Your weekly one-stop for highlights from the birth blogosphere. Visit weekly for the latest on childbirth, especially related to cesarean prevention, recovery, and VBAC. To nominate a blog post to be featured here, email me at blog@ican-online.org
Life prevented us from blogging the best last week, but we’ll make it up to you here! Great stuff this week on standing up to hospital protocols and relating with other women when we don’t agree.
Danielle shares her VBA3C story on Informed Parenting: “I wasn’t given the “choice.” I demanded that they allow it. I didn’t have their support or their understanding. I had to rely solely upon myself and my husband, knowing that if we wavered even for a moment, as we came so close to doing several times, we would be engulfed by the medical machine and processed as yet another number.” Similarly, Sheridan of Enjoy Birth discusses her experience pushing back against hospital protocols in her own birth experiences. “When I was pushing for a natural vbac in the only hospital available to me at the time, I put up a good fight and compromises were made in my favor.”
Courtroom Mama argues that if birth activists really want to reach all birthing women, we might need to think more seriously about our message: “If we want to reach who Dr. Davis-Floyd refers to as “the epidural woman,” we should make sure that our message is clear. To the extent that any message has even a whiff of judging the woman as opposed to the practice, or paints all of any type of practitioners with a single stroke, it will fall on deaf ears.” Speaking of epidurals, Rixa at Stand and Deliver asks: “So what is it about birth experiences that’s so divisive? Why are we so quick to take offense, or to react defensively, when people make different choices from ours? Perhaps we allow these significant life experiences to partially define ourselves–so that the choice to have, or to not have, an epidural isn’t just about the epidural any more…it’s about how we define ourselves as mothers and as women.”
