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Allison Yarrow Biography

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“Hands speak more intimately than words," writes author Aundre Aciman. He's discussing the deaf here, specifically his mother, but I immediately think about healthcare, about perinatal care specifically. Touch is intimate. It can excite, comfort, heal. It should also be welcome. [...] Entry to a person's body should occur by invitation only, never amid confusion, never by coercion.”

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“Hands speak more intimately than words," writes author André Aciman. He's discussing the deaf here, specifically his mother, but I immediately think about healthcare, about perinatal care specifically. Touch is intimate. It can excite, comfort, heal. It should also be welcome. [...] Entry to a person's body should occur by invitation only, never amid confusion, never by coercion.”

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“...when I became pregnant with my third kid, these seemingly small moments of nonconsent replayed in my mind—the obligatory pelvic exam, the needle in my arm, the bruise like rotten fruit, the lithotomy position someone put me in both times. Sure, both births were beautiful, vaginal, natural—tick, tick, tick on the boxes of imaginary birth "success." But these were the moments I couldn't shake, that wedged themselves in and made me angry, ill.”

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“Globally, most women have babies, and it seems that a high percentage of them are still suffering postpartum injuries long after their births. Urine leakage starts with the pelvic floor. One doctor told me that families commonly give up on caring for their aging loved ones when they lose bladder control. Kids don't want to change their parents' diapers. Urinary incontinence is a leading cause of nursing home admissions for women. This means that whether or not you can live your final days independently may come down to what's unresolved from giving birth, in a part of your body you don't really understand or might not even know is there. The healthcare system isn't just failing postpartum women. It's failing women of all ages for their entire lives.”

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“Modern obstetrics still preaches that birth is a battle between mother and child and worries that babies grow too large to safely exit the bodies that built them. However, obstetricians cannot accurately discern a baby's size in utero toward the end of a pregnancy, according to recent studies. When ultrasounds predict big babies, they are wrong about half the time, far too frequently to be relied upon. This fact has not stopped doctors from inducing or scheduling surgery for pregnant people, essentially claiming they cannot birth their own babies, that their babies won't fit through the birth canal before they have even tried. Despite obstetric alarm sounding, what we know hardly suggests that women routinely build babies too large to birth.”

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“....birthing a larger-than-average baby is far less risky to a pregnant person than her doctor thinking she is carrying one. One study compared women whose doctors suspected they were carrying large babies (babies bigger than eight pounds, thirteen ounces) with women who gave birth to large babies that doctors hadn't anticipated. The group predicted to have big babies was three times more likely to be induced, more than three times as likely to have C-sections, and four times as likely to have birth complications. Far more problematic than a big baby is the need to intervene.”

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“Squishy, stretchy babies adapted big brains but also soft, mobile heads to fit through their mothers' birth canals. Mom's hormones encourage pliability in the ligaments that hold her bones together—pelvises widen during the fertile years and, of course, during pregnancy and birth. [...] These adaptations seem to disprove the argument that birthing pelvises are the wrong size and shape to birth, that they lack compatibility with their babies. Labor is like two bodies dancing, not fighting.”

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“Ultimately, why we birth the way we do transcends the boundaries of our bones. Physiologic labor is a complex process involving, yes, bones, but also tissues, muscles, organs, cells, hormones, an exchange of signals between two people, mechanical changes, emotions. Bones are easier to see and study, so bone shape and size are what obstetricians, historians, and anthropologists have historically prioritized.”

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Book:Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood
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