Teresa's CBAC Story

The Birth of Ella Rose

As I’m preparing to write this, I find myself thinking how ironic it is that I am writing this.  I began my birthing career with a one track mind – natural birth.  Anything other than that was somehow not equal.  It was less than, in my mind.  So, it’s somewhat bizarre to me that I’m sitting here, writing a birth story on why I chose a c-section birth after a c-section (CBAC) and that part of my focus is to talk about how glad I am I made that decision.  I hope this is helpful to some of you who find yourselves in a similar situation, or for those of you who might need to support others who have made, or are going to make, the same decision.

When my fourth baby was only six months old, we found out our fifth baby, a wonderful surprise, was already on the way.  I knew immediately that it would be a big decision as to how we would choose to have this sweet baby.

Our fourth baby had been my first c-section.  She had originally been a planned birth center birth, but at around 28 weeks, due to bleeding problems, we were surprised to find out I had a partial placenta previa, which had not been there at my 19 week ultrasound.  Over time it moved more and more over my cervix until it was a complete placenta previa.  This meant that my placenta was now fully covering my cervix.  If I had a vaginal birth, the baby would have to go through the placenta to be born.  It is truly a life threatening situation with a hemorrhaging risk during pregnancy (I was on bed rest), as well as during the birth.  It was extremely likely that the baby and I wouldn’t have survived if we had attempted a vaginal birth.  It’s one of the rare situations where most everyone, regardless of their view on birth, agrees that a c-section is required.

So, much to my dismay, I had to transfer care at around 34 weeks to plan for a c-section.  At the time, I was incredibly stressed over the situation.  I knew that the previa itself added more risk to the birth, as did the potential for a placenta accreta.

Thankfully everything went great with the birth, and our beautiful, 9 lbs 7 oz baby girl was born.  There was no problem at all due to the placenta previa.  We also found out that our baby had had the cord wrapped around her neck, a knot in her cord, and a very short cord – all combined would have made for a dangerous vaginal birth.  So, we felt very blessed that things worked out as they did.  I felt very thankful for the skills of our doctor to save the life of our baby, as well as mine.  Perhaps this is a big reason I have such a positive view of properly used c-sections now.  I didn’t experience the disrespect and dishonesty that many women often deal with when they end up with a c-section.

I had always heard how difficult c-section recoveries were.  So, I was quite surprised that the recovery was so easy for me.  After the first 24 hours, which were painful, I kept waiting for the pain to come.  I was up on my feet the next day, walking around much easier than I ever could after a vaginal birth.  I couldn’t believe I had just given birth.  I could sit with no excruciating pain, something I wasn’t used to.  I have difficult recoveries after my vaginal births.  I was loving this recovery!  Her birth was a surprisingly wonderful experience.  I was also surprised to feel that same birth “high” of accomplishment after having her.

So, when we found out we were pregnant with our fifth baby, I knew that solely based on the recovery, it was going to be hard to choose another vaginal birth.  But, there was more to the decision than that.

My first baby had been a birth center water birth.  I was well educated on natural birth even then.  My sister had a home birth years before, and I learned a lot from her during those years. I didn’t choose a homebirth because we lived in a tiny apartment, and the last thing I wanted to do was birth there!  When I became pregnant, I did hours and hours of research and knew natural was the way for me to go.  I was prepared to go through some hard work to have that dream birth.  But this birth ended up being far from the dream birth I had envisioned.

It was a very difficult, long, exhausting labor, and she ended up being stuck in the birth canal for about three hours before she finally emerged.  When she did, I hemorrhaged (most likely from a placental abruption, which I had issues with during the end of her pregnancy) and almost passed out.  I couldn’t sit up, couldn’t nurse her, and I could hardly move.  Meanwhile, my baby was having issues with her heart rate.  They put her on oxygen, and she ended up being transferred to the hospital.  A few days later, she had open heart surgery.  Then a couple weeks later, she was diagnosed with a really rare, fatal disease called Fanconi Anemia.  It causes bone marrow failure and different types of cancers, including leukemia.  It was all a heart wrenching experience.

