As someone who planned for a natural birth the first time and, despite
valiant effort on everyone's part (thorough preparation, fantastic support,
wonderful midwife, as close to baby friendly hospital as it gets around here
with sensitive labor and delivery nurses and a generally compassionate
environment) had a c section, I am appreciating this conversation.

I'm scheduled to have my second c section this week--attended my by midwife
and the wonderful doctor she works with.  While this conversation is a
little close to home for me now, I do have a couple of things to add, hoping
that this personal information is deemed relevant for a Lactnet post and
assuming that any subsequent conversation will stay on topic and will not be
geared toward convincing me to change my mind in some way about my own birth
plan, which has been painstakingly worked out with all parties involved:

I am a LLL leader and have a lot of friends who have homebirths, unassisted
and assisted, and natural deliveries.  I know this can be a wonderful thing.
Had we tried it, and let it go too far, one of us would have died or
suffered significant and long lasting injury.  Sure, many deaths in the
distant past were caused by a faulty understanding of germ theory, but birth
itself is not without risk and nothing we do can entirely mitigate that
risk. How people choose to manage that risk is a very personal thing, and we
should all have the opportunity to make truly informed choices based on our
individual circumstances.

The C section challenged successful breastfeeding for sure, but most of the
challenge came because of the interventions before the c section.  Our son
was taken to the nursery by my his dad, brought back to me to nurse in
recovery, never separated from one of us, never given supplements, roomed
in, and we all went home within 3 days.  Had I not been exhausted by the 22
hours of labor before the c section, I think we would have picked up and
much better.  I hope and pray that things go so well this time.

Was I depressed after the birth?  you'd better believe it.  Some of this was
adjustment disorder, pure and simple; some of it was hormonal, some of it
was a predisposition toward depression. a LOT of it was that I felt like a
failure because things didn't go the way they were "supposed" to go in some
idealized sense, which had a lot to do with the expectations I set for
myself. This depression was set up to some extent by many of the things I
read that presented natural birth as entirely normative and anything less as
a failure.

In my work afterwards (therapy and a lot of reading) I have come to the
conclusion that while a nonmedicalized birth is ideal and wonderful, so few
people succeed in having truly natural births there is no real way to know
whether c sections are the cause of the problems or a solution to
preexisting problems.  Surely they are done too often, to easily, etc. but I
am darn thankful that the option is there and frankly I resent facile
arguments against them that assume that natural birth is an option for
everyone.   Non-fatal birth injuries are often left out of the equation when
VBAC is discussed, for instance, and for me the discussion of maternal and
infant mortality and morbidity is not abstract or statistical, but very real
and based in my own experience.

The Rev. Anisa Cottrell Willis, M.Div, MSW/CSW, LLL Leader
Lexington, KY

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