The abuse of pregnant women in Ireland with the 8th amendment

If there is a way to nearly guarantee trauma, if there is a recipe that you could follow, it is to entrap someone, either physically or psychologically, render them helpless and put the fear of God into them. The Irish state does this to pregnant women with the 8th amendment. Bullying, threatening, coercing and forcing are regular occurrences in Irish maternity services and the 8th only backs this up and makes it easy to justify.

Article 40.3.3 (the 8th) was amended to the Irish constitution back in 1983. It gives the foetus equal rights to the mother. The 8th was explicitly added to the National “Consent” Guidelines for pregnant women in 2013 by the Irish health services, 30 years after it became law. If I were cynical, I’d say that this move is not for the safety of the baby, and certainly not for the mother’s safety, but to reduce the obstetric bill of the State Claim’s Agency. Section 7.7.1 states that:

7.7.1 Refusal of treatment in pregnancy
The consent of a pregnant woman is required for all health and social care interventions. However, because of the constitutional provisions on the right to life of the “unborn”, there is significant legal uncertainty regarding the extent of a pregnant woman's right to refuse treatment in circumstances in which the refusal would put the life of a viable foetus at serious risk. In such circumstances, legal advice should be sought as to whether an application to the High Court is necessary. 

In reality, the foetus has more rights than its mother, as the death of Savita Halappanavar showed so damningly. It is crucial to repeal the 8th amendment, as currently, women do not have any legal rights over their own bodies while pregnant. Many think that the 8th only affects women who seek an abortion, but it affects every woman who is pregnant. There was a disgraceful and mysogynistic precedent set in the case that Ciara Hamilton took against the Irish health service. The judge stated that:

“it was reasonable for the midwife involved to seek reassurance with an artificial rupture of the membranes. The midwife was the person entitled, authorised and qualified to make the decision, the judge said.” 

So, women are not entitled, authorised or qualified to make decisions regarding and affecting their own bodies? Please tell me what century we're living in? I am ashamed to be living in a country with rulings like this. Was Ciara Hamilton in the financial position to appeal this decision after having the state's costs awarded against her? You can be sure she wasn't and the judge certainly made sure of that in order to teach her, and all women, a lesson: don't dare stand up for yourself or you'll be punished. The clear message is be obedient, don't rock the boat and do as you're told, as any woman should do in a patriarchal world.

Not only are pregnant women not allowed to refuse a treatment, they also don’t have the right to be informed that a procedure on their body will take place, if it is for the safety of the baby. Now, that last sentence by the judge could be used to justify anything really couldn’t it? It can justify the police going to a pregnant woman's home, unbeknownst to her, in order to force her to go to hospital for a forced procedure. Are we seriously living in a world that thinks this is okay?

The desperately sad cases of Miss Y and a woman who was kept on life support against her family's wishes because her 15 week old baby still had a heartbeat, only serve to prove the point that health is not just about being alive, it is also about quality of life. If the 8th amendment didn't exist, these atrocities wouldn't be able to happen because, legally, women could not be forced into any procedure. It is important to note that if the 8th were repealed outright, the law currently regulating abortion, the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013 – one of the strictest such laws in the world – would remain in force according to Eoin Daly, lecturer in constitutional law at the School of Law, NUI Galway. Therefore the argument that there will be abortion on demand if the 8th is repealed is nonsense.

These cases fly in the face of all research ever conducted on psychological trauma impacting adults, children and prenates. The Irish health services cannot claim to be practising evidence based medicine by ignoring and even sneering at psychological research and its impact on physical and mental health. How does the Irish state think that a pregnant woman might respond in a situation where she is threatened with the police, solicitors and social workers? Oftentimes for no valid reasons. With calm and lots of oxytocin, or with helplessness and lots of cortisol that affects not only her, but her unborn, who supposedly, the Irish state is trying to protect.

I am extremely passionate about this subject, having had a horrific experience during the last 6 weeks of my pregnancy. I will never step foot in the hospital where I gave birth as a pregnant woman, because, as Aja Teehan says, she knew what the Irish state was capable of, and she could very well find herself in the position of “Mother A”. I nearly found myself in Mother A's position too. University Hospital Waterford sought a high court order in order to force Mother A to undergo a caesarean in March 2013 because she was 13 days overdue and had had a previous caesarean. Funnily enough, it was shortly after, in May 2013, that the new “consent” guidelines were published.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma ~ Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

A recipe for trauma

Most of the literature defines trauma as an event, just look at Criterion A1* in a PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) diagnosis.

