Home, for now, is a bassinet wedged into a room in the high-dependency unit of St George Hospital, where the two-month-old’s mother lies catastrophically injured.

Grace Wang’s spinal canal was injected with a powerful antiseptic instead of anaesthetic, in what should have been a routine epidural to ease the pain of her first child’s birth.

The devastating medical mistake – inconceivable in its magnitude – has poisoned her nervous system, leaving the 32-year-old distressed, confused, in shocking pain and unable to walk or even sit.

She has lost the strength to hold Alex, and rarely asks about her baby, as she did constantly after his birth.

The future may not bring relief, as Ms Wang’s physical and psychological condition has deteriorated since the accident on June 26, and new symptoms continue to emerge.

In the first three relatively hopeful weeks, her husband, Jason Zheng, cooked for Ms Wang and fed and changed Alex, who has apparently not suffered from the drug error.

Now Ms Wang has had surgery to relieve fluid pressure on her brain, and Mr Zheng maintains a vigil beside his increasingly frightened and disoriented wife, leaving little time for his son. The longed-for baby – who followed three miscarriages – is cared for by a nurse the hospital provides. The couple have no family in Sydney, where they migrated from China.

”It’s like we are ignoring that we have a son,” said the distraught father, who will begin legal action.

… Alex snuggles close when placed alongside his mother, but breastfeeding has been impossible for fear the many medicines she is taking may affect the milk.

”Every day she’s suffering and she says she wants to give up,” Mr Zheng said. ”She was crying last night when she touched her son. I just want to change my body to hers.”

Another thing Mr Zheng wants, and which motivated his decision to speak publicly, is to make contact with anyone who has suffered similarly, in the hope their doctors may advise on Ms Wang’s treatment.

Epidural administration of chlorhexidine – used to clean skin before injections and strong enough to neutralise resistant hospital bacteria – is so rare that Ms Wang’s doctors have identified only one other case.

Angelique Sutcliffe, from Britain, was paralysed for life after the chemical entered her epidural in 2001. But this was just a droplet – a fraction of the eight millilitres infused into Ms Wang.

Managers at St George Hospital yesterday admitted error and pledged to support the family, but would not explain the possible source of such a fundamental mistake in a commonplace procedure: nearly 40,000 epidurals were conducted in 2006, the most recent New South Wales statistics show, in 43 per cent of all births.

The state’s Minister for Health, Carmel Tebbutt, said: ”This is an extremely distressing case and I offer my sincere apologies.”

What happened is this: In my 39th week, I am induced because of high blood pressure. At the hospital, I am given Pitocin, a synthetic form of the labor-inducing hormone oxytocin, and Cervidil, a vaginal insert used to dilate the cervix. Within two hours, my contractions are one minute apart. I had lasted as long as I could without an epidural because I had read that they sometimes slow dilation. That’s the last thing I need: I’m at a pathetic 2 centimeters. My doctor comes up with a solution for the pain: a syringe full of a narcotic called Stadol.

“I have a history of anxiety,” I tell the nurse who has brought in the syringe, as I always warn any medical professional who wants to give me drugs. “Is this drug OK for me?” “It sure is,” she says.

It is not. Within 10 seconds, I begin hallucinating. For five hours, I hallucinate that I’m on a swing that’s soaring too high, that houses are flying at my face. My husband has fallen asleep on the cot next to me, and I’m convinced that if awakened, he will turn into a monster — literally. I’m aware this notion is irrational, that these images are hallucinations. But they are terrifying. I buzz the nurse. “Sometimes that happens,” she says …

By noon the next day, 24 hours after I had arrived, I am only 3 centimeters dilated. The new nurse, a nice lady, tells me the induction isn’t working. “Your blood pressure isn’t even high anymore,” she says. “Tell the doctor you want to go home.”

When my OB comes in, I say, “I’d like to stop this induction, if that’s possible. I’m worn out. I hallucinated all night … I just don’t think this is working out.”

“OK,” he says. “Let me examine you. If you’re still not dilating, we’ll talk about going home.”

My previous dilation exams had been quick and painless, if not entirely pleasant. This one takes a long time. Suddenly, it hurts. “What are you doing?” I scream. “Why does it hurt?”

No answer.

“He’s not examining me,” I scream at my husband. “He’s doing something!” My husband grips my hand, frozen, unsure.

