"nonfatal injuries that wreak havoc on a woman’s quality of life remain surprisingly prevalent. Depending on the study, 50 to 80 percent of women who give birth experience tearing of the pelvic skin and muscles. For more than 1 in 10, the tearing is severe enough to damage the anal sphincter muscle, which often leads to the loss of bowel and bladder control. In a 2015 Canadian study, a whopping half of all new mothers were still reporting urinary incontinence a year after the birth, and more than three-quarters had residual back pain...
Yet according to more than a dozen physicians and public health experts I interviewed for this story, rare is the obstetrician who has a frank conversation with a pregnant woman about the long-term problems she might face...
It’s hard to pinpoint the contribution of childbirth to pelvic floor disorders in part because most hospitals don’t track what happens to a new mother after she leaves. Newborns typically get excellent follow-up care—they see a pediatrician days after birth, again several weeks later, and then every few months for their first year. For most new mothers, though, insurance covers only one visit with a gynecologist, six weeks after birth—before some pelvic injuries even become apparent. If a woman complains of pelvic symptoms to her regular doctor, good luck: A 2016 survey found that most primary care physicians didn’t screen for prolapse, and those who did believed it was “rare.”...
Medical codes that specify the severity of complications after birth simply don’t exist. “We code postpartum hemorrhage so badly,” Korst says by way of example. “It’s not written down how much you bled. There’s no code for going to the ICU.” And if a woman picks up an infection during delivery that doesn’t show up until a few days after she’s released, “that wouldn’t be marked in the hospital record.”...
Prendergast, the pelvic physical therapist, points to studies showing that some women with mild injuries can heal completely if they begin a program of simple exercises right after giving birth. In France, it’s common for new mothers to have “perineal reeducation” therapy"
The way this was written was definitely kinda scaremongery (I mean, it's Mother Jones), but the core stats are alarming and horrifying and I legit had a reaction at one point like "is this too gross and disturbing to share?" and I'm still unpacking that reaction.
Related: two others on maternal death
FB: It's not great. Lots of untreated pelvic injuries that people are told are "normal".
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