Bad Parent: In Praise of the C-Section
I’m not sorry I didn’t have a natural birth.
by Tova Mirvis
March 31, 2009
When I was pregnant with my third child, I accidentally wandered into a conversation in which two mothers I'd recently met were extolling the virtues of homebirths and water births, midwives and doulas. When the well-meaning moms asked about my birth plan, I told them I was having a scheduled C-section. Their faces conveyed self-righteous disapproval and my mind was immediately awhirl in disclaimers: I was having the scheduled C not because I wanted the convenience, not because I was afraid of labor, not because I didn't want to miss my manicure appointment.
"My oldest son would have died if I didn't have a C-section!" I said instead.
It was unfair to pull the "my kid almost died" trump card, and if I hadn't skulked off in annoyance and then embarrassment at having reacted so defensively, I could have told them about my first pregnancy and the months of bleeding, followed by the morning at thirty-two weeks in which there was no kicking; then the hours on the monitors where the heart rate was at first fine, then shockingly not fine, which provoked the careening stretcher; the epidural which didn't have time to take effect, so instead the general anesthesia and the intubation. It was birth as highly medicalized and impersonal as critics of the C-section claim, one in which I had no voice and no control.
I also could have admitted that I've occasionally felt a twinge of loss that I'll never give birth more naturally. Having never experienced labor, I sometimes feel like a little girl eavesdropping on the grown-ups' tales of childbirth.
The doctor held his fingers imperceptibly apart and told us we'd come "this close."
I pore over pictures my husband took during one of my C-sections, to convince myself that this was my body, my baby. When I watched a friend's video of her home birth — in water, no less — I felt as I do when watching Olympic figure skaters: as much as I would love to do that, it's never going to happen.
But that loss is nowhere near what I would have felt had all those highly-interventionist, medical-establishment doctors not been exactly where I needed them. After a month in the NICU, when we were finally ready to take our son home, the resident who'd been on call the night of my C-section told us how blue our baby was. He held his fingers imperceptibly apart and told us we'd come "this close."
Those words followed me for the four years in which I worked up the courage to get pregnant again. I went back to the same OB, who warned me I would be closely monitored. But this pregnancy was so uneventful that by my third trimester, my doctor raised the possibility of a VBAC. I was aware of the spate of newspaper articles decrying the increased rate of C-sections and moved by a relative's joy at having a VBAC. Mostly I was tempted by the opportunity to prove to myself that I could do it. My mother used to tell me about her paternalistic male OB who, in the days of twilight medication and fathers in the waiting room, had instructed her to "lie back, sweetheart, you don't have to do a thing," to which I'd always rolled my eyes, confident of my physical capabilities and glad for all that had changed in the world.
©2009 Tova Mirvis and Babble
About the Author
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Tova Mirvis is the author of two novels: The Ladies Auxiliary and The
Outside World. Her third novel, Inside Voices, will be published next
year. She lives in Newton, MA, and can be found online at
www.tovamirvis.com. |
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