What happened is this: In my 39th week, I am induced because of high blood pressure. At the hospital, I am given Pitocin, a synthetic form of the labor-inducing hormone oxytocin, and Cervidil, a vaginal insert used to dilate the cervix. Within two hours, my contractions are one minute apart. I had lasted as long as I could without an epidural because I had read that they sometimes slow dilation. That’s the last thing I need: I’m at a pathetic 2 centimeters. My doctor comes up with a solution for the pain: a syringe full of a narcotic called Stadol.

“I have a history of anxiety,” I tell the nurse who has brought in the syringe, as I always warn any medical professional who wants to give me drugs. “Is this drug OK for me?” “It sure is,” she says.

It is not. Within 10 seconds, I begin hallucinating. For five hours, I hallucinate that I’m on a swing that’s soaring too high, that houses are flying at my face. My husband has fallen asleep on the cot next to me, and I’m convinced that if awakened, he will turn into a monster — literally. I’m aware this notion is irrational, that these images are hallucinations. But they are terrifying. I buzz the nurse. “Sometimes that happens,” she says …

By noon the next day, 24 hours after I had arrived, I am only 3 centimeters dilated. The new nurse, a nice lady, tells me the induction isn’t working. “Your blood pressure isn’t even high anymore,” she says. “Tell the doctor you want to go home.”

When my OB comes in, I say, “I’d like to stop this induction, if that’s possible. I’m worn out. I hallucinated all night … I just don’t think this is working out.”

“OK,” he says. “Let me examine you. If you’re still not dilating, we’ll talk about going home.”

My previous dilation exams had been quick and painless, if not entirely pleasant. This one takes a long time. Suddenly, it hurts. “What are you doing?” I scream. “Why does it hurt?”

No answer.

“He’s not examining me,” I scream at my husband. “He’s doing something!” My husband grips my hand, frozen, unsure.

I scream to the nurse, the nice one who had suggested I go home. “What is he doing?” She doesn’t answer me, either. I writhe under the doctor’s grasp. The pain is excruciating.

The first sound I hear is the doctor’s directive to the nurse, in a low voice: “Get me the hook.”

I know the hook is for breaking my water, to speed my delivery by force. I scream, “Get off of me!” He looks up at me, as if annoyed that the specimen is talking. I imagine him thinking of the cadavers he worked on in medical school, how they didn’t scream, how they let him do whatever he wanted.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he says. He breaks my water and leaves. The nurse never looks me in the eye again.

Eleven more futile hours of labor later, I am exhausted and terrified when the doctor comes in and claps his hands together. “Time for a C-section,” he says. I consider not signing the consent form, ripping off these tubes and monitors, and running. But the epidural I’d finally gotten won’t allow me to stand up.

It’s nearly midnight when I hear a cry. My first emotion is surprise; I had almost forgotten I was there to have a baby.

I was desperate to find someone who could tell me what had happened to me was normal. To say, “You hallucinated? Oh, me, too.” Or “My doctor broke my water when I wasn’t looking. Isn’t that the worst?” Nothing …

Now, I’d never loved my doctor … I’d found him patronizing — “Normal!” he’d shout at me, when I asked a question — I thought his assuredness might be a good antidote to my anxiousness. It seemed to work, until it didn’t.

… I also didn’t have a birth plan … Sure, I had a plan for the birth: Have a baby using whatever breathing method I’d learned in the hospital’s birth-preparedness class, maybe get an epidural. But I didn’t have the piece of paper that so many of my friends have brought to the hospital with them … in my opinion, the very act of creating such a contract was to ignore what labor is: something unpredictable that you are in no way qualified to dictate.

… people who hear my story ask … Did I consider a home birth? A midwife instead of an obstetrician? … The answer is no. I am not holistically minded. My philosophy was simple: Everyone I know has been born. It can’t be that complicated.

The women who ask me about my preparations for my first son’s birth — who imply with these questions that I could have prevented what happened to me if I’d been more diligent — are part of an informal movement of women who are trying to “take back” their birth — take it back from the hospital, the insurers and anyone else who thinks he can call the shots.

But hospitals aren’t so interested in giving women back their birth … stipulations dealing with labor and delivery (“I want only one medical professional in the room at a time”) garner barely a glance. University OB/GYN in Provo, Utah, even has a sign that reads, “…we will not participate in: a ‘Birth Contract’, a Doulah [sic] Assisted, or a Bradley Method delivery. For those patients who are interested in such methods, please notify the nurse so we may arrange transfer of your care.”

… This question of whether I could have prevented my trauma has lingered in my mind since that day; now that I am pregnant again, it has become deafening. I have a chance to do it all over. Would I benefit from thinking more holistically? Should I bother taking back my birth?

