This new parents’ column in the Washington Socialist will be semi-regular and invites other parents, guardians, and caregivers to participate. Email washingtonsocialist@mdcdsa.org with your responses. Contributions may be compiled and published anonymously in a future issue.
TYPICALLY, a person feels their bladder is full and needs to be emptied once it fills with 300 milliliters of urine. By the time I was finally discharged from the hospital after giving birth to my daughter, I had experienced the pain of holding in over 1,600 milliliters of urine at once — twice.
I had postpartum urinary retention, a common but underrecognized condition that causes difficulty urinating. In my case, my bladder would not empty out any of the urine it stored on its own. The nurses didn’t catch this until my second day in the postpartum unit. By that point, my bladder had become so full that it was pushing against my uterus, making breastfeeding contractions incredibly painful. All night, I strained to pee on my own, pushing as hard as I could because I didn't know what else to do. Imagine the feeling of holding it in when you really have to go, but for hours and hours with no end in sight. I thought I might explode. It was only the next morning, when they saw how much pain I was in, that the nurses hooked me up to a foley bag and I had to stay another night in the unit.
On the fifth day of my hospital stay, and my third day in the postpartum unit, they removed the foley bag and left me alone for seven hours. At first, I tried my very best to pee. I did everything I could think of: I walked around, sat on the toilet for what felt like hours, turned the tap on, sprayed water on myself, stood in the shower, all just to get my bladder to work again. I was disconnected from my body, nursing a crying baby, terrified that all my pushing from the first night damaged me beyond repair and that I would never pee independently again. By the end of those seven hours, my partner was yelling for help because I was sobbing in pain and unable to stand. I couldn't tell if the unit was short-staffed, but I knew the hospital was always full and the nurses took hours to return to our room.
Though I still could not empty any urine, hospital staff discharged me with a new foley bag and instructions to return in three days. The backup IV they had given me before I went into labor had been sitting in the vein on my wrist for five days. It took me another week to scrub off its sticky residue. I ended up learning to self-catheter, even through a UTI; it would take me two more weeks before I could urinate on my own again.
In virtual postpartum support groups a month later, I described this experience as the worst period of my life — sitting on the toilet re-opened anxieties that my bladder wouldn’t work, that I’d have to call for my partner to stick a tiny tube up my urethra while I looked at myself in the mirror and all that inflamed flesh, and doubted if my choice to become a mom was worth it, feared that it would become resentment and regret. I heard this same fresh pain in the voices of other mothers who told stories of healthcare horrors, of being turned away, of living with the daily and hourly reminders that our bodies no longer work the same, that our labor experiences were so unexpectedly disappointing, that the support and care and connection we all thought we would receive fell so short of what we needed. And now stuck in our houses, nursing, recovering, raising another human being, where could all our indignance go?
Maybe mine just happened to be an issue some nurses were unfamiliar with and couldn’t treat right away. Maybe motherhood was always going to be challenging for me, maternal sacrifice in the form of an angry urethra.
But just one month after my daughter was born, the hospital I delivered at closed one of its two postpartum units, reassigning eight nurses and removing 11 beds. During my time as a patient, I had already witnessed how busy nurses and doctors seemed to be. At times, clinical staff had to consolidate my prenatal appointments because they didn’t have enough room in their schedule. The day I was unexpectedly induced, I waited hours for my induction to begin because the labor and delivery unit was full.
I returned to the hospital the day after my discharge when my blood pressure skyrocketed. After hours of waiting, I was diagnosed with postpartum preeclampsia and sent home with no way to manage it. While there, I saw other patients who had just delivered staying in triage without even a private bathroom they could access.
Since then, conditions have only gotten worse. National Nurses United hosted a community forum this past September, at which a nurse shared that they now have to reroute some patients to deliver in Baltimore, over 40 miles away, because there is no capacity in the unit. Other patients never even see a postpartum room, forced instead to stay overnight in labor and delivery while postpartum nurses take away and care for their newborns. These parents get discharged with no further information on what to do after they bring their newborns home. When I hear and read about hospital management’s decisions, I think of how disempowering it must feel to be at your most vulnerable moment and realize you’re alone in keeping yourself and your child alive.
Hospitals like MedStar Washington Hospital Center claim this reduction in critical services is a response to mounting financial pressure, especially as the Trump administration slashes Medicaid spending, which pays for at least 40 percent of births nationwide. Of course, that is far from the full story. Alarmingly, MedStar’s new strict caps on the number of patients they schedule for C-sections and labor inductions apply to those referred by local maternal health organizations, many of whom are people of color or from low-income backgrounds. Both the infant mortality and maternal mortality rates are higher in the District of Columbia than the nationwide average, with Black moms more likely to experience preterm birth, inadequate prenatal care, and infant death.
This inequity parallels escalating maternal health crises across the country. In rural states, hospitals have closed their maternity units at such a rate that less than half now offer labor and delivery services. In many of these areas, abortion bans have driven physicians to quit, replacing OB-GYN care with anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers that are largely unregulated and often misdiagnose patients when treatments are incompatible with their religious views.