Everything about our daughter’s birth was difficult – from the labor, to the pushing, to the hospital, to the surgery, to the diagnosis, to the recovery.  There was no time for me to recover during any of that, and, of course, there was no way I was going to stay home and rest while she was in the hospital.  Most of the time I had no place to rest, other than sitting in a chair by my daughter’s beside, holding her when we could, and holding her hand when we couldn’t.  I was too weak from blood loss to walk more than a few feet at a time and had to use a wheelchair for the first week or so.

This led us to choose a hospital birth for our next baby, who came four years later.  We had a 25% chance of another baby being born with the same illness (besides wanting more children, we also needed a sibling donor so our daughter could have a bone marrow transplant).  While I was changed forever by the birth of our first child, and I held the birth itself as one of the most incredible, sacred experiences of my life, I needed the comfort of knowing that if anything went wrong, our baby would have immediate access to medical care.  And, should that happen, that I would have a place to stay with the baby at the hospital.  So, we chose a hospital known for being natural birth friendly, and we chose a doctor who was known for being very supportive of it.   (She was the same doctor who performed the c-section with my placenta previa baby.)

With this second baby, we knew he was going to be big.  I didn’t worry about it because I trusted my body to be able to birth whatever size baby it grew.  Plus, how big could the baby get?  I ate healthy (no sugar even), am slender, and am small framed.  I didn’t even get tested to see if I had gestational diabetes because I couldn’t image that I had it. That showed just how much I didn’t understand about it.

Everything went well with the labor for the majority of it.  It moved quickly, but it was incredibly painful compared to the first birth (which I had thought was plenty painful!).  Looking back, I really think I was dealing with some type of major sciatic nerve pain during labor.  The back pain was unreal.  When I reached 8cm, my body switched into pushing mode.  For those of you who have never had a natural birth, when your body decides it’s time to push, it pushes all on its own.  You don’t have to participate at all, and it’s near impossible to stop it once it starts.

At the time, I thought I was fully dilated.  Why else would I start pushing?  When the doctor checked me, she told me I was only 8cm, and I needed to stop pushing.  My doula and husband tried breathing me through each contraction to help me stop pushing, but I couldn’t.  It wasn’t soft pushing.  It was hard, bearing down pushing.  It was an incredibly frustrating situation.  Later on, the doctor checked me again, and I was only 6cm dilated then, due to swelling.  I was progressing backwards!

Everyone knew how important a natural birth was to me.  None of them suggested I do anything else other than try to stop pushing to see if I could get my cervix back on track with dilating.  After a while, I knew it wasn’t going to happen.  I couldn’t stop.  I didn’t want to end up with a c-section.  I asked my doctor if an epidural would fix this.  She told me it would.  So, I asked for an epidural.

It worked its magic.  It was a relief to no longer fight the contractions and to finally be able to relax, as well as to have the intense back pain subside.  After a few hours, my cervix stopped swelling, I finished dilating, and it was time to push – for real this time.

About 45 minutes after I started pushing, the baby’s head began to emerge.  The doctor told me he was a very big baby.  Then he stopped coming out.  She looked worried and told me that the baby was stuck.  She called for the NICU team, and she told me to push as hard as I could.  I did.  I pushed while she pulled.  The baby didn’t budge.  He had shoulder dystocia.  I knew a mom whose baby had just recently died from shoulder dystocia at the birth center I had my first baby at, so I was quite concerned about our situation.  The doctor told me she might have to break his shoulder to get him out.  I wished badly I would have been able to change positions during this time, knowing it might help dislodge him.  But I knew that it was thanks to the epidural that I had even made it as far as I did.  It was somewhat of a catch-22.

