Pregnancy in a Time of Coercion

After being harassed by her employer, a new mother was tormented by the health care system.

Cristina distributed a letter to truckers in the Freedom Convoy. At the bottom of that letter there’s a photograph of her newborn daughter. “My family cannot thank you enough,” she writes:

You are my heros! I'm in tears as I write this because you have filled my heart with hope that Canada will be glorious and free again…

Cristina then describes her recent pregnancy, a nightmare of coercion, shadow, and stress. Wholly arbitrary. Wholly manufactured. Unhealthy for anyone to endure, never mind a pregnant woman.

We are a society that allocates courtesy parking spaces to expectant mothers. We are a society that tells them to avoid blue cheese and to use headache medication sparingly. Yet how dare a pregnant woman err on the side of caution by declining a novel vaccine for which no long term safety data exists.

Her employer apparently thought the decision wasn’t even hers to make:

My work harassed and threatened to put me on unpaid leave unless I got vaccinated even though I was pregnant, working 100% from home until my maternity leave, and scheduled to return to work only in 2023.

We’ll never know the precise role all that stress played, but her daughter was delivered by emergency cesarean section, and then kept “in the special care unit for 11 days.”

And so began another round of torment. Because Cristina suffers from asthma, she is medically exempt from wearing a face mask. But this health care facility decided that her documented, acknowledged, very real medical condition was irrelevant. In her words:

the hospital's infectious disease officer refused to let me see and feed my baby unless I wore a mask and wouldn't accept my face shield. I couldn't bear to abandon my baby so I wore the mask. I had more asthma attacks during those 11 days than I've had in the last 5 years combined. Because of the [C-section] surgery every time I had an attack the pain was unbearable.

Flexibility. Compassion. Medical ethics. Patient-centered care. Best practices. That hospital failed each of these tests. Surely new mothers deserve better than this. Surely no health care facility should treat anyone with any medical condition with such callous cruelty.

Cristina is entirely correct when she says:

It's wrong to separate a mother and her newborn baby. It's wrong to not be allowed to kiss your baby or have them see you smile at them. It's wrong to hinder someone’s ability to breath.

She assures the truckers that their protest “matters to millions of Canadians.” She thanks them, and says many people unable to travel to Ottawa are supporting their efforts from afar. Then she adds:

May this food warm you up as you have warmed our hearts! God bless you, the freedom convoy, and Canada - our land glorious and free!

No politician dispelled the darkness in which Cristina spent her pregnancy. No community leader alleviated the misery associated with her daughter’s first weeks on planet Earth. No human rights body ran public service announcements championing the right of pregnant women to make their own decisions, free from third party coercion and harassment.

It was truckers who stood up. It was truckers - working people - who said ‘Enough is enough.’