With my usual gusto and willingness to swim upstream, I'm seeking to have a birth experience with a minimum of medical intervention. No person, including me, can really control birth, but we can control the choices we make and the professionals whose help we seek, for the most part. Alhamdulillah, I've a midwife whose care philosophy includes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", a precept that I wholeheartedly agree with. However, I had to erase the following from my birth plan, as she thought the nurses (or an OB, if my midwife gets held up) wouldn't like it quite so much.
1. Episiotomy: you cut me, I cut you. Capisce?
2. No, I don't want an epidural. But if you're offering pain meds, my sis would like a vodka and tonic.
3. As you didn't pick the position in which I conceived, you don't get to pick the position in which I will give birth. You try to muscle me into some uncomfortable position, you'll be sporting a foot-shaped bruise.
4. if you're talking to me, use my name. If you can't be bothered to recall it, then leave immediately- I don't need anyone around me who can't keep track of simple info like that.
5. This is my little rascal. Any separation of us will be very well justified, lest I go Mama Bear on you.
6. Birth is hard work- that's why they call it labor. I don't know of any arduous physical task that is best accomplished by being tethered to a machine, so I'll be avoiding that. If you insist that I be tied to a machine, I will require the same of you. Let's see you try to poke and prod at me with an IV in your arm, a monitor around your abdomen, and your feet in stirrups.
7. Same goes for not allowing me to eat or drink. I'd like to see you run a marathon on no food or water. Birth is at least as hard as that. In fact, I may have pizza brought in. if you're nice, we'll share.
Things I had to delete from my birth plan.
By Fashion Mujahid - Posted on March 24th, 2009
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THAT'S MY GIRL!
Now, have my babies. :-)
I agree with you wholeheartedly and as an ex labor and delivery nurse I would say take that list as it exists to the hospital beforehand, they have to follow it UNLESS there is a medical emergency that dictates they toss the rules. I pray Allah gives you a good birth and all that you need, and that its easy on you. When is the baby due FM? Are you going to have a shower? Can we send llittle hijabs? or Kufi's? Or something???
This is a feistier version of some stuff that's already in my birth plan, and my midwife is down with everything on the list. I shan't be giving birth in a hospital unless it all goes to heck and I have an emergency transfer. I have not found out Schenectady's sex, and will not before s/he makes his/her appearance. (2 weeks until D-day- yoinks!) It's actually Sunnah to care more about the health of the wee one than the sex, so I'm cloaking my determination to be happy with whoever's in here in religious justification.
Interesting note about Muslims and prenatal care: especially in the Gulf, obstetrics is a male-dominated profession, and the sexism that plagues many Muslim communities drives many Muslim women to male OB's for prenatal care, even when female OB's or midwives are available. So women who by law, society, or their own notions of piety could not have coffee with a non-related man readily admit a non-related man into one of the most intimate moments of her life. And in the KSA, where elder women are sentenced to flogging for sending her milk-son out for bread, it's rare to have a birth not attended by a male OB.
So apparently, preserving the modesty of Muslim women is essential- except when it may empower Muslim women by making birth a time when a woman is assisted by her sisters, and men retreat to the periphery. Even when engaged in one of the most challenging and intimate tasks a human being will ever accomplish, Muslim women must be under the control of men.
The same issues here pretty much. Male Obs made it all but impossible for Midwives to practice in this country. Until recently. Do you also have a doula?
I don't have a doula, but I've seriously thought about becoming one. If I serve Muslim families, however, I'm wondering if my advocacy on behalf of the mother will get drowned out by fathers and male OB's. That said, it's likely that a family that would hire a doula wouldn't be entirely old guard, as it were.
I'd taken a class on the fiqh of menstruation and lochia in hopes that I'd be able to assist Muslim women in reproductive health concerns- but between the rubbish enshrined in law and the entrenched patriarchy, fomenting rebellion seems to be the best I can do.
God commands us to enjoin the good and prevent or stop the evil. SO GET ON IT, PREGNANT LADY!