I scream to the nurse, the nice one who had suggested I go home. “What is he doing?” She doesn’t answer me, either. I writhe under the doctor’s grasp. The pain is excruciating.

The first sound I hear is the doctor’s directive to the nurse, in a low voice: “Get me the hook.”

I know the hook is for breaking my water, to speed my delivery by force. I scream, “Get off of me!” He looks up at me, as if annoyed that the specimen is talking. I imagine him thinking of the cadavers he worked on in medical school, how they didn’t scream, how they let him do whatever he wanted.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he says. He breaks my water and leaves. The nurse never looks me in the eye again.

Eleven more futile hours of labor later, I am exhausted and terrified when the doctor comes in and claps his hands together. “Time for a C-section,” he says. I consider not signing the consent form, ripping off these tubes and monitors, and running. But the epidural I’d finally gotten won’t allow me to stand up.

It’s nearly midnight when I hear a cry. My first emotion is surprise; I had almost forgotten I was there to have a baby.

I was desperate to find someone who could tell me what had happened to me was normal. To say, “You hallucinated? Oh, me, too.” Or “My doctor broke my water when I wasn’t looking. Isn’t that the worst?” Nothing …

Now, I’d never loved my doctor … I’d found him patronizing — “Normal!” he’d shout at me, when I asked a question — I thought his assuredness might be a good antidote to my anxiousness. It seemed to work, until it didn’t.

… I also didn’t have a birth plan … Sure, I had a plan for the birth: Have a baby using whatever breathing method I’d learned in the hospital’s birth-preparedness class, maybe get an epidural. But I didn’t have the piece of paper that so many of my friends have brought to the hospital with them … in my opinion, the very act of creating such a contract was to ignore what labor is: something unpredictable that you are in no way qualified to dictate.

… people who hear my story ask … Did I consider a home birth? A midwife instead of an obstetrician? … The answer is no. I am not holistically minded. My philosophy was simple: Everyone I know has been born. It can’t be that complicated.

The women who ask me about my preparations for my first son’s birth — who imply with these questions that I could have prevented what happened to me if I’d been more diligent — are part of an informal movement of women who are trying to “take back” their birth — take it back from the hospital, the insurers and anyone else who thinks he can call the shots.

But hospitals aren’t so interested in giving women back their birth … stipulations dealing with labor and delivery (“I want only one medical professional in the room at a time”) garner barely a glance. University OB/GYN in Provo, Utah, even has a sign that reads, “…we will not participate in: a ‘Birth Contract’, a Doulah [sic] Assisted, or a Bradley Method delivery. For those patients who are interested in such methods, please notify the nurse so we may arrange transfer of your care.”

… This question of whether I could have prevented my trauma has lingered in my mind since that day; now that I am pregnant again, it has become deafening. I have a chance to do it all over. Would I benefit from thinking more holistically? Should I bother taking back my birth?

During my pregnancies, friends gave me two books; their spines are still barely cracked. The first is called “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth.” … The other book is “Your Best Birth” by Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein; it’s an offshoot of their 2008 documentary, “The Business of Being Born.” Their urgent message is that women who want to deliver vaginally can do so if no one intervenes. Instead, doctors and hospitals are doing all they can to “help” the laboring woman along … and failing. Inductions like mine, epidurals given early in labor, continuous fetal-heart monitoring — all of them have been associated with a higher risk for cesarean section. The result is an epidemic — 32 percent of U.S. births were C-sections at last count, the highest rate in our history. Individual surgeries may be medically necessary, but as a matter of public health, the best outcomes for mothers and babies come with a rate of no more than 15 percent, according to the World Health Organization.

Sam … was five months pregnant when watching “The Business of Being Born” convinced her that hospitals could be dangerous and a home birth would be more meaningful. She and her husband found a midwife … and spent the rest of the pregnancy preparing.

After 24 hours of labor, Sam’s contractions were two or three minutes apart, yet when her midwife examined her, she was only 3 centimeters dilated. The midwife gently told her that she was nowhere close to delivering, despite her contractions, exhaustion and pain. Sam asked to be taken to the hospital.

The change of scenery did her good. “At that point, I had been in labor for 40 hours,” she says. “I entered the relaxed zone. The epidural took the edge off … It was a sacred space.”

After her son’s delivery, Sam passed out, having lost 50 percent of her blood volume in a postpartum hemorrhage. Needless to say, she was relieved that she was in a place where blood transfusions were readily available … she believes she will want midwife care at a hospital next time.

