Home birth after cesarean: one woman's story
At the time I chose to give birth at home after a medically necessary cesarean with my first child, I attended a small reform church in New Jersey. My pastor, a woman with a big heart who used to be a nurse, counseled against it: “Once a cesarean, always a cesarean.” My obgyn, another wonderful woman, who unable to outright endorse it based on her training, was nevertheless intrigued and excited for me. She was one of those doctors who ran super late but chose to do it consciously, because she wanted to take time to talk with her patients, to really know them. I found a great two midwife practice that operated out of Philadelphia, one younger woman and one older woman, both of whom I trusted in implicitly.
They were fabulous, professional, balanced and badass in their willingness to face the courts if necessary to preserve a woman’s right to birth how and where she chooses, with the support she chooses. One of them later did end up in a long court battle. When my son was born, there was a part at the end of the birth that was tricky because his elbow was at an odd angle. I doubt a family practice physician or an OB would have had the skill of my midwife to safely address that situation. My husband, a physician, agrees.
It is very sketchy to me when the political left passionately supports a woman’s right to end a pregnancy, virtually unconditionally, yet places many conditions on a woman’s right to choose when, how, where and with whom she births. Eugenics was the origin of planned parenthood. Wise women, midwives have been the source of both the wisdom to naturally control one’s fertility and reproductive choices, as well as birthing skillfully in the care of other women. Although much can be said for the lifesaving gifts of surgeries - my younger midwife later had a necessary cesarean when her own baby’s cord was too short - decisions about birth belong in one place: with the woman doing the birthing and the people she chooses to support her. Anything less than this is not women’s lib. Likewise, all choices related to a woman’s body and her innate wisdom to know what is right for her belong to her and her baby, including choices about vaccines. To be pro-woman is honor a woman’s spiritual wholeness, her whole humanity, her whole body - not just her ovaries, her uterus - but her full sacred embodied wholeness as a sovereign, sentient being. The same is true for men and non-binary people who also have a feminine aspect that needs to be honored. The best men, including the best hetero straight men, are in touch with this feminine aspects that has the capacity to be tender, yet also brave.
I can tell you it took courage to birth at home, in the face of zero support outside of my husband. A lot of things in my life that were difficult at that time: strained relationships with my parents, with whom I now have no contact; the recent loss of most of my friends from college and church, owing to my decision to follow my heart and soul rather than churchy does and don’ts - namely I didn’t relegate myself to single hood forever after I left a toxic, terrifying, psychologically damaging, life-threatening first marriage. My current husband was in medical school and we were spiritually but not legally married when I gave birth too kids 2 and 3 at home. He did his absolute best, he didn’t really know how to be there for me emotionally at the time. He does now. What he did know was that he trusted women’s knowing of themselves more than men’s, including allopathic medicine based on a patriarchal model. He has always been the kind of person who, once he sees the light of day, is all in. And when I explained my rational for choosing an HBAC, he was entirely supportive and attended as many of my midwifery appointments as possible, seeking to absorb all he could from a kind of education he wasn’t getting in his mainstream medical schooling.
At the time I chose to give birth at home after a medically necessary cesarean with my first child, due to polyhydramnios - too much fluid in the uterus, causing it to be unsafe to attempt to assist my breech baby in pointing her spaceship down for a headfirst earth entry - I attended a small reform church in New Jersey. My pastor, a woman with a big heart who used to be a nurse, counseled against it: “Once a cesarean, always a cesarean.” My obgyn, another wonderful woman, who later adopted three children from Russian who were addicted to coffee, was actually more supportive than the former nurse who became a pastor.
I chose to birth at home after careful research as well as listening to my own inner knowing, which was loud at the time. I wouldn’t have called it intuition, it was just a blaring clarity that I would fail in the pressurized hospital environment hooked up to God-knows how many technical devices to monitor me, with a timer running to see if I birthed before it made them too litigation-wary to let me continue. I had read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth and it left me with a full on knowing that I would not be able let my body do what it needed to do in a hospital environment. I’ve never done anything in my life according to a standard set by someone else. I wasn’t likely to start with my vbac.
Based on my understanding of the literature I was able to find at the time, it seemed clear that, looking at both maternal and fetal/infant risk factors:
A successful VBAC was less risky than a planned C-Section
A pre-planned C-section was safer than a failed VBAC - or in other words, an attempted vaginal birth after ceserean that ended up in an emergency surgical birth aka a C-section
I would almost for sure based on self-knowing fail at a VBAC in the hospital, so if I wanted to do one that had a likelihood of success, it would need to be at home since there wasn’t a local birthing center that was available to support VBAC women in their birthing process.
My home births weren’t blissful. I was terrified the first time around, and stressed the second; yet I had two successful home births after that initial cesarean. I was in labor unofficially for about a week with my son. I got my wonderful OB to strip my membranes against the advice of my midwives (I also listen to my intuition over and above alternative voices when its clear) and was able to have him at home, in our bedroom with the purple walls. The first time around, I didn’t have a doula, so I thought I’d try having one the second time around. I fired my doula part way through labor of my second home birth. The one I found who was available was away on vacation during the time we would have gotten to know each other, and when she showed up for the birth, we weren’t jiving. When she choose to consult with my midwife instead of me about whether to stay or leave and be on call to come back later, I asked her not to come back. In my deepest center of conviction, she should have asked me instead of my midwife. With my second birth, I squatted, did stairs, went for walks, and although my midwife didn’t believe me on the phone when I told her to come, simply because I have enough self-discipline to talk calmly through a lot of pain, and thus arrived barely in time to set everything up, I gave birth, once again in the purple bedroom. In all the cases, whether my C-section or my home births, I am very grateful to have been able to breastfeed without any complications other than sore nipples. Yet in this experience, even the wisest women were influenced enough by patriarchy to put professional courtesy before listening to the woman-mother.
This happens a lot where women are often unconsciously influenced by the very patriarchy they work hard to work around, beyond or to dissolve. It even happened to me - for I was so wounded by the mother wounds I carried, that I rejected many of the sacred aspects pregnancy and birth, although I did trust my self-knowing in certain ways. In order to reclaim the feminine, we have to understand how it has been used to hurt us. In order to reclaim the masculine, we have to understand how it can be sacred and in honor of the feminine, within us all.
Reliving my birth memories invited me to do a stream of compassionate light-love back to that woman - the one birthing at each of my births - the one bravely riding the elevator toward her c-section…the one who couldn’t feel herself breathe as she was cut open…who preferred to look at her surgeon than her husband…the one whose baby was taken away, screaming ,still covered in lanugo, to the man of whom she was terrified…the one who chose to birth at home…while dealing with so much emotional stuff and feeling so very alone and afraid…the one who birthed a second time at home, taken on the challenge like a badass, but so much so, she scared herself yet again, with how strong the contractions were…dealing this time with feeling all the feelings of having her midwives listen to each other instead of to her, the woman birthing, when she knew herself. She knew herself, what she needed. Why did even the midwives bypass my own knowing of myself to listen and assume their own interpretations were correct? Even wise women don’t know automatically know better than others, just because of their training, experience and accumulated sense of things. The best experts really take the time to listen before deciding if their expertise or the direct knowing or amateur insight of another is what is most relevant, resonant, necessary, indicated and truthful to the situation at hand.