Canada has an incredibly long way to go, but I have some questions.
From my experience indigenous women are amazingly stoic during childbirth. It’s impressive to see. I’m not suggesting racial bias and prejudice don’t play a role, but I wonder if they are able to normalize the results for “squeaky wheel gets the grease”.
I would like to know how this compares with the general population.
Did you read the study?
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/global-womens-health/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2026.1780855/full
Mistreatment:
Indigenous participants 63%
White participants 49.4%
BPOC participants 51.5%There we go. Thanks for the spoonfeeding.
Exactly. This is partly due to a chronically underfunded medical system - most new mothers don’t get the support they want. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is also racism involved, but it may not be as significant as inferred here.
I suspect the racism is as bad as inferred, but to gauge it we need a baseline.
Of course “mistreatment” is not the same as “don’t get the support they want”. And if it were the case that the majority of Canadian mothers are mistreated at birth, don’t you think that even without an actual scientific study we would have some kind of pop culture ambient feeling about it? Like articles, anecdotal stories, tiktoks etc? But we don’t have such ambient cultural references because there is no baseline of a majority of Canadian mothers being mistreated at childbirth. Stats would indeed be great but don’t use their absence to trivialize the systemic racism indigenous people face in our country.
“don’t get the support they want” can be a what counts as mistreatment in this study. You only needed to tick one of the boxes, and one of them was “My health care provider(s) withheld treatment”. What each person defines “withheld treatment” as can vary. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/global-womens-health/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2026.1780855/full#T1
Either way, all of the women were given the same list, and the indigenous women showed more negative results.
“My health care provider(s) withheld treatment or forced me to accept treatment that I did not want.”
Keyword is ‘or’. If care provider failed to give a requested back rub at some point, this could be checked off and associated with mistreatment. Obviously that’s a stupid example, but it shows why this study was a bit crappy. I’m sure there’s is mistreatment due to racism, but this study isn’t so good at showing it.
Yes, if you’re the kind of person who is looking for ways to discredit victims and deny the existence of social problems, then any amount of ambiguity is easily manipulated.
Scientists should always define experimental protocols explicitly with ignorant apologists in mind…
Yes, scientists should define their experimental protocols explicitly. That’s kinda a cornerstone of science. Based on the article (which could be poor and maybe the actually published paper is better), they did show the questions, and it looks explicitly like if a patient checked off ‘did not receive requested treatment’ (or something like that), then they would be characterized as mistreated. And that raises red flags. If they had a good control group, and if the scoring was more nuanced than implied, then it could be ok. But it doesn’t read that way, and that can damage a cause that is important and needs addressing (ie racism in the medical system affecting care especially regarding native women and maternity care). Science should always be questioned if only to make it stronger as it survives questioning. If we let it slide because of political correctness or not wanting to hurt feelings, then it’s no better than religion.
Are you a woman of color in Canada?
No. Thats the point. If I were, I might not know about how white people don’t get the support they want from the medical system.
Mistreatment is not the same as “not get the support I want”.
Well not getting what you want can be mistreatment, and it can not be. But if you read the article, that’s one of the questions that they used to determine if someone was mistreated.
It seems the same when you’ve never been treated like an indigenous woman though, and allows you to feel genuine about completely insane takes.
I have zero doubt that there’s mistreatment in the medical system due to racism. But that was one of the questions they used to determine if mistreatment occurred. So, basically, it was a poorly done study and they should have had a control group and not included such open questions. And it’s rather hard to filter self reported complaints appropriately - I’ve never had a baby, but from what I understand it’s often a pretty nasty experience for anyone.
Just stop digging at this point.
Canada has such a long way to go, holy shit.
The fact that the stock photo used here is of a white woman says a lot as well.