I had no sense of time during all of this.  No idea how long he was stuck.  I remember a nurse ended up coming over and shoving really hard down on my belly – similar to a CPR move.  She shoved down really hard, while the doctor pulled really hard, and while I pushed really hard.  Out popped the baby.  She immediately gave him to me.  He was moving, but he wasn’t breathing or crying.  They took him away as quickly as they had given him to me.

It was probably only a minute or two before he finally started crying, but it seemed longer.  It was such a huge relief to hear that sweet cry.  Poor little guy had quite the rough birth.  He had a lot of bruising on his arm, shoulder, and back, which luckily didn’t cause him any issues afterwards.

He was healthy at 10 lbs 11 oz, 21 inches, and his head was over 15” round.  He was very broad shouldered.  It was then I began to suspect that maybe I really did have gestational diabetes!  Why else would a baby as huge as him come out of someone as small as me?  I’m not quite 5 ft 4 in, small framed, and around 115 lbs (post pregnancies).  We definitely didn’t think a baby that big would grow inside of me.  All of the medical personnel were shocked.  It was actually quite entertaining how everyone responded!

I asked my doctor later on what would have happened if she wouldn’t have been able to get him out.  She said they would have done a c-section.  I asked her how risky that was since his head was mostly out.  She said it would have been a 50/50 chance as to whether he would have survived going reverse through the birth canal.  It definitely gave me something to think about, especially as I was deciding on what type of birth to choose for baby #5.

Despite the pushing problems, and scary ending of his birth, it was an incredible experience.  I could not believe I had given birth again and to such a big baby!  His birth opened my eyes to the reality that even non-natural births can be just as incredible as natural ones (what a sad thing that I didn’t recognize that before).  And, I gained an appreciation for epidurals – that they actually do have a purpose beyond pain management – which I didn’t believe before.  I was on a birth “high” for quite a while.  Though, at the same time, I felt worried about the things that had happened.  Why was he so big?  Why did I have the pushing issue problem?  I didn’t think either was likely to happen again.  At least I hoped they wouldn’t because I really didn’t like the rough birth he had to go through.

When I had the next baby, I chose to go back to a birth center with midwives attending.  It felt like the right choice, and it looked like she was also going to be a healthy baby like her brother and not need heart surgery.

It turned out I tested positive for gestational diabetes.  My test results were very high after one hour – 208.  That began my blood glucose testing after every meal.  I was easily able to keep my numbers within normal range during that pregnancy, most of the time they stayed below 125.  On occasion they were closer to 140.  The major change in my diet was to reduce my carbohydrates.  The baby measured large, but she appeared to be much smaller than her big brother.

Labor with her was really long and tiring.  It was similar to my first birth, though not as long.  I dealt with similar back pain as I did with my previous birth – felt like some type of sciatic nerve labor pain the way it radiated from my back through my whole body.  The pain felt unreal.  After about 25 hours, labor went into overdrive.  I could tell things were moving along quickly.  A few hours later, I felt pressure and felt the baby shift down.  I also felt the urge to push but was afraid to do so.  My midwife told me to push if I felt like it, but I still hesitated because I wanted her to check me first to make sure I was fully dilated.  Despite wanting to wait until I was checked, I was suddenly pushing.  She told me I was only dilated to 8cm.

I couldn’t believe it when she told me that.  I felt somewhat panicked because of what had happened the last time.  I really didn’t want to transfer to the hospital at this point.  I kept trying to stop, but it was completely out of my control.  My body was pushing whether I liked it or not.

My midwife turned me onto my left side, which was the side that my cervix still needed to dilate on.  That helped me dilate faster.  After a couple minutes, she told me to lie on my back so that the baby could come down under my cervix and come out.  She told me that typically laying on my back would be the worst position, but given the circumstance, it was the best.  After that, it took about ten minutes of pushing, and out popped the baby.  Pushing her out was shockingly painful.  My midwife said it was due to my cervix.  I think I must not have been 100% dilated.  I went from being dilated 6 cm to birthing the baby, all in about 35-45 minutes.  It was pretty intense!  She was a beautiful girl, 8 lbs 7 oz, 21 inches long, and 14.5 inches around her head.

