I saw this article on CNN.com and thought I would share it here. It’s a human interest story about a mother who decided to go against her doctor’s wishes and have a vaginal birth after having had Csections.
Why are you posting about this, Kcurly? you might be asking. Well, this mom has a beautiful head of natural hair. In the article, she appears to a healthy, chunky twistout going on.
Mom defies doctor, has baby her way
On Thursday, December 2, as Aneka sat at home nine months pregnant, the phone rang.
It was her obstetrician wanting to know where the heck she was. Did Aneka forget that today was the day for her cesarean section? How could she have forgotten?
No, Aneka hadn’t forgotten. She hadn’t shown up intentionally.
“She told me, ‘You’re being irresponsible. Your baby could die. You could die,’” Aneka recalls. Then the doctor hung up.
Aneka (she doesn’t want her last name used) had already resolved to not have a C-section, even though the doctor told her it was absolutely necessary. She wasn’t going to be opened up surgically, no matter what her doctor said, no matter what any doctor said.
In some online communities, Aneka is a hero who defied the obstetrical establishment and gave birth her way. To many doctors, however, she’s a risk-taker who put her and her baby in peril by giving birth at home.
‘No, no, no, you can’t do this’
Aneka’s story begins nine years ago with the birth of her first daughter, Nya. After 10 hours of labor, her doctor told her she wasn’t progressing quickly enough, and she needed a C-section.
“I didn’t know any better, so I said OK,” Aneka says.
In a postpartum visit six weeks later, the doctor told her she’d needed the surgery because her hips were too small to pass the baby.
“I thought to myself, what’s she talking about, I don’t have small hips,” Aneka remembers.
Four years later, doctors told Aneka she couldn’t deliver her second child vaginally, since Nya had been delivered by C-section. Studies show when a woman gives birth vaginally after having had a previous C-section, there’s a higher chance her uterus will rupture since she’s pushing against scar tissue.
Then again, when Aneka was pregnant with her third child, son Adasjan, she had a C-section for the same reason.
When she became pregnant with her fourth child, a boy named Annan Ni’em, she expected to have a fourth C-section. But about seven months into her pregnancy, Aneka started to read more about childbirth online, and noticed a documentary by actress Ricki Lake called “The Business of Being Born,” a film released in 2008 that questions the way American women have babies.
I was a little bit angry after watching documentary,” she said. “It made me realize I’d been robbed of the birthing experience. If possible, all women should be allowed to birth naturally.”
“I asked my doctor if I could try delivering vaginally, and she said no,” Aneka says. “I called the hospital and they said they wouldn’t allow it, and I called three other hospitals and they wouldn’t let me deliver vaginally, either.”
The closest hospital that would let her try to deliver vaginally was in Manassas, Virginia, about 90 minutes from her Maryland home. She and her husband, Al, decided that was too far.
So just seven weeks away from her December 1 due date, Aneka contacted the International Cesarean Awareness Network, an advocacy group that promotes vaginal births after cesareans, or VBACs.
“She asked me if I could find someone who would deliver her vaginally,” remembers Bobbie Humphrey, who works with ICAN. “She started to cry because she’d heard ‘no, no, no you can’t do this’ so many times.”
But Humphrey told her yes, that she knew of a midwife who would be willing to deliver her baby at home.
An article in Midwifery Today, written by Barbara Stratton, the National VBAC ban chair for ICAN, lists several approaches women have used to protest a VBAC denial.
On December 5, three days after the C-section that never took place, Annan Ni’em was born at home. He weighed 9 pounds, 6 ounces and was delivered after 20 hours of labor, and, she says, just four minutes of pushing. He was completely healthy.
“We were all crying at the delivery,” says Humphrey, a doula who assisted the midwife at the birth. “It was very emotional. I was just so proud of Aneka.”
You can read the rest of the article here if you like.
Side note: Everyone in that family has awesome hair!
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