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Dear List -
I am posting this for a friend of mine who is working hard to also
promote change.
She has a limited amount of time to get this done asks that
anyone with first hand experience or professional knowledge of how
devastated women can be and how the opportunity to speak up about this
after a traumatic birth would NOT do "more harm than good". She
needs this by the end of January.
Here is her letter - Anyone who has the time to reply can post a
reply to her at the snail mail address listed. Thank you so
much.
Rhonda.
"Dear Rhonda,
I basically need some letters from women who have had an emergency
caesarean saying that their delivery did lead them to feel distress
afterwards, and that they would have welcomed the opportunity to fill
out a
questionnaire asking them about their true feelings - that it
would *not*
have made them feel worse to do so.
Currently, the
ethics committee (mostly men, with several doctors on board)
is trying
to block my woman-benefiting research, by arguing that the
increased
'distress' put upon women by asking them questions a month after
the
birth is not outweighed by the potential benefits of the research
(which sounds awfully like an attempt to silence women's voices and
prevent
change!).
But I am arguing that not only are there huge
benefits to women overall
from the research, but that it is not going
to harm emergency caesarean
women, by asking them how they feel.
Rather, it might actually make them
feel better!
I know I would
have welcomed someone that gave a damn about how I really felt!
And I
would have liked to have known that I was not alone in how I felt
too.
I also would have been reassured to know that there were people
working to
make things better for women in the future so that they
didn't have to go
through what I did.
So anyway, if you'd like
to write a brief letter (can be less than a page,
or whatever you
like) for me to include with my reply to the ethics committee,
to help
get this research off the ground, you can send it to me at:
Ms
Robyn Henriksen,
P.O. Box 552,
Geelong, Vic. 3220
I have to
send my reply to the committee's 'concerns' in two weeks, so if
you
wanted to contribute, it would have to be within that time.
Thanks for
any support you can give,
Robyn."
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