Posts by B Jones
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Emma, I reckon you're dead right. It's quick surgery that doesn't need general anaesthesia, just (I understand) upping an epidural that may already be in place. Compare that with the pump machines and hours of surgery of a heart bypass, and the expensive drugs of chemo (all I have to go on with that is the cost of Herceptin), ya de ya.
I love Mad Men, although (are we up to this bit yet?) I'm pretty sure twilight sleep was out of fashion by the 60s.
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Judgy-pants often turns up anyway when the topic of breastfeeding comes up. Being judged for your decisions because they impact on the next generation - now that's getting closer to a universal female experience :-/
On the subject of elective caesarians (another judgy one), one of the things that gets people going is the word "elective". It doesn't mean what many people think it means: too posh to push. It means that a caesarian is decided upon before the birth, generally for medical reasons like the baby's in breach position, as opposed to done in an emergency setting. I don't know if anyone keeps data in NZ on non-medically indicated caesarian. Some US doctors once (maybe still do, I don't know) promoted routine use of caesarians as more "civilised" than letting nature take its course.
One thing I've learned in the last year is that you need a whole lot of information, which most people don't have until they need it personally, before you can competently engage with the politics of childbirth. But there's a big strand of "these women have all these choices now and are doing stupid things with them, it must be stopped!" in those debates. On the other hand, there's an equally annoying "what do we need all these experts for, they're only out to oppress you with their opinions, it's my choice," vibe out there too.
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Isabel, well, yes, pumping is a PITA, and there are extra things to worry about like sterilisation and so on. But that's kind of why I didn't want to get into that - it becomes a question of whether it's as good as it can be rather than is it good enough, and sidetracks things a lot.
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can a sister just get this baby safely out of her without having to live up to some nebulous ideal of How The Ladies Will All Feel while doing so? It's a bit... woo. :)
Hehe - I thought of it like long-haul air travel. Exciting, tiring, boring in parts, uncomfortable and stressful in others, a bit of danger, potential for dramas at the end with passports and luggage and so on, and not nearly as important as the destination. Powerful, I suppose, so long as you don't define powerful as psychically expanding or suchlike.
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Lots of women don't or can't have children. I'm pretty sure I was a woman before I had my baby. Perhaps a more universal experience is uncertainty over whether you may or may not have your body and life taken over by having a child. That covers both women who want to have kids but can't, and those who don't want to have them just yet, and those who are happily having them.
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I haven't felt particularly deprived of my mother's love for not being breast-fed.
I don't want to get into the whole breast is best argument. There are advantages for the babies to breastfeeding, but that's mainly in the content of the milk more than how they drink it. Once it's been produced, the sex of the person delivering it to the baby aren't all that relevant. And it's that delivery that's the lovely special bit.
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The unique and beautiful relationship between this mother and her child went off to a rocky start, with breastfeeding really really hurting for three weeks until we got it sorted out. Many many women need to circumvent this biological process for various reasons and either express and bottlefeed milk, supplement with a bottle, use formula exclusively and so on. This technology blurs the importance of the distinction between men and women, more so than rare lactating men. Being able to breastfeed is nice and convenient but it's not a crucial gender-defining thing. I get the same sort of satisfaction and bonding giving baby a bottle of what I call expresso as feeding her au naturel. Time and caring are more important than the delivery mechanism.
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Giovanni - I think the anti-abortion movement illustrates the carrot/stick model better than the abortion rights campaign (they challenged the law but generally in private). I haven't heard of any extremist actions on the part of the latter, but the former are masters of it.
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There's nothing like the presence of a few sticks to make the carrot option look more palatable too.