However, I believe trauma is the experience of an event, not the event itself. You cannot be traumatised without having had a response to an event, it is therefore the response which is important. If fear, (or any intense emotion that overwhelms our resources to cope with it), helplessness and feeling/being trapped are present and an external threat is internalised, there is a good chance of a person being traumatised.  And that includes many so-called "disorders", not just PTSD.

This is especially true in the case of children where a threat can be either real or perceived. For example, a child might live with the fear of being abandoned, they might never be abandoned, at least not physically, and that constant threat depletes their resilience and exhausts their nervous system as they are on continuous high alert. They will adapt their behaviour to not be abandoned and so their true self is lost in the (usually) futile search for acceptance and love. They certainly will not feel safe, another crucial element in the process of being traumatised and healing from trauma.

By not including emotional abuse and neglect, any criteria for comprehensively assessing trauma are incomplete and as a consequence many people don't get the help they need because their bruises aren't as visible as those from physical and sexual abuse.

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared ~ William S. Wilson

* The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

Feeling connected

Even if we’re loved, we might not feel connected to the person who says they love us. Love is not a noun, it’s a verb. It’s not enough to say you love someone, you have to show it. There is a difference in being loved and feeling loved.

I really loved this blog post by Leonard Jacobson a few years ago. He talks about the importance of being present. When we’re present, we’re connected, we're paying attention to ourselves and whoever is before us. It’s not always pleasant, but it’s real. Paying attention, or being present, makes us and others feel heard, seen, acknowledged, validated and connected.

This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention ~ Mary Oliver

I think a lot of us are literally starving for the nourishment that connection can give. Try tapping on the word 'connection' and 'feeling connected or disconnected' and anything and everything that this brings up for you.

Closure

The word closure drives me nuts. Or more to the point, it’s what it means when others say it that annoys me. When I hear the word closure, what I really think I’m hearing is “Are you not over that yet?” or “I don’t really want to listen to your problems” or “Can’t you keep your real feelings to yourself and pretend like the rest of us?”. When we don’t have closure it seems to make others a lot more uncomfortable than it makes us.

I think what we really want around something or someone that has been painful is peace. Some things in life can only be carried, not forgotten about, as this article says so well.

We want to be able to get on with our lives, without whatever it is incapacitating us. This is called integration, not closure. I don’t think things finish as neatly in life as the term closure suggests. When things are incomplete, unfinished and undigested, they can really disturb us, which is why Ivor Browne calls trauma “unexperienced experience”. When we get to digest whatever it is, we get to have peace around it. We might not get closure, but we’re more than ok with that. Because whatever it is/was doesn’t have the same power over our peace of mind anymore. We can live peacefully alongside its remnants, if there are any.

A resolution for emotional health

Many people talk about improving their health at the start of the year. It’s a way of wiping the slate clean and starting afresh. But how many extend that attitude towards improving their emotional health? Our emotional health is just as important and has a huge impact on our physical health. We often underestimate just how important it is, it might not always be the sole cause of physical illness but it is definitely one of the most important contributors to ill health. Whether stress has caused a physical illness, or an illness has led to subsequent stress, looking after our emotional health can significantly decrease our stress levels, which can only spell good fortune for our overall health.

People don’t often think about improving their emotional health until they encounter a crisis.  But we can learn to be more emotionally healthy before we run into serious trouble.  I’ve heard countless “experts” talk about anger, fear, shame, guilt and the like as “negative”, “destructive” and “unhealthy” emotions. I absolutely cringe when I read/hear that because it is just not true. The issue is not the emotions themselves, but in how we handle them. And many of us just don’t handle anger or fear very well. I think people have huge issues with anger and fear in particular. Many people are described as “angry people” or “fearful people”, as if those terms described a person in absolute terms. I believe the people who have the real issues are the ones who label others like this. If we haven’t made friends with our own difficult emotions, we’ll shun and shame them in others.

There are such things as healthy anger, healthy fear and healthy shame. Polarising our emotions into positive and negative does not make us emotionally literate or intelligent, it has the exact opposite effect in fact. When we disown, deny, bury, suppress or repress our emotions, we’re not using them for what they were intended to be used for; action requiring neurological programmes, according to neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio.

