Bill Byungyol Chun: The Informed Consent Illusion in Obstetrics
Bill Byungyol Chun, Staff Physician at MelroseWakefield Hospital, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Informed consent in obstetrics is broken.
Not in theory. In practice.
Here is how it works in most labor and delivery units in this country: a woman is in active labor. She is managing contractions. Her partner is next to her. A clinician she may be meeting for the first time presents an option.
An induction. An augmentation. A cesarean.
She has sixty seconds to process a clinical recommendation while her body is in crisis.
That is not informed consent. That is informed consent’s administrative cousin – the version that gets documented, that satisfies the legal threshold, that protects the institution.
Real informed consent requires that a patient understand her options before she is in the middle of the decision. It requires a prior relationship. It requires that someone in that room is anchored to her values – not to the institutional timeline.
A doula does not provide medical advice.
But a doula is often the only person in that room who has had an unhurried conversation with this woman about what she wants, what she fears, and what she has already decided.
That is not a supplement to informed consent.
In the environment we have actually built, it may be the closest thing to it that most women get.”
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