Cut me open!

I just had my second scheduled Caesarean and, yes, I still consider myself a feminist.

By Jean Hanff Korelitz

Aug 2, 1999 | First, the horror stories.

A little girl, a friend's half sister. She's a teenager now, alive but completely paralyzed and muted by an obstetrician's failure to perform a timely Caesarean section on her mother, who was trying for a natural birth.

A newborn baby boy, whose mother, my friend, had a history of problems relating to her placenta, and the added misfortune (in this instance) of being British. In Britain, there is an even greater effort to limit the use of Caesarean sections than exists here in America. When the mother's placenta abruptly detached from her uterus, a rushed Caesarean was indeed performed, but it was too late. Her otherwise healthy son lived 17 minutes.

I just had my second planned Caesarean section. Anyone want to fight with me?

Yes, yes, I know natural birth was born of the women's movement. I know about those midwives down on the Farm in Tennessee who rhapsodized about "the surges" (that's contractions, to you and me) in their classic book, "Spiritual Midwifery," and reminded us that labor is an expression of female power, an umbilical connecting us directly to the goddess, the earth, our higher power as we understand her. We're supposed to eschew pain relief in order to experience fully our transformation into mothers and the rush of new life.

I understand all that. I even respect it. But I maintain that, in the end, the natural birth movement has done a great disservice to women. That its insistence that a mother can and should control her labor -- equipped with "birth plans" and proscriptions about fetal monitors and episiotomies -- is both illusory and damaging to women. Because when you get right down to it, labor can be neither planned nor controlled; its a kinetic, quicksilver process that may slip instantly through the fingers of the best doctor or midwife, who must then be ready to react with any and every available response -- including C-section -- to avoid a tragic outcome for mother, child or both.

It's the preachiness of the natural birth phenomenon that I can least abide, the sympathy and tut-tutting of other women when they discover you've had a Caesarean (the sympathy is if you had to have one; the tut-tutting if you chose to). And, worst of all, the utterly unnecessary self-castigation of mothers themselves, wrought by this absurd requirement that we have a "good" and "successful" birth experience.

I remember the first of these mothers I encountered, seven years ago in a prenatal exercise class. She had a young child already and tearfully confided to the rest of us, first-timers all, that she had originally planned to wait another year or two before having a second baby, but the failure of her first birth experience (she'd been "forced" to have a Caesarean by the fetal distress of her baby during labor) had proved so overwhelmingly and lastingly upsetting to her that she felt compelled to try again, as soon as possible, to "get it right."

This smack of failure, this sense of falling short despite the best intentions to be "natural," is something I've heard again and again from otherwise sensible women. And seldom, if ever, do they pause to consider what the consequences of that catalytic fetal distress or erratic heartbeat might have been, had some authoritative and scalpel-happy doctor not burst their bubble by commanding a Caesarean. It seems to me that the fear of doing it wrong has replaced our fear of dying in childbirth (which is now, thankfully, very rare) and surpassed our fear of losing our baby in childbirth (which is also, thankfully, very rare). But try thinking of each and every one of those disappointing emergency Caesareans as a baby who didn't die, or wasn't devastated by oxygen deprivation on the way to being born. Get the picture?

Next Page: A C-section buys you four days of hospital time

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