Understanding objectification of women in maternity care
"They spoke over my body like I wasn't even there."
During my first labor, I was heavily objectified by my healthcare team.
My OB spoke over my body like I wasn’t there at all, to my nurse and to my husband.
As a lay on my back, paralyzed and numb with an epidural, the female OB waved my husband to come look between my stirruped legs. She told him that she was “breaking the water” as she inserted a hook inside my vagina, without consulting me. He was extremely anxious, and looked on, uncomfortably. But I guess she thought it was important to walk my husband through it, because he…what, was supposedly in charge of my body?
In addition to this being a spot-on example of objectification, it was also horror-movie-level degrading, and sexist as hell.
Yet, she did it all with a bizarrely condescending smile. I concluded she was either a practiced misogynist, or completely ignorant of social context and history. Maybe a bit of both.
What is objectification?
Objectification is a term heavily used in the social sciences, but not so much in the “hard” sciences. It means to dehumanize a person by treating them like an object.
Humanities and Women’s Studies courses have long pointed out that oppressed groups - for example, women and people of color - are likely to experience being treated this way.
Patients are sometimes objectified as a rule - which is obviously not good practice - but when objectifying oppressed groups, it’s can be extra offensive and traumatic.
Women are often objectified sexually, or seen as sexual objects to fulfill others (men). Porn and all kinds of mass cultural messaging (mainly mainstream movies, ads, music videos) support treating women like this.
For instance, a man who is cat-called by a woman (unlikely scenario, right?) might feel embarrassed, but he often won’t feel threatened, whereas, if the situation were reversed, a woman might feel threatened, depending on the context (time of day, isolated, etc.) This is because there is an unspoken, but heavily recognized, reality that men can be a threat to women’s safety, and specifically our sexual safety, and often get away with it.
If you flip it, women are by-and-large not a threat to men’s safety, as a group.
So, if a person is objectified, and they feel afraid, that interaction obviously has worse consequences than being just annoyed.
The very scenario of women cat-calling men is unlikely because of the hierarchy in our culture of men oppressing women through violence and rape, and mostly through the remembrance of violence (historical violence) and the potential for/threat of violence.
Like an abusive relationship, an entire class is controlled by a fear of what has happened and what could happen.
You can apply this to any class of people who has had violence enacted against them on a mass scale. Fear of being abused or hurt can influence peoples’ choices and actions as individuals. The dynamic effectively controls and silences people.
How sexism and objectification play out in maternity care
When we look at objectification of women in maternity care, you can see how the consequences of a provider objectifying a patient, particularly a female patient, or a patient of color, particularly while she is exposed, has layered consequences.
This is because, not only is the power dynamic in maternity care providers-on-top, as it is in most healthcare models, it is also, women-at-the bottom as reproductive objects.
Both dynamics are working to push women to the bottom at the same time, in separate power systems - one as patients in healthcare, and the other as women in a patriarchy.
In addition to these systems, the power dynamic is physically stacked against laboring women.
They are either in vulnerable, sexually exposed or humiliating positions, or restrained, or both
They are in extreme pain and often unable to speak full sentences
They are not uncommonly given drugs without informed consent, easily pushed into IVs
They and their babies are threatened with bodily harm (c-sections, episiotomies, manual tearing, forceps, vacuum)
They are sometimes threatened with the state taking away their children
And of course, there is little, if any, recourse, because the above is all normalized in our culture.
Women are vulnerable physically, sexually, emotionally and even vulnerable as free citizens, as being labeled non-compliant (refusing an intervention for herself or her baby, as in many cases, her body is seen not as separate, but as the baby) is a phone call away from being set up to be evaluated by the state.
After noticing all of these power dynamics are in play, it’s easy to see that women are at the rock bottom of maternity care. Women are tools to be manipulated in the system.
The power differential is so tipped that routine obstetrics mimics (and perhaps simply is) the abuse of women, as it routinely treats women as objects and tools to be manipulated.
Speaking over a woman’s body to her husband, not making eye contact with the woman, ignoring the woman, or chatting over her body while cutting into her womb is not only disrespectful, it’s salt in the wound after all these routine humiliations. It’s degrading and dehumanizing, and therefore traumatizing.
It demonstrates that disrespecting women in maternity care is not a side effect of horrifying routines, it’s built into the culture. The degradation is either not on providers’ radars, or it is, and it is used to punish women who are seen as non-compliant, “difficult,” or not obedient to their provider, who sees themselves as an authority over pregnant women.
Treating women like this, during what could be a highly powerful rite of passage in her life, during a major life event, is devastating women. It’s not just “poor bedside manner.” It’s misogyny, and it’s abusive. I would think being treated in this way leads to high chances of feeling powerless and violated, and therefore likely leads to PTSD, probably being misdiagnosed as PPD.
Objectifying women in maternity care is grossly degrading, and is sexism and oppression in action. Women routinely live through these experiences of oppression and objectification, and it is a massive betrayal to be treated this way additionally by a healthcare professional, a person who is supposed to be there to support us, not harm us.