… Bialik’s first birth didn’t go the way she wanted. After three days of labor at home, she stalled at 9 centimeters, one short of the goal. Her midwife suggested they go to the hospital, where after a natural childbirth, Bialik’s son spent four days in the neonatal intensive-care unit. “My son was born with a low temperature and low blood sugar, which isn’t unusual in light of the fact that I had gestational diabetes,” she explains. “I understand doctors need to err on the side of caution, but there was nothing wrong with my child. All of our plans for bed sharing, nursing on demand, bathing him — gone.”

The experience was scarring. “I felt a sense of failure that I had to call my parents from the hospital,” Bialik continues. “Yes, I know vaginal birth in the hospital is the next best thing to a home birth.” …

I point out that natural childbirth in the hospital — her “failure” — was my best-case scenario. But I also understand when she says, “Everyone is allowed her own sense of loss.” She realized her vision when her second son was born at home.

The second time around
I don’t consider myself a candidate for a home birth. The risk of uterine rupture from an attempt at vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) makes it unthinkable … I’m also not really interested in a home birth … But I’m also not interested in another C-section …

So I’d like to attempt a VBAC, but I know that it doesn’t always succeed. I have a new doctor — the 10th I interviewed following my son’s birth — at a new hospital, and he has agreed to help me try. But my primary goal is more modest: not to be retraumatized. Even now, my heart pounds at the sight of hospital receiving blankets, the antiseptic smell of the maternity ward.

The common thread in Bialik’s and Sam’s stories that impressed me was how supported and safe they felt with their midwife …

In an e-mail Bialik sends after our meeting, she goes back to my idea that some women weren’t meant to have babies the holistic way. “There are those among us who believe that if the baby can’t survive a home labor, it is OK for it to pass peacefully,” she writes. “I do not subscribe to this, but I know that some feel that … if a baby cannot make it through birth, it is not favored evolutionarily.”

I think about my appendectomy, back in 2003. Had I not made it to the hospital in time, I would be dead. What would it be like to refuse medical intervention? I’d call my family, say my good-byes. “I’m sorry,” I’d say. “But I’m not evolutionarily favored. It’s time for me to go.”

This attitude, that everything was better back when there were no doctors, seems strange to me. C-sections, although certainly done too often, can save lives. Orthodox Jews still say the same prayer after childbirth that those who have been in near-death experiences say — and with good reason. A birth that leaves mother and child healthy may be commonplace, but it’s also a miracle every time.

As the weeks pass and my belly grows, I can’t stop thinking about Sam. Her pregnancy was a sacred time, and she had truly looked forward to labor. Is that what I should try for — a meaningful birth, as well as an untraumatic one? At what point had people like Sam and me learned to feel entitled to a meaningful birth?

“I think that birth should be a beautiful experience,” says obstetrician Kimberly D. Gregory, M.D. She’s the vice chair of women’s health care quality and performance improvement at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. “It should be exactly the way you want it, and doctors should intervene only to preserve the health or life of you or your baby.”

Naturally, one would assume that Dr. Gregory advocates birth plans. When I ask her this, she laughs. “We always say, ‘If you show up with a birth plan, just get the C-section room ready,’” she says. “You get everything on that list that you don’t want. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Dr. Gregory led an unpublished study that compared women who took traditional hospital birth classes with those who employed Bradley-like training and a birth plan. The birth-plan group trended toward a higher C-section rate and more interventions. “There’s a certain personality type that tends to be more anxious. Maybe the anxiety hormones themselves put them at risk,” Dr. Gregory theorizes. “It seems that being open and honest and choosing the right doctor is probably a better option than writing everything down. Walking in with this list appears to set up an antagonistic relationship.” …

… In the past three weeks, I’ve had the same dream. I’m in a field (I believe at Ina May Gaskin’s Farm), and women in braids are dancing around me as my baby is born, painlessly, joyously. As I reach down, I notice my C-section scar is gone.

I wake up upset. Am I truly under the impression, subconscious though it may be, that taking back this birth will undo the damage of the last one?

“I don’t understand this phrase ‘take back your birth,’” nurse-midwife Pam England, creator of “Birthing From Within,” … tells me. “Who took it? What would a woman tell herself it meant about her if she failed to meet the criteria she made up for ‘taking back’ her birth? I am concerned that this phrase, meant to generate action and a feeling of empowerment, may actually be generated by or feeding the victim part of her.”

