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Catherine Pfenning's avatar

Beautiful. I've had 7 birth experiences and all were challenging in different ways. My first was a C-section due to a breech baby. I had planned on having the baby at home anyway but ended up transferring after being in labor for 30 hours. I've hemorrhaged three different times, one of those times being life threatening, with an entire retained placenta. I've had VBAC home births, 10 lbs. babies with big shoulders, two water births. I've birthed babies in the hospital, at home, and at a birth center. Some of the things I've experienced have been just plain traumatic, even with the most supportive care.

But I remember the way doctors have talked to me (good and bad), I remember clearly different moments of feeling very respected and other moments of feeling ignored. I'll always remember the kind way the anesthesiologist talked to me during my unplanned C-section, making me feel more human and less like a science experiment. I'll always remember my doula saying during the most intense pushing, "You're a rockstar."

Those moments shape us. I hear from moms whose kids are grown who still talk about the way they were made to feel during births.

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Emily Hancock's avatar

Thank you for sharing such a vulnerable piece here Amber. I have only heard you quickly reference your experience with your cesarean in the past so this connected some dots for me on your life and your experiences! It is a sort of theft, isn’t it? Of agency and the ability to integrate and process the experience in the way that your brain and body are designed to. The speed of it all doesn’t allow for it, and that requires a great amount of intention and patience and time after it’s all said and done to integrate I imagine. Or, maybe I don’t totally imagine. I haven’t had an emergency c-section but I did have somewhat similar feelings about my only hospital birth. I was too young and uneducated to know what was happening, they cut an episiotomy without telling me first, and all I remember is lights in my face and being led through pushing the way they told me to. It was extremely fast and overwhelming and I felt absolutely out of my mind, I was quite literally convinced I was dying. Not anywhere near the same situation but I do think the theft of agency was present all the same, and yes, I don’t see that as a good birth either.

I haven’t read Serena’s piece yet but I suppose I am one of those free birthers who made certain choices in response to my hospital birth, and in my situation, in response to being on the other side of things as a labor nurse in the past.

Knowing what I do now, I think if I am blessed to be able to carry another life into this realm, I will birth at home again with an elder midwife. I think I worked through what I needed to work through in free birthing, and I think I have realized that it is good to have a fellow woman present to witness me and comfort me. My husband did a magnificent job (he extracted a breech baby intuitively and stayed calm, I do feel like it takes a special breed of man to do that and I have to give him credit!) but I think that birth truly is women’s work, and women need one another in this wondrous, special, transformative space.

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