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.
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.
As much as I hate to say it, I love black and white, absolute thinking. So bad I want to say “all hospital birth is bad, all homebirth is good,” but it doesn’t work that way. I think, really, it stems from my idea of how many gold mom stars I’d get if I was able to stay at home. But the reality is that my first birth was flawless and the second was a train wreck. Oddly enough, I didn’t suffer PPD/PPA after my second son was born. I’ve had some very goofy encounters with providers, too - including homebirth/hospital midwives (who I think are some of the worst offenders). There’s truly not one way.
All of this. My first birth felt traumatic to me, but after a lot of inner work and reflection, I realised it wasn’t how the birth unfolded, but how I was treated by my care providers that had made me feel traumatized. Like, yes, I had to transfer to hospital and didn’t get my planned homebirth, and had a lot of other interventions I hadn’t wanted. But that in and of itself was not a problem. What was a problem, and what I really struggled to come to terms with, was how I was spoken to, how my wishes were ignored, how I was coerced into accepting things I kept stating I didn’t want, how things were done without consent (episiotomy). That was very hard to come to terms with.
How women are treated in birth matters immensely, and in my own experience it absolutely impacts postpartum, including bonding with your baby. All women deserve to be respected and listened to, regardless of where and how they give birth.
"It seems so basic, doesn’t it, that in a birth the birthing woman would be honored as the one whose feelings and thoughts matter most? Alas this is not the way it so often is."
I couldn't agree more. And yet so many women are denied this agency or are at least coerced away from
it...
I'm so sorry your second birth was rushed in such a traumatic way. My OB did the very same thing to me at my 40w appointment, becoming alarmed at baby's heartrate (which he took immediately after checking my cervix in a rough and painful manner) and sending me to the ER. By the time I made it there, baby's heart rate had stabilized so they sent me on my way. Nevertheless that moment still
makes me furious and gave me my first taste of feeling enraged on my child's behalf...
“Birth prepares us, emotionally and spiritually, to welcome a new human being into our lives. It’s a meaningful experience that I believe is meant to inform women of their power and strength so they are ready to mother.”
Thank you for writing this piece. This point was so especially helpful as I process my first birth, which occurred two months ago. I had hoped to feel the power and confidence from birth in my newfound motherhood, but have felt more scared and anxious than ever.. which has left me confused.
It makes sense to me now why I’m so anxious—during my birth (which was long, complicated, and ended in an unplanned c-section that was not only necessary but revealed health issues I wasn’t aware of) I felt misunderstood by my providers and not included in important conversations. I’m still slowly processing it all, but your piece has given me such clarity around this topic, which is in its own way empowering. 🙏
"Of course a healthy baby matters, so much, and I’m grateful all was well in that regard. But a healthy baby is not all that matters." So very true. Thank you for sharing your perspective and experience around this, Amber.
I always wonder about calling birth "good" or "bad", when in reality birth (like all of life) simply IS. Traumatic definitely seems to have its place in describing how certain births unfold, all on their own, but the good or bad descriptors—thought they end up being applied to the birth itself—so often seem to be connected to how other people behaved in the birth space.
Ooof, I’m reading your birth stories in parts because I can feel the trauma as I’m reading. I had to stop at the unexpected c-section. I will resume reading again. My eyes filled with tears and had to pause.
I think it’s a mom thing where sometimes we can put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and feel what another mom was or is feeling. It’s me, it didn’t make my day harder, don’t worry!
Yes, this is a hard one. I’m someone who would theoretically be interested in home birth a la Call the Midwife, but the women on my Mom’s side almost all hemorrhage during birth and I hemorrhaged during my first one as well, so I simply wouldn’t feel comfortable with it. That said, so much of the hospital experience isn’t ideal. I did a research project on coerced c-section rates and maternal mortality years ago, and like all lawyers I learned about medical malpractice lawsuits in torts. Without getting too verbose here, it’s tragic that so much of obstetric medicine is informed by legal considerations (I think doctors and lawyers are both to blame for this).
