On the 11th of April women around the world will take action to protect their bodies, their sexuality, their birth experiences and babies from the unstoppable misleading ignorance that guides many countries to prevent women from giving birth and to make them have unnecessary surgery instead.
Brazil reaches 83% in its cesarean rates in its private hospitals, it simply can not be possible that 83% can not birth. When we talk about unnecessary cesareans we talk about the impact of the surgery on the woman and baby's body and emotions, but there is also the less talked about impact of those rates in culture, women's endangered culture of motherhood. The impact of those rates of cesareans in generations of women and their relationship with their bodies, their womanhood and their motherhood, their relationship with their mammalian instincts... And the perpetuation of a secret that it is kept, hidden and distorted from women's access which is that they decide, they rule, they birth, they choose and they are powerful for they carry, birth and raise the future of humankind.
Our entire society is feeding us fairy tales from morning till night, from childhood to adulthood. They tell us that women are princesses, that women must wait to be rescued, they tell us to look in the mirror and make sure we are pretty, they tell us that we are witches for we know too much and because we are old…and we do not matter. An entire system of dominance and manipulation in a nutshell in many stories that tell us women who to be. And then there are also adverts, and fashion, and movies, and finally culture but not our culture.
It is the culture written by others, the observers, the admirers, the leaders, the investigators, the wizards, the kings, the heroes, the doctors... Written while we wait to be rescued and we hear their version of our story.
So therefor it doesn't surprise me that when a woman refuses a cesarean as it happened last week in Brazil and she is then forced by police to have a cesarean, it doesn't surprise me that the majority of society in Brazil says that the doctor deserves a medal for rescuing the irresponsible mother and her poor baby.
The ideas around childbirth and women are twisted until we women believe them wholeheartedly, we are mere containers of sex or babies, we produce a baby and we and our genitalia or wishes are redundant. If we make decisions those are selfish, risky and ignorant and certainly a danger to our babies. If we question we must be punished.
We don't belong to us.
We belong to the expectations of a system, that asks us for purity, for beauty, for youth, for care, for domestic responsibilities, for work, for sex. That system that demand us to do everything apart from being ourselves with our dirty blood, with our smelly babies, or with our abortion history, ourselves with our milk coming out of our breasts, all of our dirty sins of which we are guilty since biblical times. Meanwhile we get our pat on the back and we end up believing that we are free, we are better at women's things like...not being present and multitasking!
Obstetric violence happens everywhere around the world and with society's consent, and it is a symptom of an unbalanced society that needs the urgent input and presence of women. Women who are able to write their own stories in freedom and without fear, who can be themselves freely and completely. Who can menstruate, have sex, get fat and get old and choose who they want to be according to their own expectations, their own referents and their own desires.
The forced cesarean in Brazil that took place last week it is "that step too far", it is the one that should awake us all and make us shout:
Enough! These are our bodies, these are our babies, this is our future and with all our power we will rule it.
