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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
I believe women should always be given a choice in how they give birth, just as women should always be given a choice of whether to end a pregnancy.
But here's what an elective C-section circumvents: one of the few chances a woman has in her life to experience a deep and profound wildness. I had an extremely complicated twin delivery with one of my children a full breech while the other had a complication with a high mortality rate. I deliberately changed doctors in my 20th week of pregnancy, sought out a teaching hospital with a world-class perinatal practice, and gave birth vaginally.
Had these doctors told me a C-section was necessary (and in 99 percent of all other hospitals without these doctors' skills, a C-section would have been a preemptive move), I would have done it without hesitation. I labored for 24 hours. It hurt, it wasn't fun, and I would do the same thing again. I'm not a hero, but I did choose to fall deep into the experience of childbirth and see what turned up. For me, experiencing my body as not being under my control was a revelation, and oddly, a relief. My body knew what to do, and how and when to do it. Some deeper intelligence was at work, and I am very grateful to have had the chance to experience it.
-- Dayna Macy
I blame Hollywood for images of pregnant women "moaning, panting, sweating and screaming while people poke and prod" at them, and I blame the medical community even more for not easing women's fear. It's self-serving for doctors to, if anything, encourage women's fear of childbirth: If women saw it as a natural physical process, shaped by millions of years of evolution and undergone without incident by who knows how many women every day, they might just question whether they really need quite so much medical intervention or whether they should be paying quite so much money to be treated oftentimes worse than a farm animal. Shame on women for failing to do their homework and electing to have C-sections in the bizarre belief that major abdominal surgery is going to be a snap. The saddest thing of all is that these women call themselves feminists. As Ms. Feeney herself says, "It just seems so unnecessary to me."
-- Leslie Claire
When I was pregnant with my first child seven years ago, I read extensively on the subject of natural vs. C-section deliveries. The issue was important to me, because I am under 5 feet tall, and my husband was over 10 pounds when he was born, so I knew I had a statistically higher chance of needing a C-section. I broached the subject many times with my OB/GYN, but her response was always the same: "It's better for the baby to be born naturally."
This same doctor induced my labor, and 17 hours later, my daughter was born by emergency C-section, clinging to life because of a deadly blood infection she contracted during my prolonged labor. The hypocrisy of inducing a labor that was supposed to be better for my baby but actually endangered her life was infuriating. Fortunately, my daughter made a complete recovery, but it makes one wonder exactly what "first do no harm" actually means.
-- Stephanie Littleton
I had my first child "naturally" -- no meds, nothing -- and my second with a C-section, as she was a breech birth. They were both big babies, at around 9 pounds each. With the first birth, I got to feel everything -- the pain, the joy, the adrenaline rush. With the second, I got the pain, the gas, the constipation. Why anyone would willingly choose major surgery is a mystery to me.
Thinking that you can be in control of every second of your life is an illusion. My son had his own timetable, and I found out the moment labor started that he was an individual, not just an extension of my body. My second child, with her refusal to turn around in my uterus, was and is just determined.
I would have been overjoyed to deliver her the same way her brother was -- recovering from abdominal surgery was horrible. I felt more like a patient and less like a new mother. If I'd had a C-section the first time around, I would never have known how great my body's natural responses were.
-- Kate Coe