Yes I think this is a foundational issue, for sure. I’d be curious to know more about how things in obstetrics came to be this focused on the avoidance of lawsuits, if you want to share more. My dad likes to blame the lawyers for everything😂 but it was interesting to see you say the same thing!
So, my bff is a surgeon (not an OB) and we talk about this a lot. Medical malpractice and liability is a huge concern for doctors and hospitals and I think something like 90% of OBs—it might be more—are sued at some point in their careers, so OBs practice “defensive medicine” to prevent injury and death at all costs. This obviously sounds like a good thing, except for cases like yours where there’s a 99.99% chance so much intervention wasn’t necessary. The incentives are wrong and motivate doctors to intervene as much as possible to avoid even tiny risks.
My Dad has done a few major med mal cases where doctors did truly egregious things like operate on the wrong side or the wrong limb (horrifying), but I think there needs to be reform. Patients should be informed of what the actual risks are and should be able to waive some rights to malpractice lawsuits with informed consent, in my opinion.
Some states do cap medical malpractice settlements at a certain amount, but I’m not sure that’s a great alternative because sometimes really horrible med malpractice does happen. It’s such a mess 😬
I consider my daughter’s birth a good birth, even though it went nothing like I had expected or hoped, and other people in my life have told me I should consider it “traumatic.” My water broke five weeks early, before I’d had my group b strep test, and I was induced right away because of the risk of infection. The labor was 22 hours, most of them on pitocin, and the entire time I was being pumped full of penicillin, since they didn’t know my strep status and had to treat me as though I could be infected. I had a late epidural (from an amazing anesthesiologist; those guys are just built different) and I don’t think I would have been able to deliver vaginally without it because I was just so exhausted at that point; it took me eight hours to go from 4 to 5 cm dilated and then I basically got stuck there until I had the epidural. There was also a scare where my daughter’s heart rate started dropping and they told me if it didn’t stabilize I would be taken for an emergency c-section. Thankfully, that did not happen; she stabilized and was fine for the rest of the labor.
I felt empowered when I chose the epidural, and I credit it with the reason I was able to deliver vaginally at all; I was actually able to rest and sleep a little for about an hour and a half, and then I was fully dilated and it was time to push. My daughter ended up in the NICU for fourteen days because she needed oxygen support, what with being early and the whole labor experience (she was super swollen because of all the IV fluid I received, and they said that didn’t help her much in the breathing department). I wrote more about the NICU experience itself on my Substack. But we made it through and she is now the healthiest one of us, as my husband says!
The experience was very unexpected and at first very frightening; I was alone at the hospital for the first hour or so, not expecting at all that I was going to have to birth my baby that day. But the nurses were amazing, and my mom and my husband were able to be there for the actual induction and labor, and altogether I think it was a good birth. I got almost all the interventions I didn’t want, but they always explained them and waited for my consent (and even respected me when I refused the internal contraction monitor; baby got the internal heart rate monitor tho because of the heart rate issues). I felt that I had agency, and I even had a wonderful nurse run interference with my overbearing OB completely of her own accord; I really felt like she was on my side. So, long story short, I absolutely agree: it’s not the type of birth or the lack or presence of interventions, but rather agency and respect that makes for a good birth. And even a very difficult and unexpected birth can be good, I think :)
Birth is such an intimate event. I'm so sorry one of your experiences made you feel so dismissed. During my last pregnancy, there was a time where how I'd give birth was up in the air due to placenta issues, and I was having a hard time with that. Hearing "as long as the baby is healthy, that's all that matters" truly hurt. While I absolutely wanted our baby safe and healthy, I was still processing the unknowns, trying to trust God in what had to happen. I hope you've experienced healing since writing this post.
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.
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.