England is right: Having a childbirth that I deem successful this time will not change what I haven’t overcome from the first. I try to find a way to make what my doctor and nurses did to me OK, but my mind rebels. I feel loss — no, theft — of an opportunity for me to have a baby the way so many other women do: a carefree pregnancy, a labor that could still go any way.

Maybe I’m not so different from the women I spoke with, after all. Bialik had a successful natural childbirth but felt like a failure because it was in the hospital. Women who had a C-section also used words like failure. Perhaps part of the problem is that our generation of women is so ambitious, so driven, that we don’t know how to do anything without quantifying it as a success or failure.

According to Dr. Gregory, women are now requesting a C-section for their first birth, even without indication. “A lot of people are uncomfortable with the unknown,” she says. Plenty of people are wary of C-sections by choice, from holistic moms to obstetricians. But isn’t this, too, taking back your birth? Refusing to be out of control seems to me the epitome of taking it back. You don’t have to have an unattended birth in the woods to be considered a real woman.

Deciding that you can’t control the uncontrollable — and committing to that decision when you are, in fact, out of control — is also taking back your birth. It’s what your grandmothers did. It’s what their grandmothers did.

With this, I realize that I have already taken back my birth, but not as part of any movement. I have stopped judging women who take extra precautions as defensive and started to understand that everyone has to find her way.

I don’t know how this story ends. I’m still not convinced my body was made to deliver vaginally. But here’s what I do know: I will insist on kindness. I will insist on care. And I hope I will be open to being treated kindly. It’s harder than it seems.

“The fact that she has transferred to hospital to me suggests that she had a really great midwife who said ‘you know what, it’s time to go and get some help’,” Mrs Jones said.

“To me a home birth transferred to a hospital is not a failure or a disaster.

“It’s just that obviously for whatever reason, it couldn’t happen at home, so the midwife has said let’s go to the hospital we’ve already booked into and get the medical help you require.”

Mrs Jones said the attraction for her to home births was to avoid the adrenalin that affected the natural process.

“The hormonal process is affected by adrenalin which is caused by fear and at hospitals you have doctors and midwives you mightn’t know, it’s a strange environment, you have bright lights — they’re all the sorts of things that leads to everything going wrong in deliveries,” she said.

“I see that as a greater risk than having a home birth.

“At home, you’ve got a midwife who you have been preparing with for months.

“I was confident in my body’s ability to give birth if I was left alone to get along with it.”

FOR most women, the memory of their baby’s birth remains a vivid mental replay that awakens sensations at times as sharp and clear as the moment itself.

For Fiona Thomas, such memories are hazy, trammelled by darker ones that involved her fight for survival. All she remembers is the baby, her third, being lifted from deep within her; and then feeling faint and unwell.

As the baby lay in her arms, she was elated to discover she had a daughter (she already had two boys.) But there was tension in the room and the obstetrician seemed preoccupied. As the feeling of faintness dragged her deeper into a place she did not want to go, she signalled to the nurse to take the baby.

She remembers the anaesthetist telling her there were ”some complications” with bleeding and the obstetrician saying tersely, ”get her husband back here now” (he had gone with the baby to the nursery).

And then she was lying unconscious, monitored by the rhythmic beep of machines on a 24-hour guard. Meanwhile, the baby slept in the nursery, her life stretched out vast as an open sky.

Unbeknown to her, Fiona was suffering from placenta accreta, a potentially fatal condition in which the baby’s food supply, the placenta, attaches itself to the walls of the uterus so deeply that there’s a risk of haemorrhage if it is removed. It occurs in one in 2500 pregnancies but is difficult to detect beforehand.

In the delivery suite, the obstetrician worked rapidly to stitch up the ends of the blood vessels but the placenta was an open network, pumping blood at a rate of knots. ”My husband had a fright when he came back into the room and saw the obstetrician covered in blood,” Fiona recalls. ”I actually think it was harder for him than for me.”

… Fiona underwent an emergency hysterectomy and woke up in intensive care attached to drips and tubes that leeched donors’ blood back into her depleted body. Pinned to the foot of her bed was a photo of her daughter …

AUSTRALIA is the fourth-safest country in the world in terms of maternal mortality …

The chance of dying in Australia as a result of childbirth is remote – about one in 10,000 …

But globally, women die of pregnancy-related causes at a rate of one a minute, with 99 per cent of deaths happening in developing countries. Clearly, giving birth is a risky business. Good hygiene and better standards of living and prenatal care have gone a long way towards making it safer in this country, but that doesn’t mean it won’t go wrong.

