Birth Monopoly

Women toppling the monopoly on childbirth I have no problem deleting comments and banning people :)

About me: http://birthmonopoly.com/about/

What I found as a customer in maternity care was that the system didn’t serve me and my baby very well. As I began talking to more and more women around the U.S., I felt like I was uncovering a massive, silent epidemic: major variations in care, low consumer power and extremely limited options in some places, and very little transparency about any of it,

anywhere. This is my tiny contribution towards transparency and a little more consumer power in American maternity care.

- Cristen Pascucci, vice president of ImprovingBirth.org and founder, Birth Monopoly

Comments Policy: This is a drama-free zone.

01/23/2026

“In a democracy, the fundamental civic unit is neighbor.” Jelani Cobb, Dean, Columbia Journalism School |

Side note, there have been lots of comparisons of ICE to the Gestapo. But I also keep hearing, ICE is closer to our own slave patrols. Remember, **N**i Germany studied American slavery as a model for its policies.**

01/20/2026

There is a fantastic video by pinned to her account where she suggests renaming white supremacy “white narcissism.” Go watch it, it’s 🤯🤯🤯

01/19/2026

“People are hiding families in their own homes right now.”

01/03/2026

🗓️ Friendly reminder that a January “reset” was an administrative decision made by the Roman Empire, later adopted by the Church that acted as government.

🌿 It was a break from thousands of years of tradition of celebrating the birth of a new year along with the Earth’s new year… Spring! From when the “calendar” was aligned with lunar and planting cycles also in rhythm with women’s hormonal and reproductive cycles.

🌑 I heard somebody say this is “like calling midnight ‘morning.’” Expecting rebirth and reset immediately after what is for many women already their highest energetic output of the year—Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas. It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t feel natural for me.

🌕 So I’m not doing it. No resets here. Tonight is a full moon and I’m settling in with friends in warm clothes around a dinner table with candles and comfort food.

☢️ This is a weird time in human history. I had roses blooming in November. Birds singing in December that shouldn’t be. Upheaval, war, genocide, environmental r*pe on a scale we’ve never seen. What looks to me like mass delusion and denial around pe*******ac trauma being confronted on a world stage.

🪢 It’s some kind of reclamation to tweezer out these threads of patriarchy and actively regulate within community (like indigenous and Black folks have been doing forever…). Lately I’ve been into Afrofuturistic literature which is changing my brain and needs its own post. It gives me hope we don’t have to stay on this 2,000-year-old apocalypse track. ❤️

11/26/2025

Just a few days apart, two videos were posted on social media of Black women having care denied or delayed during labor.

In one in particular, the nurse exhibits a pathological lack of empathy, peppering the laboring woman with questions as she visibly and vocally suffers through contractions, seated in a wheelchair.

This is not new and it is not rare; it’s just on social media now. This neglect/hostility/hatred has been happening for many years, not limited to but particularly in Black communities. This isn’t hyperbole—ask any birth worker, especially a birth worker of color, if they are aware of this kind of treatment happening in your community.

Obstetric violence and obstetric racism. Dehumanization, power, control—even a desire to do harm; where is the concern for the safety of these babies?

These may appear to be extreme events but they truly are on a spectrum of misogyny and racism that sits on a seemingly benign foundation of widespread denial about misogyny and racism in obstetrics.

11/06/2025

Great article in on something folks have been yelling about for years now. It’s an ugly example of how slow change is when the people most hurt are mothers, how despite allllll the evidence and the trauma and the injuries and deaths, this practice persists because it’s “easier” for hospitals. (It doesn’t even make sense because the strip is ALWAYS used as a cudgel in courtrooms—you would think docs and hospitals would want to get rid of a primary piece of evidence against them.)

Reminder of something we talked about in the previous Know Your Rights course, that “safety” and “liability” are not the same thing and are actually quite often at odds with each other in maternity care.

Google “Electronic fetal monitoring: a bridge too far” by Thomas Sartwelle from the Journal of Legal Medicine in 2012 for a trial lawyer’s assessment. He said:

“EFM is and always has been junk science. This article explores the questions why so feeble a medical modality became the standard of care not only clinically but in the world’s courtrooms. The answer is multifactorial but partially lies in the continued belief in myth, not only by physicians but by the public and trial lawyers. It also explores the question why ACOG and other professional organizations have remained mute allowing an inferior medical modality to become a deus ex machina not only in labor rooms but courtrooms as well.”

10/27/2025

✨Everything is optional✨

You don’t have to know some special language or have ethics policy memorized to just say “No” in your maternity care (but we’ll make sure you know all that anyway).

The right to refuse medical treatment is a foundational human and legal right. Pregnancy does not remove this right.

So why doesn’t it seem that way in real life?

Cultural assumptions about childbirth and women influence the way maternity care is delivered—women don’t really have the ability to make important urgent decisions, birth is traumatic no matter what so lower your expectations about the experience, you forfeit your legal rights over to the doctor or state when you’re carrying a baby…

But policy and guidelines for maternal healthcare providers are generally pretty clear that the birthing person is still and always the legal authority.

It’s frustrating that culture so often overrides all that.

You can say no and you can revoke consent, if you’ve already given it, at any time.

And every needs to know this information and be confident about passing it along to clients and patients every time.

We’ll talk about this *Wednesday* at the live broadcast of Know Your Rights 2025. 🎉

10/21/2025

I was going to make a cute video for this ⭐️important day⭐️ but I ended up in the back yard planting peonies and staking wobbly wildflowers and tending to my baby oak trees who planted themselves on the graves of all the fruit trees I murdered 🥰

So I ran out of time and tried to make one in the car but car selfies are SO EMBARRASSING I chickened out and got…. this image before anyone could see me. 🙈

🎉🎉🎉 Anywayyysssssss we opened registration for Know Your Rights (2025) this morning!! The updated course releases Oct 29 with a watch party and discussion, so get on and get registered now before you forget and get mad at yourself. 👎

https://birthmonopoly.com/know-your-rights-course/

10/14/2025

Our signature course is back and better than ever!! And it’s more IMPORTANT now than ever 😭

Everyone is owed full information and options in their birth care but you know most patients and providers don’t understand that.

You will though :)

🎉 Save the date for a live viewing and discussion 10/29/25 with Cristen and Chanté. Registration info coming soon.

😘

09/23/2025

😩 I’ve been saying this for ten years: the natural (ha) outcome of fetal personhood as policy means women lose “comfort” in birth. A doctor or politician will decide whether it is appropriate or medically indicated for someone to have certain options for birth.

We have always had an unofficial version of this running anyway, but imagine it’s *legislated* you may not have an epidural as a low-risk person. Or you may not get out of bed or eat in labor because of the risk of a fall or aspiration.

One of the biggest myths we bust here at Birth Monopoly is that hospital policy is law, and actually patients have the freedom to exercise their free will despite policy. But what if restrictive and punitive policy IS law??

I kind of can’t believe I’m seeing this IRL because back in the day this was a worst-case hypothetical to illustrate to people how fragile your birth rights actually are. How you give birth and the options available to you are based largely on *culture*, not on what is best or smartest or safest.

And options you believe to be standard may be yanked at any time. Especially when the law functions to restrict pregnant folks rather than protect them.

What a circus 🤡
Cristen

Address

Minneapolis, MN

Website

http://www.birthmonopoly.com/

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