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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My best friend tried a VBAC after a scheduled C section for a breech baby. She had some really fanciful notions about vaginal childbirth being some kind of empowering and beautiful experience she has missed out on and felt like she has failed in her first for having a section and was hell bent on trying for a vaginal birth. Some of her friends had had vaginal births tried to disavow her of these unrealistic expectations and to explain to her how painful and difficult the experience was but she wouldn’t hear it. She ended up having a long and painful labor and then a traumatic emergency C section which she said was far worse than the scheduled one. I think the only benefit she has now is that she can still run easily with no leaking or pelvic floor issues. But even after all that she still seems to think she missed out on something from not having a vaginal birth. [/quote]

Screw you.[/quote]

Why? If mom and baby are healthy and no one died or was permanently injured, WTF does it matter if baby came out of your belly instead of your lady bits? Plenty of vaginal births are horrific and injurious but the VBAC community refuses to hear that. [/quote]

I think the issue is that people like you discount other people's preferences if you don't share them. Many woman want to experience labor and vaginal childbirth. People like you are always offended by and dismissive of the reasons they want to do that. My reason was that I believe that childbirth is an experience that is uniquely female and I wanted to experience what billions of women before me experienced. I did find that birth was an empowering and beautiful experience, which was obviously largely a function of both of my births going smoothly and everyone coming through them healthy and happy. I would certainly feel differently if that wasn't the case, but before my first baby was born (10 years ago), I would have felt disappointment at not having had that experience. I know that women like you like to discount the mother's experience of birth as selfish and trivial, but not everyone feels that way. I don't think that my desire to experience vaginal childbirth is selfish, particularly since I absolutely would not trade "experience vaginal childbirth" for the health of my child. My sister recently had an emergency c-section with her first baby, and she plans to try for a VBAC next time. I know that she feels like she missed out on the experience that I and our mother had in having babies vaginally, even though she also feels grateful that her baby was healthy.

There are also complications to c-sections which the "VBAC moms are selfish" community refuses to hear. [/quote]

So what about all the moms who think childbirth is going to be an amazing and beautiful experience and end up with horrible injuries like prolapse or 4th degree tears? And all the C section moms who only hear beautiful empowering stories of vaginal birth and then who feel like they missed out on something, not recognizing they may have dodged a massive bullet? The ever-present narrative around C sections being bad and vaginal births being empowering and amazing is reductive, binary, and inaccurate. It makes anyone who didn’t have the perfect vaginal birth feel like total sh*t and people like you who got lucky yet don’t realize it intolerably arrogant.[/quote]

You know, not everything is about you. I can feel good about my experience and understand why someone would want to have that experience without putting your experience down. You can't do that. It's like someone having a good experience makes your experience worse somehow. I have never understood it.

Neither of my births was "perfect." I completely recognize that luck plays a role. I also do not believe that the way a birth goes is 100% due to luck because that seems quite reductive to me. Are you suggesting that there is nothing anyone can ever do to have a vaginal birth without complications? I think there are plenty of things women can do - for example, have good prenatal care and establish a good relationship with a high quality healthcare provider that is based on trust and respect. That is something you can do. I also think that understanding the mechanics of labor and delivery as well as complications can help with having a good experience. Obviously neither of those things is a magic solution, but when things were complicated during my second child's birth, the relationship I had with my OB and my knowledge of what was going on based on knowing a lot about labor and delivery changed the way that I felt about it.

I don't think that there is any kind of ever-present narrative for birth. For example, I didn't get an epidural with my first child. The majority of my friends questioned that decision. "Why would you do that to yourself?" they asked, as though I was doing something dangerous and stupid. Why did they care? Why is it impossible for you to accept that some people actually do that an empowering amazing birth? It's like you think that's a lie or something that they should not feel good about. I'm not sorry that I don't feel appropriately apologetic for having a good experience.[/quote]

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