Ironically, despite Australia’s great record, experts say many women are feeling more, rather than less, anxious about the birth process. Some blame this on our risk-averse society, saying the screens and tests and the increasing level of intervention in birth and pregnancy is geared towards making women fearful. As one expert puts it, antenatal care has become ”antenatal scare”.

Louise Kornman, associate professor of obstetrics at the Royal Women’s Hospital, says: ”Birth rarely leads to death, but it can lead to damage. The majority of pregnancies work out fine, but the reality is it doesn’t always go that way. There is a belief that technology can save you if things go wrong, and in doing so you can lose sight of the fact there are inherent risks.”

… ”Of course, women might feel that sometimes the medical profession intervenes too much in what is a natural process, but the reality is that if left to mother nature then the outcome is not very good, often, and there needs to be a sensible balance struck between not interfering in a natural process but judiciously intervening when things start to go wrong – or preferably before things start to go wrong, given that prevention is better than cure. It can be a difficult compromise to reach.”

It is worth remembering that obstetricians are at the coalface of difficult deliveries. Does this make their view distorted? Unlike midwives, who oversee successful, normal births every day, doctors bear witness to the worst-case scenarios. Inevitably this difference in experience manifests itself in an ongoing debate on how best to manage childbirth. Midwifery groups push for normal deliveries and natural births while obstetricians err on the side of caution … Caught in the middle are the mothers.

Rather than becoming too complacent, Melissa Maimann, a private midwife and childbirth educator in Sydney, is seeing more anxiety among her patients, created, she believes, by our risk-averse culture.

”The safest place to have a baby is at home, if everything is going well,” she says firmly. ”The vast majority of people who go through the hospital system are unhappy with their experience.”

Have women been made to feel over-anxious? ”Possibly,” admits Bernadette White, clinical director of obstetrics at the Mercy Hospital For Women. ”It is easy to focus on the things that go wrong, and for some people that’s a source of stress.

”Obviously, a logical approach is to look and say, ‘Yes, that could happen, but how likely is it?’ But people don’t always have an entirely rational view when looking at things that might go wrong in their labour.

”And when you are assessing a risk, there’s a very broad spectrum of interpretation. That’s why some people will look at one set of figures and want a home birth, and someone else will look at the same figures and want an elective caesar.”
Associate professor Jenny Gamble, deputy head of nursing and midwifery at Griffith University, Queensland, has researched birth and post-traumatic stress.

Her findings show that while birth is a relatively safe physical event in Australia, it remains a hazardous psychological journey.

”If we stick with the premise that a high level of intervention has unintended negative consequences, then yes it does. We have consistently found that 30 per cent of women report that their birth was traumatic; that they feared for their life, or their baby’s life. This is a very high figure. We also know that about 6 per cent go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

”Women don’t feel safe. Birth is being geared towards making them feel fearful; strangers are telling them this and that, there is screening and testing at every step and they develop a sense that at any moment they might lose the baby or something catastrophic is going to happen. It’s called ‘antenatal scare’ in the trade.”

Gamble is concerned about the ripple effects of such trauma. Affected women may find it harder to bond with their baby, and their relationships may fall apart. They may develop a fear of hospitals and doctors and even birth itself.

”Most of our gains in maternal morbidity have been based around realistic, basic things, like feeding the mother, sending out health messages such as not smoking in pregnancy and basic care in the community. I am not suggesting that we do nothing, but the pendulum has gone too far the other way.”

ERIN Horsley had her first baby in Britain. Despite her plans for a natural birth with no intervention, she ended up having her baby induced and then delivered by forceps when labour progressed slowly.

Attached to a drip and no longer able to move around, Horsley couldn’t speak through the pain. ”If you can’t tell me what’s the matter then I can’t help you,” said the midwife, brusquely.

Horsley emerged from the experience feeling emotionally battered. ”I felt let down,” she said. ”Not listened to. It caused marital problems. When I had my second baby here in Melbourne I tried to talk the hospital staff about my experiences; they said I was being oversensitive and that birth trauma doesn’t exist.”

Shae Reynolds, 31, was also hoping for a natural delivery but a late scan showed the lake of amniotic fluid surrounding the baby was ”potentially low”. (This turned out not to be the case when the waters finally broke.) In the cascade of intervention that followed, Shae found her legs in stirrups opposite an open doorway with several strangers milling around the room, including someone emptying the bins.

A vacuum extractor was attached to her baby’s head and one her most horrific memories is watching the doctor put a foot on the bed and pulling, saying, ”We have to get this baby out”. She says part of her daughter’s scalp was damaged as a result, and she suffered a big tear.

”I struggled terribly the first six months,” she recalls. ”I couldn’t have sex for over a year. I felt like I’d failed, like I hadn’t protected her.”

Reynolds’s daughter is now five and she has had two more children, both born without complications and naturally, at home.

But every birthday awakens memories of the trauma. ”It’s hard not to feel torn, because one of the happiest days of my life was also one of the most traumatic. Those precious first moments that we had as a family were destroyed. We were cheated of so much more than just the birth. We still are.”

Medics and midwives are united in the belief that it helps if a woman can feel in control, or at least informed about what is happening. Says Maimann: ”We have an excellent public health system. The government’s job is to offer a basic and safe level of care, which it does very well. It doesn’t suit the emotional or mental needs of women having babies, but I don’t think it should.”

She argues that families should be prepared by investing in independent childbirth education, or working with a private midwife who will provide continuity of care at a cost of between $3000 and $6000.
Surely this will be out of reach to many? ”We can afford holidays,” … ”It’s about valuing what you get.”

Melissa Bruijn and midwife Debby Gould run birthtalk.org, a national birth trauma support group … ”People assume that if birth is going to be safe, there has to be lots of intervention, but reducing the amount of birth trauma is not about reducing what can go wrong, because that’s not controllable.

”It’s really about meeting the emotional needs of women. Even if they find themselves undergoing emergency caesareans, they can still feel empowered and part of the process if they are looked after properly. It’s a myth to say that the most important thing is a healthy baby. Traumatic birth gets carried with you – you don’t leave it at the hospital – and it can have profound consequences for both the mother and baby.”

It is almost seven years since Fiona Thomas, 45, an occupational therapist, went into hospital to give birth and ended up in intensive care. She was fortunate to have given birth in a hospital with a good supply of blood; fortunate that there was a team on hand that worked with rhythmic precision to save her. ”You don’t expect that,” she says. ”I went in thinking I was going to have a routine caesarean, just like I’d had before. All our friends were expecting a phone call 10 minutes later with good news, but there was nothing.

“When I had my first child in the hospital … It wasn’t a real positive experience,” … “It was a stark, very impersonal feeling, treating me like I was sick and not pregnant.”

Jacobs explained she believed she had more control over many aspects of the birth when it took place at home, including whether she got to be with the baby after delivery and having the siblings there at the birth.

“Doing a home birth, I felt like I had a say,” said Jacobs. “This is not the hospital’s baby. This is my baby.”

… the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that a very small but slightly growing number of women are making the same choice that Jacobs did. While less than 1 percent of all births in the United States take place outside the hospital, the number of those births taking place at home has increased by 3.5 percent between 2003-04 and 2005-06 …
… the most recent trend might be a negative reaction to a hospital birth experience, since the majority of mothers choosing a home birth have had children before.

… “It certainly suggests it’s an experience they don’t want to repeat.”

“I suspect that economic issues are not the main issues,” … “I suspect consumers are becoming more informed … and seeing home births are a safe alternative for healthy women with a qualified provider.”

… The Initiative is an effective wellness model of maternity care that offers safe choices to overused and costly high-tech birth interventions that often lead to avoidable cesareans …

The … study examined the possibility of sexual abuse experienced in childhood triggering retraumatization during wanted pregnancy … 1,830 pregnant women participating in the study were divided into high- and low-risk groups, which were further divided into three subgroups: those who were victims of child sexual abuse, those who experienced other types of trauma in childhood, and those who had experienced no notable trauma. Compared with women who had not endured any notable trauma before, those who had been sexually abused in childhood, the study shows, suffered higher levels of depression and more post-traumatic symptoms.

… the main post-traumatic symptoms that these women reported were detachment and avoidance … the more severe the child sexual abuse, the stronger the correlation between the PTS symptoms and poor physical health during pregnancy. “Gynecological problems might be the body’s manifestation of the child sexual abuse trauma,” …