Pregnant and afraid: When expecting moms suffer at the hands of their partners InternationalDayForTheEliminationOfViolenceAgainstWomen
As Beth Hovis* lay pinned on her bed, her partner Roger’s* hands tightening around her neck, she had only one thought:Beth, who was five months pregnant, flailed her arms and twisted her swollen body in an effort to get him off, but he was too strong, too cruel, too determined to show her he was the boss. He was pissed off that Beth had interrupted him while he was getting high with his buddy, and he was letting her know it.
“I was so scared to be a single mom. I never imagined I could do it on my own. He took away all my self-esteem,” she says. “I thought if I could just make him happy, if I could give him the love and support he needed, he would calm down. I thought I could change him.”At its core, intimate partner violence is about power, control and dominance.
Roger started constantly criticizing her and telling her she was going to be a bad mom. He insulted her friends and family in an attempt to isolate her from them. And he was so jealous, he threw out all the photos she had with other men, grilled her daily about who she spoke to and accused her of cheating on him. It wasn’t long before his attacks turned physical: He grabbed her roughly, slammed her against walls, threw her on the bed and restrained her painfully.
In some cases, the pregnancy itself can be a form of abuse—a woman may be sexually assaulted, coerced into pregnancy, prevented from using birth control or lied to about condom use. “Pregnancy can be a tactic to keep a woman in the relationship,” says Kimber. “It’s a way of holding on: ‘You’re pregnant. You can’t leave. You’ve got my kid.’”
The couple went on to have a second child and then split up. When Gayle started dating other people, Brent’s jealousy went into overdrive. “He followed me places; he called me at all hours of the night; he showed up at my doorstep unannounced,” she recalls. They got together for a night, and Brent again lied about using protection. Gayle wound up pregnant with their third child. She wonders whether it was an intentional act to keep her busy with another baby and away from other men.
Janssen, a former labour and delivery nurse, did the first population-based study in Canada looking at adverse pregnancy outcomes associated with exposure to intimate partner violence and found a threefold increase in poor fetal growth, a nearly fourfold increase in hemorrhaging during pregnancy and an eightfold increase in perinatal death, which includes stillbirths and deaths within the first week of life. Her findings, published in 2003, have since been replicated over and over again.
Sometimes the abuse leads pregnant women to take their own lives. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death during pregnancy, and data from the World Health Organization shows that intimate partner violence is one of the most consistent risk factors for suicide attempts. And in May 2018, an expectant mother in her third trimester was shot in the belly at a Vancouver print shop, where she was hiding in fear of her ex-boyfriend. The woman survived, but the baby did not. The man charged, identified by print shop staff as her ex, had previously spent time in jail for the attempted murder of another ex-girlfriend.
Gayle’s middle son, now 14, has generalized anxiety, and she wonders if it stems from the significant stress she endured during pregnancy. Also, while Brent was careful to protect his image in front of his kids, there were times they witnessed his abuse. Once, when Gayle came home from an evening out with the kids, who were then three, five and seven, he yelled at her for keeping them out late, calling her a bad mom and threatening to beat her up next time. The children were in hysterics.
Many women worry about the legal implications of leaving a man when they’re pregnant with his baby. While a man doesn’t have a legal right to be involved in the pregnancy, he does have rights once the baby is born, including having contact with the child. However, the mother can apply through the courts for a protection order to keep her ex away from her and her child. Women may have to go to court to get sole custody.
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