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Canada has an incredibly long way to go, but I have some questions.
From my experience indigenous women are amazingly stoic during childbirth. It’s impressive to see. I’m not suggesting racial bias and prejudice don’t play a role, but I wonder if they are able to normalize the results for “squeaky wheel gets the grease”.
Canada has such a long way to go, holy shit.
I would like to know how this compares with the general population.
Did you read the study?
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/global-womens-health/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2026.1780855/full
Mistreatment:
Indigenous participants 63%
White participants 49.4%
BPOC participants 51.5%
There we go. Thanks for the spoonfeeding.
Exactly. This is partly due to a chronically underfunded medical system - most new mothers don't get the support they want. I wouldn't be surprised if there is also racism involved, but it may not be as significant as inferred here.
I suspect the racism is as bad as inferred, but to gauge it we need a baseline.
Of course "mistreatment" is not the same as "don't get the support they want". And if it were the case that the majority of Canadian mothers are mistreated at birth, don't you think that even without an actual scientific study we would have some kind of pop culture ambient feeling about it? Like articles, anecdotal stories, tiktoks etc? But we don't have such ambient cultural references because there is no baseline of a majority of Canadian mothers being mistreated at childbirth. Stats would indeed be great but don't use their absence to trivialize the systemic racism indigenous people face in our country.
"don't get the support they want" can be a what counts as mistreatment in this study. You only needed to tick one of the boxes, and one of them was "My health care provider(s) withheld treatment". What each person defines "withheld treatment" as can vary. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/global-womens-health/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2026.1780855/full#T1
Either way, all of the women were given the same list, and the indigenous women showed more negative results.
"My health care provider(s) withheld treatment or forced me to accept treatment that I did not want."
Keyword is 'or'. If care provider failed to give a requested back rub at some point, this could be checked off and associated with mistreatment. Obviously that's a stupid example, but it shows why this study was a bit crappy. I'm sure there's is mistreatment due to racism, but this study isn't so good at showing it.
Yes, if you're the kind of person who is looking for ways to discredit victims and deny the existence of social problems, then any amount of ambiguity is easily manipulated.
Scientists should always define experimental protocols explicitly with ignorant apologists in mind...
Yes, scientists should define their experimental protocols explicitly. That's kinda a cornerstone of science. Based on the article (which could be poor and maybe the actually published paper is better), they did show the questions, and it looks explicitly like if a patient checked off 'did not receive requested treatment' (or something like that), then they would be characterized as mistreated. And that raises red flags. If they had a good control group, and if the scoring was more nuanced than implied, then it could be ok. But it doesn't read that way, and that can damage a cause that is important and needs addressing (ie racism in the medical system affecting care especially regarding native women and maternity care). Science should always be questioned if only to make it stronger as it survives questioning. If we let it slide because of political correctness or not wanting to hurt feelings, then it's no better than religion.
... And you value truth and accuracy so much that you are making assumptions rather than seeking out the actual study...
You already know what you want to believe, so you're framing your interpretation to fit your presupposition.
Kick rocks, racist; no one here wants to talk to you, or hear what you have to say.
I'm responding to the article and what was reported there. It seems to be you that wants to find a racist to satisfy your moral outrage and make yourself feel better in some twisted way. Nothing I've said is saying racism in the system isn't there - in fact I've specifically and directly said that it is. I'm criticizing the science of this particular study. If you can't distinguish the two because you are blinded by ignorant self righteousness, that's on you.
Yes... And your alleged intentions have clearly been well understood by everyone here...
Get over yourself; from your vocabulary it's clear you're not employed in a STEM field. You're just some armchair pundit who wants to manufacture doubt by suggesting ideological bias has been introduced in someone else's work because you don't like the results of their study.
Don't expect any further replies from me; it's clear exactly what you are, and you're not worth engaging with.
Haha. I was doing stem type work before it was called that! Not that I've done any real science for decades, but I certainly know the process. Ask yourself why you are so worried about covering for the bad science of this article that you'd take to insults instead of facing the clear facts? And no, I don't 'like' the results - I wish we didn't have racism in the system, but that's got nothing to do with it. As I've said multiple times and you seem incapable of absorbing, I'm not arguing against the paper because I don't think there's racism in the system, in fact I've said explicitly that I think there is. It's the bad science that actually hurts the effort to fix these things. So why are you arguing against me here? Do you think this paper was good science? Do you think we should ignore bad scientific method if it shows results we want to see? Or if it shows results we are pretty sure are right but it's methods are flawed? See - that's bad science, which any stem educated person would know.
You've already admitted you haven't read the paper... Only an article covering it... Take your bullshit and indignation somewhere else.
We're done here.
Honestly I was hoping someone with access to the paper might have explained the data gathering and it would turn out that that the research had actually done a much better job than what the article made it look like. Maybe that was lazy of me, my bad. But it seemed to instead trigger a bunch of people.
Are you a woman of color in Canada?
No. Thats the point. If I were, I might not know about how white people don't get the support they want from the medical system.
Mistreatment is not the same as "not get the support I want".
Well not getting what you want can be mistreatment, and it can not be. But if you read the article, that's one of the questions that they used to determine if someone was mistreated.
It seems the same when you've never been treated like an indigenous woman though, and allows you to feel genuine about completely insane takes.
I have zero doubt that there's mistreatment in the medical system due to racism. But that was one of the questions they used to determine if mistreatment occurred. So, basically, it was a poorly done study and they should have had a control group and not included such open questions. And it's rather hard to filter self reported complaints appropriately - I've never had a baby, but from what I understand it's often a pretty nasty experience for anyone.
Just stop digging at this point.
Why? It's kinda important. When a study is published that is poorly done - ie poor science - it can negatively affect a very real cause that requires work to fix - like in this case to address the racism in the health care system. The study can be dismissed because it's junk and people will equate that to dismisssing the issue.- people think 'if they had to fabricate/stretch/spin the data l, then the concern is bs'. Now I haven't read the original paper, and new articles have a habit of reporting very poorly on science. So maybe the article just butchered the methods they used; maybe the article purposefully did that to discredit the study - who knows. But just ignoring it to be politically correct or not hurt people's feeling is backwards.
The fact that the stock photo used here is of a white woman says a lot as well.