The Myth of Normal 129

intuition invalidated at this most vulnerable time of her life, being intimidated by a highly extolled medical specialist, and having been raised in a culture where “expert” authority trumps one’s own, Courtney lacked the wherewithal to assert herself. She finally acceded to the induction and, after fifteen hours of fruitless labor, the inevitable surgery. “I was so weak. I’d been throwing up. Everything about this was like the biggest nightmare. I said, ‘Fuck it—let’s just do the C-section. Like, what choice do I have at this point?’ So we roll into the OR, and I’m throwing up on the table, and I’m a basket case, sobbing. Scared out of my mind, shaking. They start the surgery; it takes forever. She then says to me, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize your abdominal muscles were this strong.’ They were, because I’ve done Pilates for twenty years. I’m thinking, ‘Why didn’t you realize it? You’ve been examining me regularly for nine months and anticipating this surgery for weeks.’ And the following morning she said to me—can you even make this up?—‘I’m going to call the Mount Sinai scanning department and complain about how inaccurate your growth scans were!’ All that week in the hospital I would just lie awake at night, sobbing at how violated I was.” I asked Courtney whether she had thought of working with a midwife. “I’m not that left-wing,” she said. “I’m not that far-out. I completely bought into the system.” Now consider that this galling story took place in a privileged, white, middle-class context. For poor women, especially women of color, treatment of mothers in labor can be considerably more brutal, with consequences that range all the way to fatal. According to a 2019 World Health Organization report, “42% of the women [in a global survey] said they experienced physical or verbal abuse or discrimination during childbirth in health centers, with some of the women being punched, slapped, shouted at, mocked, or forcibly held down.”[11] Nor is this limited to the so-called third world. In my own country, a cell phone video emerged recently of hospital staff in a Quebec facility taunting and verbally abusing an Indigenous woman in labor. Nurses “are heard calling her stupid and saying she’s only good for sex and would be better off dead.” Minutes later, she was.[12]