The lived experience of pregnancy and birthing of women with histories of childhood sexual abuse
Abstract (summary)
This interpretive inquiry addresses the question: What is the lived experience of pregnancy and birthing of women with histories of childhood sexual abuse? Its aim—through ongoing and discursive dialogues with women, various literatures, and other sources of information—is a descriptively rich and evocative text that uncovers a deeper understanding of this experience as it is lived, through the themes living in the wake of childhood sexual abuse, response-ability to motherhood, and regeneration.
Living in the wake of childhood sexual abuse reveals how sexual abuse can insinuate itself into a life and etch a body and a psyche with uncertainty and fear, fracture beliefs, and even 'undo' a self. Through the theme of response-ability to motherhood, women describe awakening to new ways of seeing and relating to their self and to the weighty responsibility for (an)other's well-being. Those who felt safe and supported often experienced a visceral 'Ices!' to being pregnant. When safety and support were absent however, participants were more likely to feel uncertain about their pregnancies, to feel invaded, and to be re-traumatized. Through this theme too, we see how women's response-ability to pregnancy is coloured by an indelible firsthand 'knowing', about the dangers that exist for children in the world. The third theme, regeneration, shows us that pregnancy and birthing can also be a time of personal growth and healing for women with histories of childhood sexual abuse. The women spoke of how carrying, birthing, and caring for a child opened them up to previously unimagined ways of being, to their own lost innocence, and to the delights and joys of childhood, which in turn offered them new opportunities for wholeness and healing.
My hope is that this text, offers nurses and other health care providers a rich and deep understanding of the lived experience of pregnancy and birthing of women with histories of childhood sexual abuse; that it contributes to the advancement of nursing knowledge; and in these ways, informs the sensitive healthcare of women with histories of childhood sexual abuse.
Indexing (details)
Nursing;
Pregnancy;
Sex crimes
0569: Nursing