling out of me. Slowly, she started moving less. On the morning of the fifth day, the fluid turned from clear to pink. That evening contractions began. I told the nurse I was in labor, but the monitor wasn’t picking up my contractions, and the OB on call didn’t believe me that I was in labor. She came in and asked if I needed pain relief. I asked her if there was a medical reason for me to get an epidural. She looked at me like I had two heads. I said, “I’m in labor. Isn’t it time for the C-section?” She snapped at me, “It will be time for the C-section when you’re begging me for an epidural,” and she left the room, ignoring my efforts to talk to her.
My midwife arrived, and for a moment, when she walked in, I felt safe. She sat down at the end of my bed, took my hand, and we talked again about why this should be a C-section instead of a vaginal birth. I nodded in agreement, and she went to assure the OB that I was in real labor. Up to this point, I had been able to sit and talk for several minutes in between each contraction, but now things sped up. During contractions, I had to be on my hands and knees. If anyone was saying anything during the contractions, I couldn’t hear or see them. During those contractions my world shrank to contain only the bed beneath me, and my husband’s hand in mine. He looked worried to see me in pain, and he asked me if I was okay.
I confessed to him how comforting the labor pain was. That physical pain offered me an embodied escape from the fear and purgatory of the past five days. I could feel the soft warm waves of oxytocin washing over me. I loved that feeling. That animal remove from my own anxieties. That sense of safety. I had craved that feeling ever since my first birth. And when I consented to the C-section, I had feared I would never feel that feeling again. I was treasuring those contractions.
The OB came back and said she needed to check me. She sounded loud and shrill when she announced, “Three centimeters, she’s three centimeters! That’s active cervical change!” I was confused about why she sounded frightened as she said that. But she left, and no one said anything to me.
After that point, the contractions intensified so fast that I lost all awareness of what was happening around me. I was only getting maybe 30 seconds between contractions now, not enough time to figure out what was happening before another one came on. Each time I came out of a contraction, someone else was beside me. During one 30-second window, The OB announced, “We can’t have you in that position if it loses the signal.” I felt desperate and afraid. “I’m trying! I can’t! I’m trying, but I can’t stay on my back.” She sounded like she thought I didn’t care about my baby, like I was just dancing around for fun to keep her from tracking the heartbeat. I tried with desperation to stay on my back, but my body was like a wild animal; I was incapable of preventing myself from flipping back onto all fours.
After that, I felt increasingly panicked. I didn’t know or understand what was happening. The contractions had become all-encompassing and nearly constant. I was still treasuring the contractions, but I was also terrified. I only understood my body, the waves of oxytocin, and the pain. I could no longer hear what anyone around me was saying. I surfaced from one contraction to see that a man had put a pen in my hand, and he was waving a piece of paper in front of my face. The title at the top of the page said “Consent for Anesthesia.” I was confused. Could that mean general anesthesia? No, that wouldn’t make any sense. It must mean the spinal. I only had seconds, no time to ask any of that out loud, and a new contraction was already coming on. My hand felt weak and I told him I couldn’t hold the pen, and he said that was okay and that I didn’t need to sign it. By the time I surfaced again, he was gone.
For the next few contractions, only my nurse, my midwife, and my husband were in the room with me. I was worrying about how I would hold still for the spinal when I couldn’t force my body to stay still during the contractions. And then out of nowhere I felt an enormous vibrating boom as someone kicked the brake off on my hospital bed. Suddenly and without a word, they yanked my bed out of the room, and as I swung out into the hallway they forcefully wrenched my husband’s hand away from mine. I could feel someone physically holding him back to keep him from following me and I heard him cry out “J, I love you.” He sounded desperate and terrified.
My nurse pushed the bed down the hallway so fast that my body swung back and forth on the bed, nearly to the point where I nearly overbalanced and fell off. I watched the lights and shadows alternating rapidly along the walls as we raced down the hallway. In movies I had never seen a gurney pushed so fast. We crashed through a pair of double doors, and a female voice behind us laughed nervously: “Don’t go so fast that she falls off the bed!”
We swung into the OR. The lights were so bright. I instinctively closed my eyes under the glare. At first, I tried to help them get me onto the table. But so many hands were touching me, turning me, pulling me. And then they strapped me down. Wide velcro straps fastened around my hips. That petrified me. I began to struggle against the restraint, trying to get off my back, trying to get all those hands off of me. The anesthesiologist clamped a brown mask over my face. It smelled sweet and sickening and slightly of rubber and plastic. He told me “Breathe deeply,” and his voice was kind, and for one moment I did as he said. As I inhaled, my muscles relaxed, and my tensed arms fell to my sides, and then immediately hands on both sides strapped down my arms. I felt tricked and betrayed. I was consumed by total terror. I tried desperately to wrench my arms free from those restraints, but my arms were like lead weights. I was trying desperately to get loose, but I could feel my arms still, unmoving, tied down. There were so many people in the room. So many voices. So many hands touching me. I kept trying to turn, to get up; my body didn’t respond. I was naked from the chest down, splayed out. An uncertain female voice said, “She’s still wearing a shirt.” I knew she was asking if she should cut it off of me. A more confident female voice answered, “it’s okay, leave it.”
