The Unnecesarean blog featured a post called “The Most Important Thing”, written by Courtroom Mama. The post featured screen caps of comments from a recent post from a cesarean mother who was content with her surgical birth and didn’t understand the other commenters who grieve over their c-sections. She is indeed entitled to her own feelings and her own opinions, and really, I’m happy for her that her cesarean scar doesn’t extend any further than the low transverse cut on her abdomen. I wish that could be true for all of us. Unfortunately, it is not. For many of us cesarean mothers, me included, the cesarean left a bigger scar on my heart than it did on my uterus and abdomen. Though she may have meant no harm, and she even said something along the lines of “not to disrespect”, her words were like salt on our wounds……it was the “just be happy you have a healthy baby” we’ve heard all over again.
To shake things up, the one and only “Dr.” Amy Teuter felt compelled to chime in the discussion. Here’s what she had to say:
There’s nothing inherently traumatic about having a C-section. It’s culturally determined. In the “natural” childbirth culture, a vaginal birth is an “achievement.” That’s why disappointment, trauma and “birth rape” are restricted to Western, white women who’ve been drinking the NCB kook-aid. .
It reminds me of my patients from certain ethnic groups who were disappointed and depressed about having a girl in a culture that deemed having a boy to be an “achievement.” It’s all about impressing others in the same culture.
At first I was speechless….what do you say to that? Who SAYS something like that?! So cruel and heartless, and really just flat out untrue. And really, if there really was nothing traumatic about cesareans, why would women be desiring VBACs?
Any woman of any ethnicity, religion, or social status can experience a traumatic birth. Disappointment over the experience, traumatic memories, and “birth rape” don’t just happen to women who had their hearts set on natural child birth. Or as Amy puts it, women who have been “drinking NCB koolaid”. It may be true that women who were planning an unmedicated birth might feel more disappointment at needing a cesarean or being coerced into a cesarean that they didn’t need. But a surgical birth can conjure up a huge range of emotions that even a mother who elected for a cesarean might experience.
Let’s examine Amy’s statement that “there is nothing inherently traumatic about having a c-section”, shall we? In obstetrical managed hospital labors, their favorite position is the “stranded beetle” lithomy position where the laboring woman lays flat on her back with her feet in stirrups, or one leg being held by her partner and the other held by a stranger for the pushing phase. Her epidural-numbed body can’t feel enough to push effectively or the baby starts showing signs of distress or both, off to the O.R. she’ll go. She goes from the degrading enough stranded beetle position to the crucifix position to be sliced open and her baby surgically removed and quickly whisked away from her. She spends her first days as a mother in pain and unable to perform even the simplest of her duties as a new mother with out help. Maybe her hospital experience was worse than I described or maybe it wasn’t, but the cesarean isn’t what she expected or what she originally wanted. She thought she would be the one to push the baby from her body, and instead he was cut out of her. She thought she’dbe the first to hold her baby, but instead he was handed off. Nobody can put the baby back inside her, or push the rewind button. The sense of accomplishment of “giving birth”, gone. The first few moments of the baby’s life, gone. Taken from her. Taken from her child. Forever.
It has nothing to do with whose Kool-aid she’s been drinking. What was taken from her and her baby cannot be given back, and she does have the right to grieve what she has lost. Every woman, pregnancy and birth is different. Some women might be content about their cesareans- even if it was unnecessary. But others need to grieve. I cannot tell the happy cesarean mother to be sad about her cesarean because I’m sad about mine; and she cannot tell me to just be happy because she is. It doesn’t work that way. No cesarean mother needs a guilt trip for their feelings, good or bad.
And I just gotta say, Obstetricians are not inherently better than Midwives……that is culturally determined by America’s mainstream medical culture! People who believe so might be visiting Dr. Amy’s kool-aid stand!
