Kimberly Turbin thought she was going to be a happy mom. “But that was snatched from me,” she says, the first time she gave birth. Up until then, “I had a perfect pregnancy.
I didn’t have any nausea. Nothing was wrong with me,” she says. Her water broke while she was at her friend’s house, and she went home to shower before going to the hospital.
Once there, she let the staff know she’d previously been raped and asked them to be communicative with her throughout her delivery. She remembers them giving her a pill to help calm her down because she was growing anxious. “And I did calm down,” she says.
“I thought I was going to push the baby out, and everything was great. Everybody was really nice still.” But shortly after she began pushing, her obstetrician, Alex Abbassi, told her he was going to perform an episiotomy, or cut into the sensitive skin between her vagina and anus — known as the perineum — to widen her vaginal opening.
Turbin repeatedly objected to the procedure, which the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends doing . “What? Why? We haven’t even tried!” she can be heard saying in a video of the birth taken by her mother that she later posted online. “Why can’t we just try?” Abbassi said the baby wasn’t coming out and if she continued to try to push, “it’s going to rip the butthole down clean.
” When she protested — more than once telling him no and pleading, “Don’t cut me!” — he told her.