The male voice was still saying “breathe deeply... breathe deeply... breathe deeply” but I couldn’t, I was hyperventilating. He was holding down the mask with so much force, like a clamp. My cheeks hurt where the sides of it dug into my face. It felt like there wasn’t enough oxygen coming through the mask. I tried desperately to get out from under the mask, but it was being held down with so much force. As I struggled I became convinced that I was suffocating. I thought I was going to die from suffocating.
Then, deep in my cervix, low in my back, I felt another contraction coming on. I tried with animal desperation to break free from the straps, I tried to flip the whole table over. I screamed, not a labor vocalization, not a moan or a yell, a shattering scream like the kind you hear in horror movies. I felt it in my throat. I heard that scream fill the room. If crowning a baby was a 10 out of 10, that single contraction, strapped down on my back, was 1000 out of 10. It was a completely different plane of existence. Pain filled everything. Pain became the only thing that I was. Dying cannot possibly hurt more than that. I felt my entire body explode.
I cannot remember the middle or the end of that contraction, only the beginning. The next thing I remember, the contraction was over, and I heard a female voice command, “Foley.” Then I felt someone force something painful inside my vagina. The violence and violation of it was breathtaking. I remember thinking: “This is like some kind of fucked up nonconsent porn.” I didn’t know why any of this was happening. I was unaware of any emergency. I only knew how I was being treated, and that no one was talking to me. They were behaving as if I was unconscious. I yelled, “Why can I still feel everything?” No one answered me. No one responded in any way. People were talking, everywhere, and none of them were talking to me. Someone was fiddling with my legs. Someone else was doing something to my shoulders.
With the painful thing still shoved up inside of me, gloved hands grasped each of my thighs and forced them together so sharply that it hurt, like a slap on bare skin. For the third time, straps came down, around my pinioned thighs, cinched tightly. Those straps were so tight that I could feel my skin bunching up around them.
Someone sloshed liquid across my entire abdomen. For the first time, the fear occurred to me that maybe they thought I was already unconscious; maybe they were about to cut me open now, while I had full sensation.
Knowing what I know now, I can fill in some of the missing parts of this story. When my contractions intensified, my baby’s heart rate dropped into the 60s and stayed there. But at the time, no one told me that there was any kind of an emergency; no one told me they would be using general anesthesia; no one even told me that my baby was in any danger. That disconnect did not arise only from my inability to hear what was happening during contractions; my husband confirms that no one ever told us what was happening. They just took my bed from the room.
When the fetal monitor started losing contact, my midwife had crawled under me and held the monitor in place, watching the strip and moving with me. She did it so gently that I never knew she was there. As the emergency developed, she was frightened, and so were the OB, the nurses, and the anesthesiologist. None of them told me what was happening. I wish they had–it would have meant the world–but I understand how their fear led to their silence.
In the OR, after the anesthesiologist had given me nitrous oxide through the mask, I appeared unconscious, at least from my midwife’s perspective. My eyes were closed; I was unable to move. When I screamed, everyone in the room heard me moaning but not screaming. I believe this, too, was caused by the nitrous, which lowers vocalization pitch. My inability to move could have been caused by a psychological freeze reaction–common in trauma–although the nitrous may have intensified that as well.
The part of this story that I cannot forgive are not the moments when scared human beings made mistakes; we all make mistakes. The parts of this story that I cannot forgive are the parts that are standard practice. Imagine, for a moment, being a rape survivor who has been tied down to a bed, naked or nearly naked. That should never happen to any conscious person. Not in a calm, planned surgery, and not in an emergency. The straps were an even greater violation than the catheter. At the time, no one was speaking to me, no one was explaining what was happening, and when something was painfully forced inside my genitals, I thought it was my vagina. It felt like my vagina, at the time. But as horrifying as it was to be penetrated without consent, without knowing what was happening or why, that pales against the horror of the straps.
I’ve heard all kinds of defenses of those straps. “They’re to keep you from falling off the OR table” – that isn’t necessary while I’m awake. “They’re like seat belts” – we clip on our own seat belts, they don’t get fastened onto us by strangers, and we certainly don’t fasten them around our wrists. “They’re loose; they’re just velcro” – straight jackets also use velcro. And even among patients who could physically get loose, symbolic restraints are still restraints. “They preserve the sterile field” – in my case, no sterile field yet existed; they could have waited until I was unconscious. In the case of birthing people with spinals, tell them where the sterile field is and then trust them with their own bodily integrity. Please, just trust women. “They prevent shoulder injury” – How many shoulder injuries are worth a life? Being immobilized during a traumatic event is one of the best predictors for developing PTSD, and PTSD, unlike shoulder injury, carries mortality risk. Those straps have haunted me every single day of the two years since my daughter was born. Those straps broke me.
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