What are your rights?

So, let's say you are pregs.  You're going to have a baby.  YOU are going to have a baby.  A baby who will become YOUR child that YOU are going to take care of, feed, clothe, respect, love, cherish, coo over, mistily gaze upon from time to time in story circle at the library because, "omigosh, I can't believe that is my precious peanut clapping and laughing with the other kids.  Mine. Thankyousomuchforgivingmethisgift!" - uh, I digress...  Where was I?  Okay, yeah, you're going to get to the point where said babums is going to exit the womb.  Now.  Is the HOW your child exits your choice?  Or not.  Well, I recently stumbled upon, then tweeted the shit out of, this nugget o' outrage, regarding a woman who gave birth to her daughter at home (homebirth!! OMG!), then had her removed from her custody and placed into foster care (and eventually her mother's care) because she refused to have the recommended c-section due to her daughter's breech presentation.  (just like me!!! except I rolled over and signed the consent forms in my "I can't believe this is what is happening ativan-infused haze").  So, this family has their daughter taken away from them when they took her into the emergency room a few hours after birth because she seemed particularly fussy.  Apparently during the birth, her shoulder's became stuck for a bit causing a mild shoulder distocia and some nerve damage that now seems to have completely healed according to medical tests.  So.  Okay, I'm not going to go into specifics about breech birth, is it safe to do at home, or vaginally, or not, whatever.  I know of some people who have successfully and without issue homebirthed, and hospital birthed breech babies, as well as several who have, like me!, had a scheduled cesarean for breech.  I also have a friend of a family member who recently lost her baby trying to deliver breech at home.  But I also know of some people who have lost a baby trying to deliver normally, in the hospital, with no idea why things went wrong.  Everyone has a story and everyone knows someone (or knows someone who knows someone) to whom the worst imaginable happened.  It happens.  Is that fair?  No.  But is that life?  Yes.  Would I be so blase if it happened to me, or a family member or friend?  No.  But trust me, I'm not blase about it at all.  Being all up on this mother thing, I'm confronted with stories of pregnancy, birth and child loss on a daily basis, and trust me, I cry.  I feel it and when I was pregnant, I worried, 'would that be me, too?'...  And, like every other mother out there, I worry still... "will I lose them someday in some freak accident?  A terrible disease?  How can I make sure 100% that they will grow up, live a long life, grow old, be healthy and happy and love and laugh for years and years and years and years long after I'm gone?!" I cannot.  Nothing is 100%  No birth is 100% "safe".
What am I getting at here?  Where am I going with this?  Ah, in a nutshell, I think how you give birth should be YOUR choice.  And, if you dig even slightly, by dig, I mean, "google", you can find lots of cases where parents have had their child taken from them for refusing a c-section, only to give birth just fine to a healthy baby.  What is that?  A pissed off power play?  Taking away your choices makes a pregnant woman not much more than cattle.  What if her daughter had not been breech and she was born at home and suffered a cord accident; would that be her fault as well?  What if no one knew the baby was breech?  What if ultrasounds become mandatory?  What if you choose to give birth to a baby you know has profound physical defects and you refuse to submit the child to "possible life saving surgeries" that carry more risks than benefits?  Once you get on this slippery slope of chipping away at how and where a woman can birth, you are really opening the door to a maelstrom of problems. It seems like as women are slowly having their eyes opened to the benefits of a more natural and gentle birth experience, the medical establishment is fighting hard to counter women and beat them down to submit to their mystical and all-knowing ways.  Why this struggle?  How did we get here to where we are so easily coerced into huge decisions by virtual strangers like baa baa sheep?  And of course, this doesn't just apply to childbirth, but to many facets of our lives.  I mean, women have been able to vote for less than 100 years in this country.  Um, excuse me?  We still make less money for equal work than men.  We MAKE PEOPLE and yet, we are still considered ill equipped to decide whether or not we want to trust our bodies to bring them forth without a myriad of interventions.

Sure now, I realize there are lots and lots and lots of lifesaving technologies that have saved hundreds of thousands of women and children over the years.  It is to the incredible skill of some physicians that a sweet girl I know is alive today, with her triplets, because complete previa and placenta acreta rendered it completely impossible for her to deliver naturally.  I'm not raising the flag of "burn down the hospitals!  birth all babies at home!" (Um remember, I've got not one but TWO scheduled c-sections under my belt - literally, bwahhahahah) I am suggesting that we women aren't stupid.  Proper prenatal care should be a cooperative effort and the birth decision should ultimately be the mother's if she is of sound mind.  Vaginal breech birth is not some crazy myth that never happens.  It's just a crazy myth here.  In the USA.  And if you happen to deliver a healthy baby (breech or not!) at home with no problems, then you (are crazy! lolololol) and just got lucky.  OMG, you are SO lucky.  Like, you totally dodged the inevitable death bullet that was heading your way when you took that on!  Whew!  Are you like, totally relieved and thinking, "I'd never do THAT again!"?