That was a new thing for me.  I wasn’t used to pushing a baby out so quickly.  It was amazing!  I couldn’t believe how much easier it was to have such a shorter pushing time.  It really didn’t seem to matter how long the labor was when it came to recovery.  It was the pushing that determined that (beyond the need to sleep).  It was much quicker to heal from since the baby wasn’t in the birth canal for very long.  I was surprised to find out how much of a difference that part of the birth could make overall.

I asked my midwife if what she did would have worked with my son (my shoulder dystocia baby).  I thought maybe my doctor wasn’t similarly trained as my midwife.  She told me that due to the large size of my son, it would not have worked.  He was too big.  It sounded like she didn’t think it would work for a baby much bigger than my daughter was.  It made me feel all the more confident that we had made the correct decisions with his birth and made me a bit more worried about future births in case the babies were larger.

So, back to my fifth pregnancy, I thought a lot about my previous births to help me figure out what I felt was best.  The facts were that with my first two births, the babies got stuck.  My second and third births, I had early pushing issues that caused problems with the birth itself, especially with my son’s birth.  Those first three vaginal births were hard recoveries.  Then my fourth birth, the one that was supposed to be the complicated one that required a c-section, ended up being the least complicated, easiest to heal from, and a gentle birth for the baby.

I knew that I would likely have the early pushing issues again.  It seems to be part of the process of labor for me.  I knew that if the baby was very big (which would likely be the case), what the midwife did would likely not work, and I would need an epidural to stop the pushing.  Getting an epidural would prevent me from being able to move around to help dislodge a stuck baby.  And, I had good reasons to think the baby would get stuck, considering two out of three of my vaginal births the babies got stuck.  Plus, it would be a big baby, and I would be stuck on my back – both increase chance of baby getting stuck.  I really didn’t want another shoulder dystocia baby and to have the baby go through such a rough birth – or worse, to have an emergency c-section due to a shoulder dystocia baby, knowing how risky that is.

I believe that natural birth is generally the safest, least complicated type of birth to have.  But, based off of my own experiences, I couldn’t come to the same conclusion.  I didn’t feel like those statistics of safety applied accurately to me.  Statistics speak to a group as a whole.  Each woman needs to consider her individual situation and make decisions based on that.

With my belief on birth, it felt very foreign to consider that a c-section might actually be safer.  But, based off of my experience with a c-section and based off of my experiences with vaginal births that’s how I felt.    Plus, you know how you have that little voice inside of you that helps guide you when you make decisions?  I’d used it with all my other births, and usually I felt driven to have a natural birth.  But this time, I was feeling like a c-section was the right choice.

There were a couple additional reasons for the c-section.  During my pregnancy, I started having trouble with an umbilical hernia. It needed to be repaired, as well as my belly muscles to help prevent the hernia from reoccurring.  Due to my oldest child’s immune compromised situation from being in bone marrow failure, it’s somewhat complicated to have child care since we have to be so careful of germs.  So, it would be safest and easiest to kill two birds with one stone and have the repair done at the same time as the birth.  I also knew I was at a higher risk of developing a prolapsed uterus due to the larger size babies I have.  Granted, even women who have no babies can develop prolapsed uteruses, but it was a higher risk for me if I had another vaginal birth.

So, that’s why I chose a c-section.  Good thing that wasn’t a really long explanation!