Emotions are not meant to remain stagnant, they are meant to move. In human terms that means we need to feel our emotions, they come and they go when we see every one of them as healthy and necessary when the need arises. If your boundaries are being transgressed for example, anger will arise, in order for you to define your boundaries properly so you are protected.  If you’ve been taught that it’s “bad” for you to feel and/or express anger, it will be hard for you to define healthy boundaries, so you’ll often feel picked on or put upon. Ironically the person you’ll feel most angry with in this situation is yourself. You pay a high price for not being who you truly are. Even if the world has tried to change us, or has even succeeded to a certain degree, we’ll always feel the call to be true to ourselves. Living a lie is far worse than losing some people who weren’t ready for who we really are.

Following your breath

There are lots of breathing exercises for helping with anxiety. That’s because focusing on our breath brings us into our body, where our anxiety is. If we’re not in our bodies, we can’t relieve our anxiety. That can be a catch 22 as I’ve spoken about in other posts. We don’t want to be in our bodies because that’s where the anxiety is, but it’s where we need to be to resolve the anxiety. Most of the time we’re in our heads trying to control things with endless thoughts. Sitting comfortably in our bodies doesn’t just relieve anxiety though, it also makes us feel at home, and at peace with ourselves.

I find following my breath to be very effective in relieving anxiety. I don't make my breath do anything, I follow its rhythms and I nearly always find that my breathing naturally becomes deeper and slower. I do pay attention to expanding my rib cage though. Making our breath “do” something can make us even more anxious and sometimes, deep breathing exercises can cause hyperventilation. This is when the constricted breathing technique from EFT can come in very handy.

When we’re stressed our breathing is affected, so doing something about our breathing can help relieve our stress and anxiety, and vice versa. The constricted breathing technique is very good for working on your own with EFT, it can be difficult working on our own issues, we often can’t see the woods for the trees, so going in the physical door, as Gary Craig calls it, is often simpler then trying to figure things out psychologically.

Even more on anxiety

When we’re suffering with extreme anxiety, we nearly always have a fear of going inside our bodies. It is after all where we feel our pain. When we don’t feel our pain because we are frightened of it, our unfelt pain becomes anxiety. The longer this goes on, the worse our anxiety becomes.

So anxiety is also a sign for us to stop avoiding our pain. Avoiding and dissociating work brilliantly in the short term, they are fantastic survival mechanisms, but life requires that we face our pain and our true selves at some stage. Whether we like it or not. Indigestion, whether physical or mental, is unsustainable in the long run. We need to digest what happens in our lives. Anxiety strongly encourages, i.e. forces, us to heal or pain, the more pain we feel the more we want to heal that pain (or make it go away, which again, does not work, it’s just another avoidance tactic). Pain is a fact of life, what we need are more skills to deal with pain so it doesn’t fester and become illness, physical or mental.

Try tapping on some of the following phrases:

Even though my body is humming with this anxiety and it feels … I honour these feelings, they are trying to tell me something

Even though it’s excruciating to listen to anxiety’s messages, I just wish it would go away, I completely accept how I feel

Even though this pain feels like a mountain I can never climb, I’m willing to take a small step, I don’t have to do it all in one go

Even though this pain feels painful, I love and accept myself anyway

Use whatever reminder phrase feels right on the points, or just tap without saying anything, if you’re feeling anxious, you’re already tuned in and EFT works best when you are tuned in. Being tuned in means feeling anxious or being triggered by something. Stop what you’re doing and tap and you’ll feel some, if not all, of your intensity reducing. Resolving anxiety does take some persistence, so don’t give up hope!

What constitutes trauma?

I've seen a few articles recently that state that emotional abuse may be as damaging as physical or sexual abuse. It's the use of the word may that bothers me. I think the best person to ask is the person who has been emotionally abused, don't you? In addition to that, every person who is physically and/or sexually abused is also emotionally abused, one cannot happen without the other.

There have also been studies about whether neglect is as bad as abuse. Maybe in some ways it's worse, because if someone is neglecting you, they don't care. Is that the ultimate rejection? But why do we even ask these questions? Comparisons really are odious. If you are showing the signs of trauma, whatever they result from, you are traumatised.

A diagnosis of PTSD is not the only way you can display the symptoms of trauma and if you don't fit all of the criteria (or any) it does not mean you are not suffering from trauma. In fact, if you don't nominate criterion A1*, you won't even be assessed for the other PTSD criteria, that is how much a diagnosis of trauma hinges on an event and not an experience. It is a symptom of the so-called objective world we live in, which many mistakenly believe is more "scientific". But human experiences are not objective, they are subjective and until we take people's experiences seriously, many people will not get the help that they need.

* The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).