But, if something DID go wrong, it's all your fault, and you should have your baby taken from you because you clearly don't love them enough to birth "the right way".  If you were in the hospital, and something did go wrong (because OH YES IT HAPPENS PEEPS) you would hear nothing but, "Oh my, I'm so sorry, there was nothing that anyone could have done, obviously".  "Tragic, so tragic".  "I'm sure that they did everything they could".  Or, "you'd better SUE THE SHIT OUT OF THEM!"

To summarize with bullet points.
- how a woman births should be decided by she and (if applicable) her partner with guidance by whomever she chooses as a health care provider (midwife, OB, Shamen - kidding)
-Unless pregnant woman is completely mentally unsound to make a decision where it is obvious that the baby is in danger (or mom is in danger) due to complications that are known, then she should be left to decide how to birth her child.
-OB's need to treat their patients like their clients.
-Sad things happen during birth sometime.  Even today in the era of the c-section and ultrasound and all the other medical marvels we have.  Nothing is 100%.
-The more we hear about women having their children taken away because they refused some kind of medical intervention or another, the more dissonance we are going to have between the medical community and patients who ask questions.  This will inevitably lead to laws being passed that completely strip away a woman's rights when it comes to what happens to her body.
-when did we stop trusting ourselves?

Don't Miss next week!  Going to Jail for Miscarrying!  and Birth Rape!

Birthing

image by Birgit Amadori cesarean-art.com

So many women in my life are either expecting, have just had, are planning, or have sadly lost a baby recently. As someone who is open to the possibility of trying for a third child, and therefore frequently thinking about pregnancy, babies and adding to our family, the issue of birth often comes into my head. Mind you, my own sweet baby is only ten months, but I can easily remember the feelings of finding out I was pregnant for the first time... And I vividly remember the births of both of my children.

I am going to be selfish in this post and just put it out there my feelings about how my children were brought into this world. Both my healthy, beautiful, much loved and adored children were born via cesarean.

First, let me just get this out of the way. My children are separate from their birth. They are not their birth. I do not associate my children with a negative birth experience and yes, I am extremely thankful each and every day that they are alive and healthy. Would I go through c-sections again and again to have them here, yes. Do I think there is no place in this world for cesareans? Of COURSE NOT. I know that many many babies and mothers have been saved by this technology, and by other obstetric advances. But I am not here to argue that at all. I believe modern obstetrics has its place, but I truly believe that for most women, birth does not need to be a medical 'condition', and with proper prenatal care, support and confidence most women can have healthy normal vaginal births, with a low trauma factor, either physical or emotional.

So, with that said... I believe the way a woman births her children is a very personal experience. Some women love a natural birth in the water with low lights and candles, others love the hospital with the nurses and the sterility and the false sense of security that "if something goes wrong..." and other's want to do it by themselves with just their partner! (unassisted childbirth, anyone?). Really, whatever floats your boat is fine by me.

From the moment I found out I was pregnant with my son, I expected, I KNEW I'd have a natural delivery. The idea that I'd join the instinctive tribe of women who have KNOWN what it is to fully realize their bodies' ability and potential to bring forth life was exciting to me like nothing else I've ever thought about. Birth was for me. Not because I was a fist to the sky crunchy mother-goddess, not because I'm obstinate, but because, to me, it was the ultimate right of passage. The full realization of womanhood.

But of course, not everything in life is as we expect it to be. Due to my son's breech presentation, discovered at about 32 weeks, I felt that possibility of a natural delivery slipping away from me. The fear that I was going to be cut open to have my baby was becoming very real. Of course I did all the tricks. The hours of pelvic tilts, the birth ball, I never once leaned back in a chair, I walked, and crawled and did hours of expensive chiropractic techniques that did NOTHING (well, it did make my back feel good...) and moxibustion and body work. He was just breech. Staying that way. And so, at 39 weeks, he was born, with a huge incision and a non-sympathetic OB and pretty much a non-sympathetic everyone else, because hey, birth is birth and I should get over it. Was I worried about it hurting? No. I expected birth to hurt, any which way you have it. What was I upset about? I suppose, for me, it was the complete lack of participation in bringing my child into the world. I went from his birth ultimately being this thing that "I" did, to me not doing anything at all. It was humiliating. It hurt. I felt helpless while I felt nothing but tugs and pulls and pressure and my arms were strapped down and people happily chatted around me while I put on the brave face and pretended that it was just all about the baby and that I didn't care what was happening. I know some women liken their cesareans to rape and violation. I don't feel that at all. If anything, I got lucky and had a "great" cesarean experience, both times. Uncomplicated, relatively quick and non-emergent. No one made me feel like I was endangering my baby by trying to continue with labor (which I've never had a moment of) and that was that.

