Every Woman Who Gives Birth Surgically Hasn’t Been ‘Tricked’ Out Of A Natural Birth

Having given birth surgically twice, my feelings about “natural” childbirth have changed immensely. And not because I “failed” at what people call natural birth, either. When you actively seek a natural birth, you actively seek out people who are proponents of it. Sometimes those people are so narrow minded it can be mind-blowing in retrospect.I fully support the idea that many women can birth without the help of interventions or drugs. The thought of having a child this way has always appealed to me. Those images of women seeing their children for the first time and bursting into tears of joy are deeply ingrained in my psyche. Having struggled with infertility before my first child was born, and having five years to dream about what it would finally be like to give birth put an immense load of pressure on the experience.I, like many women who research birth, saw The Business of Being Born. The statistics presented in the documentary are real – and they are disturbing. The thought that many doctors had never witnessed a totally unmedicated, unassisted birth boggled my mind. Image after image of women in hospital crying and being wheeled into an operating room really scarred me. I began to believe the notion that most OBs were against natural births and were really just surgeons laying in wait to cut pregnant women open.My first child was born via emergency c-section, so my dreams of an unmedicated birth flew out the window. I was there. I heard his heartbeat almost come to a complete stop. I saw the hospital staff rushing around me and running me into the O.R. I knew that a c-section was necessary. But when I actively sought out a midwife to assist me in getting a VBAC for my second pregnancy – this was the first conversation that we had:
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