As much as I hate to say it, I love black and white, absolute thinking. So bad I want to say “all hospital birth is bad, all homebirth is good,” but it doesn’t work that way. I think, really, it stems from my idea of how many gold mom stars I’d get if I was able to stay at home. But the reality is that my first birth was flawless and the second was a train wreck. Oddly enough, I didn’t suffer PPD/PPA after my second son was born. I’ve had some very goofy encounters with providers, too - including homebirth/hospital midwives (who I think are some of the worst offenders). There’s truly not one way.
All of this. My first birth felt traumatic to me, but after a lot of inner work and reflection, I realised it wasn’t how the birth unfolded, but how I was treated by my care providers that had made me feel traumatized. Like, yes, I had to transfer to hospital and didn’t get my planned homebirth, and had a lot of other interventions I hadn’t wanted. But that in and of itself was not a problem. What was a problem, and what I really struggled to come to terms with, was how I was spoken to, how my wishes were ignored, how I was coerced into accepting things I kept stating I didn’t want, how things were done without consent (episiotomy). That was very hard to come to terms with.
How women are treated in birth matters immensely, and in my own experience it absolutely impacts postpartum, including bonding with your baby. All women deserve to be respected and listened to, regardless of where and how they give birth.
"It seems so basic, doesn’t it, that in a birth the birthing woman would be honored as the one whose feelings and thoughts matter most? Alas this is not the way it so often is."
I couldn't agree more. And yet so many women are denied this agency or are at least coerced away from
it...
I'm so sorry your second birth was rushed in such a traumatic way. My OB did the very same thing to me at my 40w appointment, becoming alarmed at baby's heartrate (which he took immediately after checking my cervix in a rough and painful manner) and sending me to the ER. By the time I made it there, baby's heart rate had stabilized so they sent me on my way. Nevertheless that moment still
makes me furious and gave me my first taste of feeling enraged on my child's behalf...
“Birth prepares us, emotionally and spiritually, to welcome a new human being into our lives. It’s a meaningful experience that I believe is meant to inform women of their power and strength so they are ready to mother.”
Thank you for writing this piece. This point was so especially helpful as I process my first birth, which occurred two months ago. I had hoped to feel the power and confidence from birth in my newfound motherhood, but have felt more scared and anxious than ever.. which has left me confused.
It makes sense to me now why I’m so anxious—during my birth (which was long, complicated, and ended in an unplanned c-section that was not only necessary but revealed health issues I wasn’t aware of) I felt misunderstood by my providers and not included in important conversations. I’m still slowly processing it all, but your piece has given me such clarity around this topic, which is in its own way empowering. 🙏
"Of course a healthy baby matters, so much, and I’m grateful all was well in that regard. But a healthy baby is not all that matters." So very true. Thank you for sharing your perspective and experience around this, Amber.
I always wonder about calling birth "good" or "bad", when in reality birth (like all of life) simply IS. Traumatic definitely seems to have its place in describing how certain births unfold, all on their own, but the good or bad descriptors—thought they end up being applied to the birth itself—so often seem to be connected to how other people behaved in the birth space.
"What I see now is that this matters more than any certain way birth goes: that a woman feels centered and respected in her experience." Love!
Ooof, I’m reading your birth stories in parts because I can feel the trauma as I’m reading. I had to stop at the unexpected c-section. I will resume reading again. My eyes filled with tears and had to pause.
Oof, that feels validating and also sorry to make your day harder!😅 It was so incredibly traumatizing. Someday I’ll write about it in detail.
I think it’s a mom thing where sometimes we can put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and feel what another mom was or is feeling. It’s me, it didn’t make my day harder, don’t worry!
Beautiful piece.
Yes, this is a hard one. I’m someone who would theoretically be interested in home birth a la Call the Midwife, but the women on my Mom’s side almost all hemorrhage during birth and I hemorrhaged during my first one as well, so I simply wouldn’t feel comfortable with it. That said, so much of the hospital experience isn’t ideal. I did a research project on coerced c-section rates and maternal mortality years ago, and like all lawyers I learned about medical malpractice lawsuits in torts. Without getting too verbose here, it’s tragic that so much of obstetric medicine is informed by legal considerations (I think doctors and lawyers are both to blame for this).