During my pregnancies, friends gave me two books; their spines are still barely cracked. The first is called “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth.” … The other book is “Your Best Birth” by Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein; it’s an offshoot of their 2008 documentary, “The Business of Being Born.” Their urgent message is that women who want to deliver vaginally can do so if no one intervenes. Instead, doctors and hospitals are doing all they can to “help” the laboring woman along … and failing. Inductions like mine, epidurals given early in labor, continuous fetal-heart monitoring — all of them have been associated with a higher risk for cesarean section. The result is an epidemic — 32 percent of U.S. births were C-sections at last count, the highest rate in our history. Individual surgeries may be medically necessary, but as a matter of public health, the best outcomes for mothers and babies come with a rate of no more than 15 percent, according to the World Health Organization.

Sam … was five months pregnant when watching “The Business of Being Born” convinced her that hospitals could be dangerous and a home birth would be more meaningful. She and her husband found a midwife … and spent the rest of the pregnancy preparing.

After 24 hours of labor, Sam’s contractions were two or three minutes apart, yet when her midwife examined her, she was only 3 centimeters dilated. The midwife gently told her that she was nowhere close to delivering, despite her contractions, exhaustion and pain. Sam asked to be taken to the hospital.

The change of scenery did her good. “At that point, I had been in labor for 40 hours,” she says. “I entered the relaxed zone. The epidural took the edge off … It was a sacred space.”

After her son’s delivery, Sam passed out, having lost 50 percent of her blood volume in a postpartum hemorrhage. Needless to say, she was relieved that she was in a place where blood transfusions were readily available … she believes she will want midwife care at a hospital next time.

… Bialik’s first birth didn’t go the way she wanted. After three days of labor at home, she stalled at 9 centimeters, one short of the goal. Her midwife suggested they go to the hospital, where after a natural childbirth, Bialik’s son spent four days in the neonatal intensive-care unit. “My son was born with a low temperature and low blood sugar, which isn’t unusual in light of the fact that I had gestational diabetes,” she explains. “I understand doctors need to err on the side of caution, but there was nothing wrong with my child. All of our plans for bed sharing, nursing on demand, bathing him — gone.”

The experience was scarring. “I felt a sense of failure that I had to call my parents from the hospital,” Bialik continues. “Yes, I know vaginal birth in the hospital is the next best thing to a home birth.” …

I point out that natural childbirth in the hospital — her “failure” — was my best-case scenario. But I also understand when she says, “Everyone is allowed her own sense of loss.” She realized her vision when her second son was born at home.

The second time around
I don’t consider myself a candidate for a home birth. The risk of uterine rupture from an attempt at vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) makes it unthinkable … I’m also not really interested in a home birth … But I’m also not interested in another C-section …

So I’d like to attempt a VBAC, but I know that it doesn’t always succeed. I have a new doctor — the 10th I interviewed following my son’s birth — at a new hospital, and he has agreed to help me try. But my primary goal is more modest: not to be retraumatized. Even now, my heart pounds at the sight of hospital receiving blankets, the antiseptic smell of the maternity ward.

The common thread in Bialik’s and Sam’s stories that impressed me was how supported and safe they felt with their midwife …

In an e-mail Bialik sends after our meeting, she goes back to my idea that some women weren’t meant to have babies the holistic way. “There are those among us who believe that if the baby can’t survive a home labor, it is OK for it to pass peacefully,” she writes. “I do not subscribe to this, but I know that some feel that … if a baby cannot make it through birth, it is not favored evolutionarily.”

I think about my appendectomy, back in 2003. Had I not made it to the hospital in time, I would be dead. What would it be like to refuse medical intervention? I’d call my family, say my good-byes. “I’m sorry,” I’d say. “But I’m not evolutionarily favored. It’s time for me to go.”

This attitude, that everything was better back when there were no doctors, seems strange to me. C-sections, although certainly done too often, can save lives. Orthodox Jews still say the same prayer after childbirth that those who have been in near-death experiences say — and with good reason. A birth that leaves mother and child healthy may be commonplace, but it’s also a miracle every time.

As the weeks pass and my belly grows, I can’t stop thinking about Sam. Her pregnancy was a sacred time, and she had truly looked forward to labor. Is that what I should try for — a meaningful birth, as well as an untraumatic one? At what point had people like Sam and me learned to feel entitled to a meaningful birth?

“I think that birth should be a beautiful experience,” says obstetrician Kimberly D. Gregory, M.D. She’s the vice chair of women’s health care quality and performance improvement at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. “It should be exactly the way you want it, and doctors should intervene only to preserve the health or life of you or your baby.”