With my second child. A failed attempt at trying to VBAC. I opted again for a cesarean (my choice! Ha ha!) at 41 weeks because the next step was "fetal monitoring" and "risk of stillbirth is increasing" and, oh, "we're moving in two weeks, and likely you'll fail trying to deliver normally anyway and still end up with a section, so you'll need the extra few days to recover". I'm SO angry about this one. My daughter's birth was supposed to have been so very different. But it wasn't, except that I knew what was coming this time. And I laid down again, spinal numbing me, and once again blocked out all the happy chatter of the doctors and nurses and the tugging and pulling and just focused on one thing, hearing her first little cry as she was pulled out. Because my arms were strapped down and all I could do was turn my head, someone laid her next to me after she was cleaned up (because she was covered in my blood) and I could kiss her cheeks and soothe her with my voice because she was screaming. I remember apologizing to her silently that I failed again, to do what I had hoped I'd be able to do.

And that's it. Afterwards I recovered like all good c-section mommy's; taking my percocet and motrin and slowly getting back to normal. Except for the scar, adhesion pain and the numbness that I HOPE goes away someday just below my navel, I seem to be back on track physically.

Likely, if I'm fortunate enough to have another baby, I'll be heading down c-section road once again, for what OB is going to allow me to risk that 1.1% chance of uterine rupture with a VBA2C.

Believe me when I say I wish more than anything that this did not bother me. I wish I could just brush it off. I wish I was like those momma's who happily signed up for their second, third, fourth! cesarean and didn't feel like they really lost out on something big. B.I.G. big. But that's just me. It's hard to let it go and I hate that I still get a pang in my heart when someone writes about their amazing VBAC, their perfect homebirth, their waterbirth, the amazing sense of power they felt, the joy, the emotions, the strength, the "I never knew what I was capable of doing until...", and on. Usually the utter defeat I felt surrounding my own birth experiences comes back to me to be felt anew.

I'm not sure why bitching about your cesarean become such a taboo subject these days. Women complain about labor and how much it hurts and their tears and their contractions and crappy epidurals until the cows come home, but if you have a section, it's not really worth mentioning. OR, some think you "got off easily". This, usually coming from someone who either a) has not given birth, or b) has not had a c-section and has no comparison. Of course, I have not had a natural delivery, but from the women I know who have..., I don't know any who wished they'd had a cesarean. Is having a cesarean the worst thing that could ever happen, of course not. I'm not that ignorant to the vast injustices that are occurring in this world and to the tragedies that befall good people regularly. But do I believe there is great benefit in delivering one's baby in a healthy, supportive and natural manner? Yes. Do I think the way we treat pregnancy and birth and subsequent infant care is a telling indication of the priorities of a society. Yes. Is there a place for modern medicine and interventions in childbirth? I certainly believe so. But a 31% c-section rate? Unnecessary.

I know that all I'm ever supposed to be thankful for is for a healthy baby. The why's and how's are no longer important. I got it. GOT. IT. Thank you very much. I love being a mom. More than anything. I appreciate and love and am amazed by my children every day and thank God or whoever that we were able to make them. I am SO lucky, so freaking unbelievably lucky I haven't experienced a miscarriage and that it was not a long and heartbreaking road to even get pregnant. I am SO fortunate. TRUST ME, I GET THAT. This does not negate the fact that I still value the birth experience for women and that something that is so intrinsically natural and beautiful was, for me, major surgery. It's hard to be thankful for that experience. Thankful for my beautiful babies, yes. Thankful for abdominal surgery, not so much. Being a mother in and of itself is the most amazing gift, but mothering is separate from birth and I think a lot of that gets forgotten when talking about birth. Birth is, to me, yours and yours alone. When that baby is coming and labor is moving him/her down, that is all you, girl. That is not motherhood, that is womanhood. The second that baby is out, then you're a mother. And that's another topic altogether.