During Ella’s pregnancy, my friend, Heidi, was training to be a doula.  She mentioned to me that she wanted to attend a c-section because she felt it would help her better serve moms who needed them.  She asked if we were interested in having her as a doula.  With each new birth, I’ve learned more and more what I am comfortable with.  One of the things I’ve realized is how much I prefer a private setting for a birth, without family and friends there during it.  Plus, I feel like birth is a very sacred, special experience, and I only want people around me that are supportive of my decisions.  With my out of hospital births, I didn’t want anyone there who disagreed with our decisions.  And, I found myself feeling similarly with my upcoming c-section.  I didn’t want someone there who was so supportive of natural birth that they couldn’t truly support my reasons for having a c-section.

So, I talked with Heidi about it and shared some of my concerns.  Overall, I viewed doulas as women who are supportive of natural birth (or vaginal births, at least), and I felt like they would only attend a c-section if it had originally been an attempted vaginal birth turned c-section.  Heidi felt strongly that a doula was there to be supportive of whatever type of birth the mother feels is best for her to have. She didn’t feel like it was up to the doula to try and make the mother have the type of birth that she (the doula) thought was best.

She explained the things she could do to help.  She could help keep me in the loop with everything going on with the baby.  She could help my husband should he need help with anything so that he wouldn’t have to leave my side.  If the baby ended up having any issues, she could stay with me while my husband went with the baby.  She had a nice, long list of things she could do!  I was surprised.  Who knew a doula could be so helpful during a c-section birth?  As a bonus, she offered to take photographs for us of the birth.

After talking with her, I felt really comfortable with her view of things, and I felt like she would truly do her best to support us in any way she could.  So, we chose to have her attend our birth, and I’m so glad we did!

I tend to have my babies a little bit early (not induced).  I had one at 39.5 weeks and two at 38.5 weeks.  So, we scheduled the c-section right at 39 weeks.

At around 34 weeks, I started having Braxton Hicks contractions frequently.  Some of them were quite painful and lasted for quite a while.  I’ve done this with each pregnancy, so I knew it was normal for me.  But it still left me wondering how easy it would be to know when (if) active labor started.

At almost 38 weeks, my belly measured 42 weeks.  It was looking like the baby was going to be on the large side!  Whenever I went places, people would stare at me and ask me if I was going to have twins.  Nope, it’s just one giant baby.

At 38.5 weeks, I noticed that I suddenly had a sore throat.  I remember this happening when I went into labor with one of my other children.  So, I began to suspect labor was on the way.

That same night, I woke up at around midnight, starving, which is another thing I typically do right around the time labor starts – get hungry and need to eat a lot.  When I got up to eat, I had a contraction that lasted the whole time I ate – probably five or six minutes.  Both things made me a little more convinced that labor was getting ready.  I didn’t realize I was already in labor.  I went ahead and went back to bed.  I knew if the contractions were really going to start, they’d start even if I was asleep.

I woke up an hour or two later and felt “off”.  I had a constant backache and all my contractions were hurting.  I couldn’t sleep anymore but continued lying in bed.  I timed the contractions for an hour.  They started off ten minutes apart, lasting about a minute each.  By the end of the hours, they were closer to 5-7 minutes apart, lasting about a minute.  I noticed I was starving again, so I got up and ate some more food.  Over the next couple hours, they got down to every 2 to 3 minutes apart, lasting about a minute.  I took a shower to help ease the pain, as well as get ready for the hospital.

During all of this, my back was constantly hurting with no break.  With each contraction, my belly would hurt a lot, along with my back.  At first I thought it was just the fluke, painful Braxton Hicks, but it became pretty obvious it was real labor since they didn’t stop hurting.  The thing that confused me the most is that my labor wasn’t feeling the same as it had with my previous births.  It was hurting in different places.

At 6am, I told my husband.  He called the doctor soon after.  She told us to come into her office.  I called my doula around 7am, and she said she would get ready.  I was going to call her back and let her know what the doctor said.  We both lived about an hour away from the hospital, so I really didn’t want her to come if I ended up being sent back home.

