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

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