Your Birth, Your Choice

The birth of a child is a dramatic, life-changing event. I'm not just talking about the impact a new baby has on your life, but how the birth itself affects you. I think often a new mother's feelings about the birth itself are overlooked or minimized. A woman may be reluctant to admit that she was in any way emotionally harmed by the method in which her child came into the world or by the circumstances surrounding the birth. It's as if  coming out and saying that she is dissatisfied, angry, depressed, regretful, or unhappy about any aspect of her baby's birth is tantamount to saying she is not happy to be a mother, or not happy to have a new baby.

This isn't fair, and it isn't true. It does women a great disservice to tell them that their feelings don't matter. If such feelings must be buried, ignored, or hidden then they can't be dealt with. Not only that, but these feelings must be aired so that they can be separated from the feelings about the child. You can absolutely unconditionally love your child but not love the way he was born. You can be over-the-moon happy about motherhood but still be angry about not having the birth you expected or wanted.

Pregnancy and birth change a woman. There are, of course, the obvious physical changes. There are the crazy hormones. And there are actual changes in the brain that prepare a woman to care for, love, nurture, and protect her offspring. Pregnancy and birth change your body and your soul. Those changes may carry emotional consequences, some positive, but some also negative. It's no secret that some women are very uncomfortable in their postpartum bodies, that we spend years after giving birth hoping to return to our "prepregnancy size." For many of us, that simply never happens. Our post-pregnancy bodies have stretched and expanded in ways that cannot be undone through any amount of diet and exercise. This is especially true if there was any surgical involvement in the birth!

While postpartum diets, our "prepregnancy" wardrobe, our flabby tummies and floppy breasts, our widened hips and bigger feet are common topics of discussion among new mothers, the emotions we have attached to giving birth are less often brought to light. The result of this lack is that we are hesitant to bring up issues like "birth options," "alternatives," "unnecessary interventions," and so forth, especially after the fact. We feel we are stuck with what we get, unable to discuss our reactions to the unexpected c-section or the emergency induction we didn't want, because, "at least you have a healthy baby!"

Not everyone is affected by birth in the same way, of course. For some women, birth is a major spiritual event, connecting her back through the generations to all the women who came before, empowering her, grounded in thousands (millions?) of years of evolution and nature, filling her with all the magic of womanhood. For others, birth is simply the vehicle by which the baby goes from inside to outside, without any particular emphasis on spirituality or life-giving. Some don't know how they will feel until they've done it. Others have built up a great deal of expectation about what giving birth will be like.

All of these women have a right to be heard, and all of these women have valid feelings. There is no "right" way to feel about birth.

I have a friend who has two kids. Her older child was born via emergency c-section after a long, hard labor. When she was ready to give birth to her second, she decided on a scheduled repeat c-section. Describing this, she says there's no better way to give birth. You show up, get on the table, and an hour later, you have a baby! No labor, no pushing, no work. She usually punctuates her description by rubbing her hands together like brushing off dirt, as if to say, "All done! Quick and clean."

On the other hand, I have a friend who has one child, born via emergency c-section after a long, hard labor. I still haven't heard her entire birth story, because the experience caused her so much emotional trauma that she has trouble talking about it. She is healing, and she is more open about both what happened the first time and what she'd like the next time around than she was even a few months ago. She most definitely does not want a scheduled repeat c-section!

Then there's me. I had no idea that five years later, I would still be so affected by my first son's birth that I would be writing a blog about it! I, too, had a c-section (although not classified as "emergency") after a long, hard labor. For many months, I assumed future children would be born by c-section as well, not because I wanted it to be that way but because I thought I had no choice. I thought my uterus had been permanently damaged and that labor would put undue stress on my imperfect organ and cause me and my baby harm. It was only when I began to learn about VBAC, and that I might actually be a viable candidate for a vaginal birth in the future, that I began to process my feelings about the c-section and understand why I so badly wanted a vaginal birth.

At first, it was simply that my recovery from the c-section was very hard, and I saw friends who had had vaginal births having much easier and faster recoveries. That seemed to be the way to go. (That's what convinced my husband!) Then I started to learn about the risks of c-section and the benefits to both mother and baby of a vaginal birth. My attitude was still very clinical, but I was starting to acknowledge that there was an emotional aspect to my desire as well. But it wasn't until my second son was born vaginally that I fully recognized the power of getting the birth you want. As that baby slid easily out of my birth canal and was put on my chest, an incredible flood of joy and relief surged through me. This was my birth. I had done it. I was in control.

In a c-section, you have to give up control of the process and place your and your baby's bodies in the hands of others. In a natural birth, you are in control. You do the work. For me, that was very important, because I was able to put my trust in my own body instead of others' hands. I was able to get over the idea that my body was somehow imperfect. I could deliver a healthy baby on my own. I didn't need surgery to get him out. I am a mother. I am meant to be one. The revelation of motherhood didn't come with the first birth. It came with the second. (That's not to say I wasn't a mother to my first child before his brother was born, or that I don't love him and nurture him and care for him and protect him! It's just that I didn't feel like a mother, truly like a mother, until my second was born.)

