Susan Burton

It's what might...

convince a patient that I guess this is just what women go through.

A mother will endure a lot of pain to have a baby, to have a healthy baby.

A mother will silence herself in the operating room, not speak up about her pain to protect her baby.

After that baby is born and a mother talks about her experience, right?

So what's the thing you hear so often?

Well, all that matters is you have a healthy baby.

You know, you have a beautiful baby.

And people say that and they really mean well.

And of course, that's what you want, a healthy baby.

But it's this kind of cultural silencing.

It says, let's not talk about that other part of your experience.

And when I think about my own reporting journey here, right, like I started out and one of my questions was like, wait, how do I not know about this?

And I think that one of those reasons is because people don't talk about it.

People start silencing themselves.

Yeah.

What do you know about your mother's experience, your mother's birth experience?

Yeah, I mean, and when we think about solutions to this problem, one of them is how do we enable people to talk about these experiences that reverberate long after we leave the delivery room?

Oh, Rachel, thank you so much for having me.

It was my pleasure.