Trauma, Birth and Repealing the 8th: On Standing for Women, And Myself

So, I suppose it's time to post about #Repealthe8th as we enter the last week. I've been so "out" this year in my life about so many of my past hurts and challenges, that I've wondered a lot about why I just couldn't really post about this - and I've sat with that for a long time.

Most people in my personal and professional life know I could have been one of those "hard cases" on the boat, if I hadn't put getting the morning after pill ahead of taking care of myself after the worst night of my life. Most people know that I had significant perinatal mental health difficulties. Those things are not unrelated.

My first birth was a Kielland's forceps birth (think: twisty scary tongs in your nether regions, all sorts of pain and fear). It’s not a nice sort of birth, but most births aren’t – this isn’t such an issue in and of itself. What made it very hard for me was that it triggered flashbacks of being raped and I “left my body” because of my past trauma, which left me very traumatised and with a recurrence of chronic pelvic and low back pain for many months, anxious and irritable and agitated, which really stole my experience of being a new mum. This showed up as a lot of extreme obsessive anxiety in my subsequent pregnancy. I was absolutely OBSESSED with not letting that happen again and it grew hooks into everything and anything so that I became very seriously and at times dangerously mentally unwell.

What got me through the very worst of that pregnancy and birth was the incredible trauma-informed care of the Midwifery Led Unit at Leeds General Infirmary, who went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that I felt empowered and seen in a birth that lasted nearly four days because of the extreme anxiety I was experiencing. I delivered my beautiful Rory in the water, with shining purple stars above me, and it was incredibly healing, bringing me back into a sense I could trust my body as my body, apart from what had been done to me many years ago, that I had never chosen.

What people don’t realise about sexual trauma is that it lives in the body – it’s not that you don’t want to let go of the past, but the past won’t let go of you. It is a pernicious thief of peace and joy and ease, and I would not wish it on my very worst enemy. It is also an experience shared by 1 in 4 women.

If I had been here in Ireland for that pregnancy, I am aware that would not have been guaranteed that I could refuse consent to vaginal examinations or artificial rupture of membranes. In fact, the law would have supported those delivering my baby in forcing induction and all sorts of birth interventions. The thing is, the risk of this happening would probably have been small – but when you are in a very traumatised state in the body, that’s sort of irrelevant.

The fear of it, the lack of compassion and understanding associated with it – this is what breaks my heart now, looking back on how frozen and terrified I was, to think that I would have had that threat hanging over me. To read the stories of women who were desperately ill begging for abortions, dying on their feet, being taken back in handcuffs and told they had no choice – THAT is trauma.

For me, when we talk about interpersonal trauma, we imagine it as something that happens between some nameless bad guy and their faceless victim, but the real repercussions are much further reaching. Trauma essentially a short- hand way of saying that someone has had an experience in which their human integrity has been profoundly dishonoured and denied. Someone has lost the human in someone and damaged them greatly.

In society, we replicate this with survivors of sexual trauma in particular. We cease to see them, or to be willing to see them. We deny them comfort in pain. We deny them understanding and belonging and cast them out when they are lost, alone or afraid. We silence, shame them and judge them, and condemn them to secrecy. We look down and away. Sometimes we even do this with ourselves.

All of these things are what are at stake here - much more than "abortion". This is about how we treat human beings at the worst moments of their lives. And if you don’t know what it's like to have that moment of your greatest need met with silence and shame in your body, please don't vote in a way that denies the needs of women who do or might because of some notion you have about what is needed based on fluff and air. I cannot believe we have allowed this to continue for so long.

I don’t really care if you support the idea of abortion or not. Knock yourself out with arguments for the viability of life and foetuses and all that. I do know that what this is about is not abortion, but punishing human vulnerability and tragedy in a collective act of dissociation from what’s already here, already happening. Please stand with women. Please Repeal the 8th. Please share this post, and break the silence, shame and secrecy we still bring to sexual violence and women's bodies in our country and culture.