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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