MAY 18, 2025
Title: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Birth: Obstetric Violence, Fleishman, and Jean Milburn
“She’s fine. The baby’s fine.”
But no one asks what was lost along the way.
Obstetric violence is so embedded in modern birth culture that we rarely recognize it when we see it. It is accepted as “routine,” “protocol,” and “we had to.” It’s not just about dramatic interventions or outright abuse. Most often, it’s the erasure of the birthing person’s voice. The silencing of intuition. The mild intervention/ touch that wasn’t consented to ( e.g. stretch and sweep). The help that never came.
Two TV portrayals help us see this well— Rachel in Fleishman Is in Trouble and Jean Milburn from Sex Education. While their lives and circumstances are different, both women walk us through the realities of postpartum life—one shaped by systemic trauma, the other by internal unraveling. Together, they sketch out a broader truth: postpartum suffering is not just hormonal—it’s cultural.
The Birth
In Fleishman Is in Trouble, Rachel Fleishman is introduced through her husband’s eyes: absent, cold, and selfish. But as the series unfolds, we see something else—a woman undone by a traumatic birth experience that no one ever named as trauma.
During labor, Rachel is:
“Checked” Touched without consent
Gaslit into submission with “just trust us” language
Isolated emotionally while being “rescued” medically
Afterward, her descent is labeled a “crisis” or “postpartum,” implicating that the pain was biological. But what if it was political? What if it was grief?
Rachel's unraveling isn’t irrational—it’s relational. It’s a nervous system protest against being reduced to a “hysterical woman”. Her story invites us to redefine obstetric violence for what’s done to a body and taken from a soul: voice, power, meaning, and coherence.
Jean: The Mind
In Sex Education, Jean Milburn—a renowned sex therapist—faces her own postpartum struggles after giving birth later in life. Unlike Rachel, Jean is supported materially and emotionally. She has language. She has insight. But still, she spirals. Why?
She becomes anxious, overwhelmed, resentful. Her identity fractures. Despite her expertise, she’s human—lost in a fog of sleeplessness, hormonal chaos, and maternal disorientation.
But Jean is not silenced. Her pain is visible, even if messy. There’s no hospital trauma here—no visible violence. And yet, she too walks through a kind of death: the death of control, the birth of vulnerability.
Rachel’s story forces us to name the external violence of birth systems. Jean’s reminds us of the internalized cost of caregiving.
Together, they reveal that postpartum isn’t always about hormones. It is also what we were made to endure in silence.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-163871179