EP81: Jennifer Block on Human Rights in Birth and a Feminist Health Care Revolution

Nov 18, 2019

Jennifer Block is an award winning journalist, an advocate for women’s health care, and the author of books including “Pushed: the Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care” and “Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution.” She writes frequently about health, gender, and conflict of interest in medicine.

What She Shares:

•     Insight into the recent Madison Breech Birth Conference
•     Working for 5 years to get publishers to take her first book seriously
•     Why viewing birth through a human rights lens is so important
•     How feminism’s relationship with the medical establishment has changed 

What You’ll Hear:

•     How the lack of professional birth education creates ‘birth refugees’
•     How practitioners organized the Madison Breech Birth Conference to take education back into their own hands
•     The importance of human rights in birth
•     Taking an active role in your birth and changing the trauma response
•     The correspondence of the rise in maternal mortality and the rise in c-sections
•     The discrepancy of C-section rates between different communities
•     Translating birth research into the birth room practices
•     Understanding the actual birth potential of a breech baby
•     Holding your power during birth
•     Examining the health effects of hormonal birth control
•     Separating politics from health care choices
•     Knowing that choosing to end your cycle is not a physiologically ‘neutral’ choice
•     The benefits of monthly hormone cycling
•     Taking a long-term view of fertility
•     Undoing the “father-doctor-god” complex and believing in your own knowledge and power
•     The intersection of race and health care