We met with the doctor, and she checked me.  I was 3cm dilated.  I hadn’t been dilated at all prior to that.  My bag of water was bulging.  She felt my belly while I had a couple contractions and could tell things were getting ready to pick up and go.  She called the hospital, and they scheduled us for an hour later. While we headed over, we called our doula and told her.  We were all a bit worried that it didn’t leave her enough time to get there for the birth!

The contractions were definitely getting stronger.  I couldn’t walk through them, and it was getting a lot harder to talk through them.  We drove the couple minutes it took to get to the hospital from the doctor’s office, and we checked in.  They took us back quickly and had me change into the flattering hospital gown that they offer to all their laboring moms.  It even had the open backside and all!  (Who doesn’t live for these things?!)  They placed the IV and monitored my contractions with the machine that goes ping.  The anesthesiologist came in and introduced himself.  We met the nurse that would be taking care of the baby when she was born.  All was moving along well.

Time was going by, and our doula still wasn’t there.  We told the medical staff that she was going to be arriving and asked them to make sure she was brought back to us if we made it to the surgery room before she arrived.

With just a few minutes to spare, Heidi arrived.  Yay!  She changed and soon we were off to go.

We walked to the operating room.  I was tempted to leave the back of the hospital gown open, just to scare anyone who might be walking behind me, but I resisted the urge and held it closed.  At one point they asked my husband and doula to wait while they took me into the operating room to get things going.  Just a couple minutes into having me back there, the anesthesiologist went to get my husband.  On his way out, he told the nurse to stand in front of me so that in case I got front heavy, I wouldn’t fall off the table since my belly was so huge (he had a great sense of humor).  They brought my husband back.  Then they placed the epidural and soon everyone was in there, and it was time to have the baby.  By then I had been in labor for a little more than ten hours.

They kept me up to date as to what was going on.  I knew they were cutting my belly, and I was waiting for the moment where the baby would be born.  It was taking longer than it did the time before.  Soon I heard a lot of talking and some laughing.  Someone told me that my water was making a huge mess.  Later on, my doctor reenacted it for me.  She said when they cut into it my uterus, water exploded out and shot up, and then spilled out all over the floor.  It wouldn’t stop coming.  She said the nurses kept trying to soak it all up by tossing towels, but it was a lot more water than usual.  I asked her how much water it was, and she burst out laughing saying, “It was gallons and gallons!”

Then I felt a lot of pressure, and they had the baby out.  I could hear her precious little cry.  I heard comments of how big she was and how much hair she had.  Soon they had her over at the baby station taking care of her.  My husband went over to meet her.  She stopped crying pretty quickly and was content.  I hadn’t had a baby stop crying as quickly as her before!

She weighed 9 lbs 10 oz and was 21 inches long.  She had a large head, too, just like all my other lollipop headed babies.  She really looked so much like our 15 month old did at birth that it was hard to not think of them as the same baby!

While they were taking care of the baby, they were finishing up with me.  They saved the cord blood in the cord blood collection kit that we had.  We need it in case Baby Ella is a match for our little girl who is in need of a bone marrow transplant.  We will find out if Ella is a match when we get her tested soon.

The doctor told me that the placenta was huge.  It weighed five pounds.  Usually a three pound placenta is considered really large.  Before they stitched me completely up, they fixed my hernia and repaired some of my muscles to help prevent the hernia from coming back.  When they stitched me up, the doctor later on told me that my skin was so thin and tight, I was stretched about as far as I could go.  She told me she had a little bit of a hard time stitching me up because it was so thin in some areas.  Luckily she did a great job, and I’ve had no healing issues at all.  While they were fixing my hernia and finishing up the surgery, my husband sat by me with the baby.  It was fun to watch him with the baby.  She looked so much like our other children.  It was amazing to finally have her in our arms, alive and healthy.