Republicans, and even moderate Democrats, can try to make this a moral or cultural debate about family values. But ultimately, it is about profit. And when profit is the priority, hardly anyone has real choices. While I was recovering at home, I received a letter from MedStar’s billing department. Without insurance, they would’ve charged me approximately $35,000 for labor and delivery, and my daughter nearly $4,000 just for being born. And this excludes the routine labwork that cost extra, even with insurance, or the $430 out-of-pocket expense they tried to charge me every time I went into labor and delivery for a prenatal or postpartum check, as advised by my midwives, which the hospital coded as emergency visits.
I am no healthcare expert. I am a new mom who experienced a traumatic birth, trying to care for my daughter while hooked up to a foley bag, and spending hours at my desk calling the hospital billing department and my insurance to figure out how to apply my insurance benefits to my hospital bills. And in this reality, I am lucky — lucky that I can afford to be on my partner’s insurance plan, lucky that I could work with a doula, lucky that my nurses and midwives kept me informed about my care decisions throughout my pregnancy and labor, lucky that my nurses noticed how hard I was weeping at my follow-up appointment and referred me to a social worker, lucky that my partner and family helped me care for the baby in my first two months postpartum so that I could join virtual support groups and speak with a therapist, lucky that I am alive and my daughter is healthy.
But to see and hear other birthing people’s horror stories interacting with this country’s healthcare system and think ourselves lucky that we don’t have it worse is an unnecessary burden and entirely solvable problem. And the stakes have changed for me. I have broken down alone in the dark, convinced I had nowhere to channel my grief. I have heard these same tears, shed and unshed, in other people's stories, all of us sharing our traumas over and over again, trying to find our way out. Every time I replay what happened to me, I can't stop asking myself: what if my postpartum issues had been caught earlier? What if I could have been comfortable and cared for until I recovered? What if I didn't have to spend hours of my life, still freshly postpartum, trapped in phone calls to settle hospital bills?
What if new parents don't have to pay the hundreds of dollars for private insurance each month or the thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs to do something vital like give birth? What if nurses are paid enough, and hospital infrastructure can be upgraded, and maternal units are fully staffed to meet patient needs? What if our babies are automatically enrolled in health insurance when they’re born and it becomes one less thing we have to worry about?
What if people who want or need abortions, birth control, and fertility treatment can access it without fear, shame, or stress? What if every child can grow up with enough formula and food? What if all parents can take paid time off work and afford to enroll our children in childcare, especially in these first few months of recovery and sleep deprivation? What if caregivers and educators are paid enough? And what if all of these dreams are already reality for many people in other countries, and can be our reality here, too?
Right now, nearly one in five Americans have medical debt. Hospital mergers and corporate ownership have increased healthcare prices and prioritized profit over actual caregiving, as evidenced by maternity wards closing if deemed “unprofitable.” On average, the United States spends about twice as much on healthcare per person as comparable countries, but people can expect to live four fewer years and pregnant people are at least three times more likely to die.
My “what if” scenarios are not out of reach. A current proposed Medicare for All Act, if passed, would achieve some of them, while saving Americans $1 trillion. If elected officials actually care about saving lives and setting families up for long-term financial success, why is fighting for this legislation such an uphill battle? Of all the shitty things about the United States’ politics that enrage me, this hypocrisy is the toughest to swallow. Calling your view “pro-life” without implementing a better healthcare system makes it an obvious lie. Calling universal healthcare a “progressive” policy reveals the manipulativeness that we’ve assumed is required of politics — if we regard life-saving health outcomes as “radical,” then what are our health outcomes currently tied to? Somewhere, oligarchs are maximizing their own profits off the literal backs of this country’s people and they are unduly supported by bosses and managers, reporters, politicians, and everyone who believes that getting a leg up means stepping on someone else. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Shortly after I was discharged, the results of DC’s local primary election showed me that the tide is turning. With three socialists set to take local office in 2027, a better world is possible not only because I believe so, but because most of us do. I cannot describe my immense relief at that sense of true community — my neighbors not only dropping off food and gifts but also voting for universal childcare, paid family leave, deeply affordable housing, food and healthcare access, higher wages, publicly owned utilities, and the substantive policies that would change all our material lives for the better.
That is why I'm committed to this fight, in my own way, by starting this column. None of us raise children in isolation. Though I’m newly on my parenting journey, I have already seen how inseparable it is from the issues that people conveniently deem as “political” when it would be more convenient for us to be too tired, too distracted, or too apathetic to engage. We know we can’t afford not to.
The next generation is in my arms, looking up at me with big eyes as I feed and soothe her. Her world will likely already be warmer than mine, but I will do everything in my power to leave it safer and greener, and her with the tools to exercise interdependence so that she can continue making it better than anything we might imagine today.
Parent or not, will you join me?
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This new parents’ column in the Washington Socialist will be semi-regular and invites other parents, guardians, and caregivers to participate. Email washingtonsocialist@mdcdsa.org with your responses. Contributions may be compiled and published anonymously in a future issue.
