Why I’ll Never Again Give Birth in a Hospital

Thanks to Creative Minority Report for sending me in this direction.

Here is a link for you to read if you want to spit your morning coffee all over the computer like I did. This briefly reports on the story of a mother whose baby girl was taken from her for five years because the mother refused to sign a consent form for a C-section, instead insisting that she would only consent if it became medically necessary.

It didn’t. She gave birth naturally, and lost her child for five years.

You know, I’d prefer to give birth in a hospital just in case. I’d prefer to have the medical team there for back-up. But quite frankly, hospitals scare the ever-living you-know-what out of me. After having my last doctor lie to me about hospital policy because he didn’t want to deal with a woman who refused an epidural, after being forced to lie flat on my back for four hours of labor with Sienna because the nurse “needed an accurate read,” after vomiting and nearly passing out after the drunk anesthesiologist gave me way too much medication in my epidural when I was in labor with Charlotte, my labor with Liam, with lovely, caring, gentle midwives letting me labor in a tub in my husband’s arms seems like a dream. What’s terrible is that for many women, it was a dream they’ll never know. Women should be treated with more respect. That’s real feminism for you. Don’t cut us open because you’re so sure we just can’t handle it. Let us give birth the way we were meant to.

I assure you, we can do it.

(NB: I sigh at having to include this, but I know that someone will raise hell over this post, so allow me to clarify that of course I understand that C-sections are sometimes medically necessary. They were for my mother, or we would all have been born dead. In fact, my certainty that C-sections are sometimes medically necessary is why I state, at the beginning of the post, that I’d rather give birth in a hospital just in case. But I also think that the current C-section rate of over 30% nationally and 80% at my local hospital is abhorrent and nothing short of fraud.)