Soon they were done.  They moved me over to another bed and wheeled me out in to recovery.  Our doula had been such a help during it all.  I remember her explaining a lot of things to me.  She would sometimes take pictures of things that I wasn’t close enough to see and then show it to me so I could see it.  I thought that was pretty handy!  When I was in recovery, she was still helping. A couple times I felt really nauseous and started dry heaving a little bit.  She was there helping through all of that.  She offered another level of support and comfort through everything.  We’re really glad we had her there.  It definitely made me a believer in having a doula there at a c-section.  At first it didn’t seem like there would be much of a reason to have her there, but she did amazing.  We also treasure the photos she was able to take of the birth.  She made a slide show of our birth too that we absolutely love and have included at the very end of this.

The whole birth team did a wonderful job.  They all remembered this was a birth and to treat it as such.  The anesthesiologist had a great sense of humor.  I love talking to funny people.  When everyone was off looking at the baby, he kept me company.  He talked to me about a lot of things.  Some things were really funny and others were a lot more serious.  He asked about the cord blood, and I told him what it was needed for.  He almost made me cry.  We have been very blessed that all of our other children have been born healthy.  Though none of them have been bone marrow matches for our oldest.  This is our last chance, since it is for sure our last baby.  So, we hope and pray that she will finally be our match.

Oh, and during the birth, the anesthesiologist turned music on for us.  He didn’t do it on purpose, but our family song came on.  It’s a song by Coldplay, Viva La Vida.  It is a song that has a lot of emotions attached to it.  We listened to it a lot when our daughter was seriously ill – in severe bone marrow failure, needing regular blood and platelet transfusions.  It somehow seemed fitting to have that song on during the birth.

It’s been five weeks since the baby was born, and things have been going really well.  Recovery was harder than my other c-section, due to the hernia repair.  But it was still a great recovery.  I still had that birth “high” and couldn’t stop feeling so happy and excited about everything.  The birth was beautiful, and though it was a c-section, it truly was just as beautiful of an experience as my other births.  I wouldn’t trade any of them for the world.

While I did love my c-sections, and I did choose a CBAC, I treasure that I was able to have my first three vaginally.  It certainly wasn’t easy, and a huge part of it all was that my care providers were the right ones for the situation.  It’s so important to choose midwives or doctors that share your view on birth and help you achieve your goals.  Had I had almost any other doctors with my first two births, I am convinced I would have ended up with c-sections.  Who lets a small woman birth such a big baby?!  My doctor was awesome for that.

I encourage all mommas wanting a VBAC, or a natural birth, to go for it.  It is worth the effort.  I think the fact that I had three vaginal births before my c-sections helped me tremendously in how I felt about those births.  Due to my vaginal births, I had already found my inner super powers, and having two c-sections didn’t take anything away from that.  I believe all women have that super power in them – the power to give life (even if by c-section).

I still consider myself a natural birther and am an advocate for it, as well as for women who desperately want their VBACs.  But, where I was once solely a supporter of natural birth, I now believe in supporting the mother in whatever type of birth she wants – whether that is a natural birth, epidural birth, or a c-section.  I think sometimes c-sections are viewed negatively by people because of the situations in which they most often occur – a lack of respect, a lack of need, and a missed opportunity for a mother to experience a vaginal birth when she desperately wanted it.  On the flip side, I think sometimes those negative views about c-sections can leave other mothers, who have much more positive experiences with c-sections, feeling somewhat alone or like their births are being judges as not good enough.  I have felt that way at times when it came to support from my natural birth community (this happened when I had to have a c-section due to the complete placenta previa).  I think the success of a birth should be based off of how the mother feels about it and not based off of other’s opinions of what the “correct” birth is.

I now understand much better that there is no one right way to have a baby.  Only a mother knows what is best for her and what type of birth she wants to try to have.  Hopefully every mother can be educated, respected, and supported no matter what she chooses.  And, hopefully every mother can find her inner super power no matter what ends up happening!

I loved our birth.  It was beautiful – one that I will treasure forever.  You can view our birth slideshow here.  You need QuickTime to view it: