In our class we constantly talk about intersections of life. One that is important to me is the sexualization of women in the medical world, and in this case, birth. When I was reading the news one morning I came across something called the “husband stitch.” During labor, a woman can receive an episiotomy, which is a cut made between the vagina and anus, in order to help with delivery. This procedure is obviously done during a vaginal birth. After the mother has given birth the doctor will sew the area back together. This was a common practice until around the 1980’s since it was believed that this procedure would give a clean cut rather than natural tearing.
In the 1980’s research was conducted which concluded that episiotomies caused more harm than good to the mother and here is where the husband stitch comes into play. After an episiotomy is preformed and labor is concluded the doctor will sew the cut back together, however the husband stitch is an extra stitch thought to make the vaginal opening smaller, giving the man more pleasure during sex. While the stitch may cause the opening of the vagina to be smaller, this does nothing for tightness of the vaginal muscles and causes women enormous amounts of pain during intercourse in the future. Studies have shown that this occurs more frequently to white women than women of color. An informant from the article said that she did not ask for the stitch, but it was given to her anyway and she felt her doctor took advantage of her by preforming an unnecessary medical procedure which would cause her pain later in life. One informant’s boyfriend heard the midwife say that she would “throw an extra stitch in for him” and winked.
Reading this article made me so enraged that I had a hard time finishing. This shows how patriarchal our society is and our disregard for women’s choices or bodies. The fact that these doctors were preforming the husband stitch without even telling the woman could be argued that these doctors were in a way sexually assaulting these women. The women who have just given birth reported that they were out of it and exhausted from labor (as one can imagine) and having them be mutilated for their partner’s sexual pleasure is absolutely sickening. These doctors are breaking the hypocratic oath and should lose their licenses.
The silver lining is that this practice is decreasing but in my opinion, this just proves that we are still far from egalitarianism in our country.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/husband-stitch-is-not-just-myth
-Chelsea Cullen