When the time came to have my third baby, I knew without a doubt that I wanted a VBAC, and I was fairly certain I wanted to have the baby without any interventions, if I could. That is, I wanted no Pitocin and no epidural. I wanted to be in total control. I wanted to be able to ask for what I needed and refuse what I didn't need. And it turned out that the circumstances of his birth allowed me to have total control. I had no complications, and he was a full-term, healthy baby. I went into labor spontaneously and was able to fully dilate and push the baby out with no medication, although an episiotomy was helpful at the end. (This is in contrast to my second son's birth, for which I required an induction two weeks early due to pregnancy-induced hypertension. The intensity of the contractions caused by the Pitocin made it impossible for me not to have an epidural, although I was able to have the baby vaginally.)

Interestingly, despite having all of the power in this third birth, I didn't feel as powerful a sense of accomplishment as I had when my second was born. Partly, I felt I wasn't as strong as I could have been, because though I did end up having him without an epidural or other pain relief, I had broken down and asked for it repeatedly. My husband tells me over and over again that I'm being silly, that I was amazing and strong, but I think maybe I expected to feel more empowered, and instead I felt weaker than I wanted to be. I'm not at all disappointed. In fact, I'm thrilled to have been able to give birth in this manner, and my baby is as much a joy as anyone would expect. But, I think it's important to speak of feelings like these, just as it's necessary to express the anger, frustration, disappointment, or trauma of a birth that didn't go as hoped.

I bring up my third birth experience in order to make my final point. Going into this third pregnancy, labor, and delivery, I felt that I finally was fully informed. I knew what my choices were. I knew the possible consequences of any given option. I knew that sometimes an induction or c-section is unavoidable or absolutely necessary. And I felt that I would be able to make peace with however this birth happened, whether I got the natural birth I was planning or if I (G-d forbid) ended up needing an emergency c-section for whatever reason. I knew how to avoid unnecessary interventions that might lead to what would otherwise have been an unnecessary c-section. I knew what I didn't want (which I think was more important than knowing what I wanted). I'm sure that if the birth hadn't gone as "planned" (although I use that term loosely), I would have had some emotional consequences, especially if it ended up being traumatic as well as undesirable. But at least I would have known that I'd made all the "right" choices, that I'd known going in what my choices were and how various scenarios might pan out.

Thus, in conjunction with giving women the space to discuss birth trauma, to express any "negative" feelings that might be associated with their given birth scenarios, it is also important to discuss birth options. It is important to go into birth knowing what possible outcomes there are, depending on what choices are made. It is vital to understand when something is necessary and when it isn't. That's not to discount those times when we simply don't know what the right thing to do is, and we simply have to make a choice based on incomplete information, of course. But going in knowing that A may cause B, or that C is a direct result of A can help guide our decisions throughout the birthing process, and going in armed with information can at least alleviate the pain of thinking you've done something wrong if events don't play out as expected.

Five years after my own traumatic birth experience, I looked into the bathroom mirror and examined my recent postpartum belly. Under the little "shelf" of belly fat left over from being sewn up from the c-section is my external scar. I noticed, that day, that the scar was quite faded. It was no longer an angry red or purple. It no longer stands out brightly against my pale skin. It's there, but it's become a part of the landscape of my body. It no longer angers me. And I realized that along with the fading of the external scar came the fading of the internal ones, the emotional scars that I'd been left with because I thought I had made a series of bad choices that had led me to end up in a place I didn't want to be. Over the years, I have played out those couple of days of labor and delivery, trying to figure out "what went wrong." I shouldn't have gone to the hospital so soon. I should have walked around more. I shouldn't have gotten the epidural so early. I shouldn't have let them give me Pitocin. I should have been mobile so I could have pushed in a different position. It's easy to go over and over all the "bad" choices I made. For a while, I thought I might write out the "timeline" of the birth and go through and pinpoint each moment where I was led farther down the path to a c-section. But now, as I learn even more about the birth process, I have come to feel that a c-section may ultimately have been necessary no matter what choices I made to begin with. You see, the anger and guilt I felt didn't come from the fact that I had a c-section. It came from the impression that it was my fault I'd had a c-section. That I'd made the wrong choice when presented with an option. I no longer feel that way. I know I didn't have all the information going in. I now know that I couldn't have made good decisions based on what I knew at the time. And beyond that, now that I understand better how a normal birth should progress, I can see that it's entirely possible that my son was simply stuck, that there was no way he would ever have come through the birth canal no matter what I did, or that if I had tried to get him out that way, he or I might have been injured in the process. If that is the case, which I am more and more willing to believe, then thank G-d for the c-section, because I got a healthy baby and a healthy mom out of that decision.

My friend who had the scheduled c-section was describing the difference between the major surgery of a c-section and the major surgery of having her thyroid out. You see, "You get the door prize!" after the c-section. You get to take home your baby. Having your thyroid out isn't nearly as rewarding.

In the end, then, only you know how you feel about birth in general, about your birth experience(s), and about what you want to get out of having a baby. It's not anyone else's job to tell you how you "should" feel, or what choices you "should" make. I do believe, very strongly, that you need to know your options, you need to know the possible outcomes, you need to understand the process before you can make an informed choice. Because when you've made an informed choice, at least you aren't left with the "what ifs." I think it's the "what ifs" that are the most difficult to heal from.