We're told what it will be like, and we believe it.

On Robert Hadden and the normalization of violence in obstetric and gynecologic care

CW: This article discusses sexual assault and obstetric violence (which is always, by nature, sexualized violence).

Dear Substack family,

Well, it’s been a time over here in my corner of the Brooklyn. If you follow me over on Instagram, you probably already know that our neighbors our renovating their house, and how that’s meant, for us, a series of biblical plagues over the last almost 18 months: we’ve gotten noise, pestilence, and drought (as when they froze our pipes when I was 36 weeks pregnant), and this month, a veritable mudslide that descended into the lower level of our home. Twice in twenty-four hours.

The lower level houses the office where I see clients (not to mention Wren’s bedroom, Andy’s office, our laundry room, and our second bathroom), so having it be inundated with mud has meant weeks of rescheduling and relocating visits. If someone could be called a professional re-scheduler, it would probably be me, given the unpredictability of my professional life, and yet even still the amount of work involved in losing my office has been completely, totally, bring-me-to-my-knees staggering. I’ve been endlessly communicating with people — clients, friends whose offices and extra apartments I’ve borrowed to see clients, friends who I needed to ask to help with childcare so I could see clients in other friends’ spaces, engineers, cleaners, the neighbors themselves, and so on. I’ve been endlessly researching new furniture that won’t take 10-14 weeks to replace my now ruined furniture because I can’t go 10-14 weeks without an office. I’ve been endlessly ordering paint, and cleaning, and throwing out ruined things, and replacing ruined things, all while teaching homeschool classes and supporting my husband in his job market preparations and going to, you know, a couple of births in just the last week. It’s really highlighted to me how my family’s schedule is essentially a child’s art project, held together with tons of creativity and heart but not much more than glue, tape, and a staple that wasn’t even punched in properly. And that glue, tape, and staple that wasn’t even punched in properly are definitely straining under the weight of a mudslide.

Which is to say nothing of the emotional elements of seeing a space I worked very hard to be nurturing and comfortable for people destroyed, or how my nervous system feels every time I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s pouring (since the problem has not been permanently solved, yet).

Me and fellow midwife Tanya Wills in my cozy little office in 2019; that couch is now somewhere in a NYC dump because it got completely soaked.

I don’t know what else to say about this except that I’m tired, and that I very melodramatically told Andy the other day that it was entirely possible that my to-do list was so long it weighed enough to crush me into oblivion, and that this is why I've skipped a couple of weeks here on Substack, and that I’m sorry about that but hoping you understand.

There’s a lot I’ve wanted to talk about in those couple of weeks: here’s one of them.

By now, I’m sure many of you have read about the Propublica investigation into Robert Hadden, the Columbia University Medical Center OB-GYN who sexually abused and assaulted hundreds of his patients over the course of approximately 25 years, from around 1987 to around 2012. The number of people he abused is currently known to be 245, but is estimated to be many more, given many of them haven’t come forward, at least in part because Columbia University (in addition to actively enabling his behavior and thwarting investigation for the last near decade) has never alerted all of his former patients that their doctor has been convicted and sentenced to twenty years of prison for sex crimes.

The Propublica article is incredibly thorough, and if you’re interested in the specifics of his crimes, or the way in which Columbia University actively and knowingly shielded a sexual predator for decades, I’d highly recommend you read it. But what I found most interesting (and heartbreaking) about this story wasn’t the fact that a white cis man wielded his power over women to assault and abuse them (in a country where Presidents and Supreme Court Justices have done the same, who can be surprised?), but the commentary of the women related to the story — both those who were abused and those who witnessed the abuse as nurses and chaperones. It is a master study in what our culture has done to us, how much it has caused us to internalize harm and violence as a normal and routine part of life.