Yes I think this is a foundational issue, for sure. I’d be curious to know more about how things in obstetrics came to be this focused on the avoidance of lawsuits, if you want to share more. My dad likes to blame the lawyers for everything😂 but it was interesting to see you say the same thing!
So, my bff is a surgeon (not an OB) and we talk about this a lot. Medical malpractice and liability is a huge concern for doctors and hospitals and I think something like 90% of OBs—it might be more—are sued at some point in their careers, so OBs practice “defensive medicine” to prevent injury and death at all costs. This obviously sounds like a good thing, except for cases like yours where there’s a 99.99% chance so much intervention wasn’t necessary. The incentives are wrong and motivate doctors to intervene as much as possible to avoid even tiny risks.
My Dad has done a few major med mal cases where doctors did truly egregious things like operate on the wrong side or the wrong limb (horrifying), but I think there needs to be reform. Patients should be informed of what the actual risks are and should be able to waive some rights to malpractice lawsuits with informed consent, in my opinion.
Some states do cap medical malpractice settlements at a certain amount, but I’m not sure that’s a great alternative because sometimes really horrible med malpractice does happen. It’s such a mess 😬
I consider my daughter’s birth a good birth, even though it went nothing like I had expected or hoped, and other people in my life have told me I should consider it “traumatic.” My water broke five weeks early, before I’d had my group b strep test, and I was induced right away because of the risk of infection. The labor was 22 hours, most of them on pitocin, and the entire time I was being pumped full of penicillin, since they didn’t know my strep status and had to treat me as though I could be infected. I had a late epidural (from an amazing anesthesiologist; those guys are just built different) and I don’t think I would have been able to deliver vaginally without it because I was just so exhausted at that point; it took me eight hours to go from 4 to 5 cm dilated and then I basically got stuck there until I had the epidural. There was also a scare where my daughter’s heart rate started dropping and they told me if it didn’t stabilize I would be taken for an emergency c-section. Thankfully, that did not happen; she stabilized and was fine for the rest of the labor.
I felt empowered when I chose the epidural, and I credit it with the reason I was able to deliver vaginally at all; I was actually able to rest and sleep a little for about an hour and a half, and then I was fully dilated and it was time to push. My daughter ended up in the NICU for fourteen days because she needed oxygen support, what with being early and the whole labor experience (she was super swollen because of all the IV fluid I received, and they said that didn’t help her much in the breathing department). I wrote more about the NICU experience itself on my Substack. But we made it through and she is now the healthiest one of us, as my husband says!
The experience was very unexpected and at first very frightening; I was alone at the hospital for the first hour or so, not expecting at all that I was going to have to birth my baby that day. But the nurses were amazing, and my mom and my husband were able to be there for the actual induction and labor, and altogether I think it was a good birth. I got almost all the interventions I didn’t want, but they always explained them and waited for my consent (and even respected me when I refused the internal contraction monitor; baby got the internal heart rate monitor tho because of the heart rate issues). I felt that I had agency, and I even had a wonderful nurse run interference with my overbearing OB completely of her own accord; I really felt like she was on my side. So, long story short, I absolutely agree: it’s not the type of birth or the lack or presence of interventions, but rather agency and respect that makes for a good birth. And even a very difficult and unexpected birth can be good, I think :)
Birth is such an intimate event. I'm so sorry one of your experiences made you feel so dismissed. During my last pregnancy, there was a time where how I'd give birth was up in the air due to placenta issues, and I was having a hard time with that. Hearing "as long as the baby is healthy, that's all that matters" truly hurt. While I absolutely wanted our baby safe and healthy, I was still processing the unknowns, trying to trust God in what had to happen. I hope you've experienced healing since writing this post.