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
