I just think it's so ironic that I work in a field where informed consent is such a big deal, but the patients very often do not have informed consent when they actually get pregnant. And yet by the time they see me it's like, well...the baby has to come out somehow and it turns out, there's no good option! Everything has risks and you didn't know you were consenting to these risks when you got pregnant and chose to continue your pregnancy 9 months ago but here we are.
We don't teach women and girls about their bodies or childbirth or pregnancy. We don't talk about the inherent risks of pregnancy or that it will probably worsen all of your chronic medical conditions as it goes on, a lot of which will never improve afterward. We don't tell people that if you have kidney disease, you might end up permanently on dialysis after a pregnancy or if you have pulmonary hypertension (a disease we don't screen for) you have a 40% chance of dying during pregnancy which is why it is an absolute contraindication to pregnancy but you wouldn't really know you have it until you're pregnant and become symptomatic in the 2nd trimester. We don't teach you that your perineum might tear so much that you have fecal incontinence for the rest of your life.
And I wanna be clear: that's by design.
If patients actually knew the risks that come with pregnancy, even pregnancies considered "low risk", humans would probably die off in a few generations.
I work in a field where informed consent is kind of the ONLY thing that matters at the end of the day when it comes to the treatment plans I make with patients and the procedures I perform. But my patients don't get the luxury of having informed consent before they get to me and it no longer matters if you're a horrific surgical candidate who would NEVER be offered a surgery in any other specialty due to medical comorbidities, I still have to do your c-section, that baby has to come out somehow.
I do think a lot of patients might choose things differently if they knew there's a decent chance they could end up with anal incontinence and on dialysis for life or that they code during their c-section because they had pulmonary hypertension and didn't know.
But there are people in this country and world who are really invested in ensuring women do not know the true risks of pregnancy. They REALLY don't want you to know that women over the age of 40 have a maternal mortality rate double that of black women in this country. What's more is they don't want you to be able to even choose when you get pregnant because they want to take away your most efficacious forms of birth control.
And the most insulting part?
Is that they're doing that by using social media influencers who have chosen to act as brood mares for their husbands tell you how dangerous hormonal birth control methods are while totally ignoring that every single risk associated with hormonal birth control is significantly higher in pregnancy so that you willingly choose to forgo birth control out of fear, potentially unknowingly committing yourself to high risk pregnancies.