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I ran into a beautiful mother a few weeks ago. She and I had met when she was close to giving birth to her baby who is now a toddler, and I hadn’t seen her since that first meeting. She had decided, based on a number of factors, to give birth in the hospital after all, and I had never learned the outcome of her birth. On this day, when we met again, she came up to me and immediately said, “You know, I really wish that I had made a different choice, and that I had stayed home to give birth.” Then she described a hospital birth experienced which she recognized as an unnecessary and rather tragic cascade of events that had never been in her control. After a long long birth process she had finally received a c-section. She told me that she fought with doctors, and was aware the whole time that everything that happened hadn’t needed to take place at all.

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It was hard for me not to get teary, but I told her that it was amazing that she saw things this way, and that this experience might just be a bit of a roundabout path to a very different, very euphoric birth, a bit later. She really got that, and it was very moving to see that her difficult experience had brought such clarity and courage.

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Because so few of the surgical births that take place are medically necessary; because so many of the surgical births that take place are a specific result of torturous, inhuman and anti-female hospital standards and policies, most women who receive c-sections would never have been cut had they been supported by people who understand normal birth, with compassion.  But it’s very difficult to acknowledge this, if one is in the position of having to recover physically and emotionally from surgical birth.  All women are trained from the moments of our own birth, to identify with our oppression, to some degree. For all of us, giving birth is a rite of passage, and an experience that defines or at least shapes and influences our experience of motherhood.  Questioning the authority of doctors, rejecting the notion that our bodies failed, and deeply exploring the brokenness of industrial birth and how we have been implicated in it can be overwhelming, especially when recovering from major surgery.  Questioning, and certainly rejecting what was done to us, tends to lift a veil that may have settled over any number of the interconnected systems that many of us take for granted.  Doing so is painful, and can leave us feeling alienated from others, and exposed.  It is often much safer and more comfortable and less strenuous, to simply accept that the c-section saved your life, and your baby’s life, and that’s that.

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We women who have given birth in our power, spontaneously, at home, are truly privileged, and I think we have an obligation to plant seeds wherever we go–to speak up gently, and kindly and compassionately, and to share our stories and to tell other women that we’re not special, and that they can do this too. (And if you’re planning your own home birth outside of the medical system, check out my book on manifesting your own ecstatic birth, here).