Content warning: this piece mentions rape, obstetric violence, and racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality.
Brooklyn, 2014
My eyes snapped open in the dark, my head jerking back from where it had drifted. Where was I? Why was I asleep sitting up? I squinted in the dark, rubbing my sore neck, reaching for the phone that was buzzing me awake. 2:00am. Next to the phone sat my breast pump, the two bottles of milk little beacons of white. Across from me, the angular slopes of desks; beyond that a window from which the hazy orange glow of a streetlamp streamed. Sensation returned to my body and I felt the vinyl of the hospital recliner beneath me. Its stiff, sharp corners had prevented me from curling up into it and instead I had slept upright, propped up like some kind of doll, like someone or something pretending to be at rest. I had slept, my eyes too heavy to stay open, but I was not at rest.
Here I was, then, on my very first night shift as a student midwife. Someday, all of this would be familiar to me: the lurch of one’s head as the body, desperate for sleep, would find it the moment it could, anywhere and in any position; the slight edge of surreality to the shapes around you as the night goes on; the upside-down feeling of leaving one’s home to enter a space bright and fluorescent just as everyone around you is doing the opposite and settling in for the night. But for now I was new, and uncertain, and I felt as though I had unexpectedly found myself through the looking glass. I had slipped into a world strange and perplexing, where nothing conformed to my expectations and none of the normal rules seemed to apply, yet it was I who was treated as if I didn’t make sense.
Yesterday, I had caught my very first baby ever. By all accounts it had been a successful first day on Labor and Delivery. Everyone had told me I should not expect to catch a baby on my first day of Labor and Delivery. But I had. In fact, I had attended not one, but two, births. I should have felt triumphant, enlivened, proud, thrilled to have begun a new chapter. After years of dreaming and fantasizing and feeling the call to midwifery, after years of reading books about midwifery, after 18 months of getting quizzed about midwifery and practicing midwifery on rubber models and robot named Noelle, I was working with actual people, catching actual babies.
But I didn’t feel triumphant, enlivened, proud, thrilled to have begun a new chapter. I felt flattened out, far away and confused, as though I had become a robot myself, as though someone was programming me from the other room, as though someone had slid their arms into my shirt sleeves and maneuvered me like a puppet.
I peered out into the darkness of the room, taking in the shapes of the furniture and the light from the streetlamp. It danced, and curved into letters in my mind’s eye, into the shape of a broken heart held cupped in a hand. A book cover. When Survivors Give Birth.
I had read it in 2007, pregnant myself; I had read it again last year, when I was just starting midwifery school and was desperate to immerse myself in the things that mattered to me about midwifery care in all the drudgery of pharmacology and research methods and seminars on the history of midwifery legislation in New York State. It had been the best I could find for trauma-informed midwifery care both times I read it.
When Survivors Give Birth. Which was happening right now, over on Labor and Delivery.
Jessica Gonzales. Age 17. Her pregnancy a product of rape.
I hadn’t met her yet, but I knew this about her. The residents who had admitted her in triage came to the nurse’s station to give us report, shaking their heads, muttering the word “non-compliant” as they told us she had resisted the vaginal exams they had insisted upon. “Better get her epiduralized fast before the midwives have to examine her again!” Dr. Choi, the attending obstetrician, had casually called down the hall to them as he left for a nap.
He had declared this as if it were unremarkable, everyday, to discuss someone in labor with a baby conceived this way. Which maybe it was? What did I know of this looking glass world. I had not been at this particular tea party long enough yet.
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