| Dear Doctor,
May 30, 1999
As your Christian sister, I needed to write to you regarding a situation. I am a local nurse midwife. God placed me in the position to serve the women of this community who want to deliver their babies at home. I run into women while I am out in the community from time to time who enjoy asking me questions and sharing their pregnancy story with me. I ran into one of your clients the other day. She will have been delivered by the time you receive this letter. My intent in writing you this letter is not to ask you to change your management of her. She did not tell me your half of the story. She had had a c/section for breech with her first baby. As you know, primary c/sections for breech have an 85% success rate for a subsequent vaginal birth. She told me that she was having a repeat c/section with this baby because "her records confirming her incision type arrived late". That was what she believed to be the reason for her repeat section. Of course, if that were true, I know that if she had really discussed with you how much she wanted a VBAC, you would have honored her request. I know that you would guide her down the path that would make her recuperation from child birth easier, her task of mothering two children easier, and would leave intact her trust in her own body's capabilities so that her faith in her God, and in herself is strengthened. That is a physicians duty. It is also a physicians duty to assist the client to a greater level of health. To lead her out of danger. A vaginal birth, even with one prior c/section is safe. Perhaps safer even than for women who have not had a cesarean. I have known first time mothers to have their uterus ruptured from an over anxious doctor and too much oxytocin. A woman experiencing surgical birth as you know from your study of birth statistics, has a 2-4 time greater likelihood of dying during her c/section, than during the vaginal birth journey. I have experienced childbirth twice, and an eight hour induction for a 16 week fetal demise. I have been through the mysteries of birth three times. When I comfort women during birth, I have an inner knowing of what she is feeling, her discouragement, her physical pain, her sense of aloneness, and her thoughts. I have been there. I know how to guide her through this. If one has never physically experienced labor and birth, and the moment that the baby is pushed out and placed all wet and warm in your very arms, one can not know the experience of birth on a deep and meaningful level. A man can never know the joy of child birth. Birth can not be known or experienced by observation. When we observe birth, we witness the outer shell, "a woman in pain". We, as the observers are filled with fear. What the observer experiences is a far cry from what the mother experiences. Yes, she feels pain, but she will tell that she felt feelings deeper than pain. A joy, a love, that supported her. As a practitioner in the hospital, we are even more in the dark about normal birth. We have meddled with birth so that we no longer know what is true and pure about the birth experience. Hospital practitioners rely on technology to see them through the mystery of each birth. Our thoughts are on the next possible thing that could go wrong, often due to the very technology we have invented. In hospital, we don't trust. And we impart that very fear to the women we serve. We remain blind to the dangers of technology, which we have used ritualistically to try and stave off our own fears. But the joy of birth is lost to us as we fret over the little things that might go wrong. I know from experience that hospital practitioners have long stopped crying at the miracle of birth. My dads at home break into sobs as they catch their baby with me. And mom is glowing so brightly the room hardly needs light. It is a sacred moment. It is a joyful moment. It is bliss in it's purest essence. The journey of natural childbirth is the last and final preparation from child hood, to becoming a mother. It is a holy transformation. God in his infinite wisdom knew women needed this moment to gather their strength. Birth is a woman's power! A surgical birth robs families of that transformative process. Even when dad is included in the surgery, or mom spends an hour bonding in the operating room. The hormones of birth are not the same during a surgical birth as during normal delivery. I will never forget my friend Shari, whose first baby was delivered surgically for breech. At two months of age she confessed to me that she loved my baby more than she loved her beautiful baby! Her son was 6 months old before she could say she loved him as much as she loved my baby. She breast fed, she didn't work, she was supported in the post partum. She didn't have an abnormal post partum depression. She had the ideal recuperation, and still her c/section interrupted that moment when a mother falls completely in love with her baby. That is a moment of indescribable bliss. That is the moment I would bless each mother with, at each birth... May God continue to Bless you, Sandra Stine, RN, MSN, CNM |