Ugh. I just watched the most horrific birth. Probably not the most horrific, but pretty disturbing. Remember when I promised to give my thoughts on the show "16 and Pregnant"? You're about to get my three cents. Yes, I admit, I am sickeningly addicted to this weekly MTV trash. Mostly I subject myself to it because not only do I gain another reference to societal ills, but I tend to come out feeling exponentially greater about my own values and upcoming experiences.
This week's episode, which is ending as I speak because frankly I stopped caring after the birth, follows a (you guessed it) 16-year-old girl Samantha who got pregnant and now has to deal with the consequences! Those damn consequences. She and her boyfriend actually get along which diverges from the usual conflict of the show, so producers had to find one. In this case it's between the mothers of the two young parents. That's really not important though. The sticky part begins when she walks into the hospital to be induced at 38 weeks.
That's right, she's getting induced at 38 weeks, unless the little clips which head the scenes were all completely off on the number of weeks along she was. At 38 weeks she says her due date has passed, and since babies are allegedly supposed to adhere to medical estimations, that must mean there's a problem and she must be induced. For those who don't know, due dates are typically estimated at 40 weeks, and "normal" birth occurs anywhere between 37-42 weeks. She could have reasonably cooked that bun another month if the doctors believed in nature. But no, you'll see that concept is quickly laid to rest with an easy and thoughtless round of drugs.
Once they've dosed her up with her first round of Pitocin (the drug which stimulates the uterus to forcefully contract, which usually results in longer, more painful contractions, followed by the necessary epidural to numb the unnecessary pain), she sleeps a full night in the hospital without feeling much of anything. The next day they continue to pump her with the drug until she does feel something. Around 15 hours into labor the pain becomes severe, yet she is still not dilated past 1 or 2 centimeters. Epidurals are not generally given until dilation of 3 centimeters, so she is told she must endure the excruciating pain until she gets to that point. That never happens. This poor girl is lying there literally screaming because the pain is so intense, and it's a wonder to everyone why her cervix isn't opening and allowing the baby to pass. The nurse says this is an indication that the baby "just isn't gonna fit," as if it's at all a mistake made by Nature that both the baby and her mother have been injected with a severely stress-inducing drug, compounded by Samantha's natural stress hormones which are no doubt secreting off the charts at this point. Biologically, the production of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline causes muscles to contract and close, as if to turn white and flee the scene if they could! It is completely obvious that this baby and the incredibly intelligent tissues that surround it are stressed, threatened, and refusing to birth because of all the unnecessary stuff that's been done to them.
Of course, after over 20 hours of torturous and unfruitful labor, the interventions come to a climax when she is wheeled into the OR for a relieving C-section. Sure, Samantha's own mother had two, so why shouldn't she have one? She undoubtedly thinks this is normal, that there is something wrong with her body--she probably still thinks the baby wouldn't "fit"--so thank God the good doctors were there to save her and perform the medical miracle. Yes, it is good that the doctors were there to finally put her out of her misery and skillfully cut the baby out, but the need for that would most likely never have arisen if the doctors (more like the nurses following doctor's orders) had never touched her in the first place.
After the major surgery she has just undergone, the new mother is too weak to even see her baby for over a day. The traumatized infant is kept in the nursery and fed synthetic formula. Whether this was Samantha's choice beforehand or not is not at all discussed, but it's clear that she doesn't seem to care either way. She finally shuffles at tortoise pace to the nursery to hold her daughter for the first time, but she is in too much post-surgical pain for the moment to be considered at all sweet.
Yes, this post is admittedly loaded with language designed to get you to see my side of it, but that's television's only purpose, so why should I respond to it any differently? I'm through holding my tongue. I'm not very good at it. I'm outspoken about what I see. And I don't just bitch for no other reason than to expose other people's faults because I'm some kind of angsty youth. If I express concern about an issue it's because the issue is important to both me and society or humanity at large. If the majority of women, especially young women, continue to believe that their bodies are faulted and only rich doctors taught and conditioned by even richer doctors know how to birth their babies for them, then our society will eventually lose what makes us human and we will forget who we truly are as spiritual, intelligent, and natural beings. Can you imagine a day when the innate wisdom of knowing how to have babies is stripped from us completely and we must look to "authorities" for all the answers? I hope not, because that will indicate that we are tapped of our humanity. We "just won't fit."
Of course television skews reality like a frog in a blender, but there is really no denying the general idea of how that birth transpired. I don't even know if I could call it a birth; it was truly little more than sheer labor. That may sound harsh and unfair, but even through the TV I can tell there is postpartum awkwardness between Samantha and her baby. The trauma experienced by both of them hangs heavily, though perhaps intangibly. When asked by her friend a couple of weeks later how different she feels now that she's a mom, the girl hazily claims she feels "a little different, but I don't know how to explain" as if she's in front of her math class, giving the answer to #12 on her homework.