Naturally, one would assume that Dr. Gregory advocates birth plans. When I ask her this, she laughs. “We always say, ‘If you show up with a birth plan, just get the C-section room ready,’” she says. “You get everything on that list that you don’t want. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Dr. Gregory led an unpublished study that compared women who took traditional hospital birth classes with those who employed Bradley-like training and a birth plan. The birth-plan group trended toward a higher C-section rate and more interventions. “There’s a certain personality type that tends to be more anxious. Maybe the anxiety hormones themselves put them at risk,” Dr. Gregory theorizes. “It seems that being open and honest and choosing the right doctor is probably a better option than writing everything down. Walking in with this list appears to set up an antagonistic relationship.” …

… In the past three weeks, I’ve had the same dream. I’m in a field (I believe at Ina May Gaskin’s Farm), and women in braids are dancing around me as my baby is born, painlessly, joyously. As I reach down, I notice my C-section scar is gone.

I wake up upset. Am I truly under the impression, subconscious though it may be, that taking back this birth will undo the damage of the last one?

“I don’t understand this phrase ‘take back your birth,’” nurse-midwife Pam England, creator of “Birthing From Within,” … tells me. “Who took it? What would a woman tell herself it meant about her if she failed to meet the criteria she made up for ‘taking back’ her birth? I am concerned that this phrase, meant to generate action and a feeling of empowerment, may actually be generated by or feeding the victim part of her.”

England is right: Having a childbirth that I deem successful this time will not change what I haven’t overcome from the first. I try to find a way to make what my doctor and nurses did to me OK, but my mind rebels. I feel loss — no, theft — of an opportunity for me to have a baby the way so many other women do: a carefree pregnancy, a labor that could still go any way.

Maybe I’m not so different from the women I spoke with, after all. Bialik had a successful natural childbirth but felt like a failure because it was in the hospital. Women who had a C-section also used words like failure. Perhaps part of the problem is that our generation of women is so ambitious, so driven, that we don’t know how to do anything without quantifying it as a success or failure.

According to Dr. Gregory, women are now requesting a C-section for their first birth, even without indication. “A lot of people are uncomfortable with the unknown,” she says. Plenty of people are wary of C-sections by choice, from holistic moms to obstetricians. But isn’t this, too, taking back your birth? Refusing to be out of control seems to me the epitome of taking it back. You don’t have to have an unattended birth in the woods to be considered a real woman.

Deciding that you can’t control the uncontrollable — and committing to that decision when you are, in fact, out of control — is also taking back your birth. It’s what your grandmothers did. It’s what their grandmothers did.

With this, I realize that I have already taken back my birth, but not as part of any movement. I have stopped judging women who take extra precautions as defensive and started to understand that everyone has to find her way.

I don’t know how this story ends. I’m still not convinced my body was made to deliver vaginally. But here’s what I do know: I will insist on kindness. I will insist on care. And I hope I will be open to being treated kindly. It’s harder than it seems.

The proportion of surgical births should be reduced to 20 per cent by 2015, from 30 per cent now, and first-time mothers would be attended by the same midwife throughout labour.

The Minister for Health, Carmel Tebbutt, said the directive was ”designed to support women to have a birth that is as free as possible from invasive medical intervention, while also recognising that labour occurs across a wide spectrum … The safety of mother and child are, of course, paramount.”

The president of the Australian College of Midwives, Hannah Dahlen, said: ”For the last 15 to 20 years [birth interventions] have just gone up and up and up. At some point we have to start coming down again. The policy says, ‘Let’s stop, let’s regroup and try to get a balance.’ ”

She emphasised it would remain ”the safest option for some women to have a caesarean section, and women should not feel lesser because they had to have an intervention”.

Only about 13 per cent of women now achieved a vaginal birth after a caesarean, while up to 80 per cent could do so if properly supported. The NSW targets specify a 30 per cent rate by 2012 and 50 per cent by 2015.

Dr Weaver said the appropriate caesarean rate was about 25 per cent of all births, because the current generation of women represented ”an older population, a fatter population, and a lot of first-time mothers”, Factors which raised their risk.

… 6 am we were at the hospital. I took a ton of food in with me, because I was not going to do this with no fuel. We got settled, the first nurse got us all checked in did all the paperwork and started the IV. They had a change of shift, so the next nurse, Anna, come-on and she was wonderful.

Anna spoke with us and I told her how things were going to go. To call the doctor if she needed but I was the one birthing a healthy baby, and unless the stats of baby changed, this is what I wanted …I told her we would be doing the pit slowly. I only wanted an increase every 45 min to an hour, not the every 15 the Dr. had ordered. She called the Dr and it was agreed. So off we set. We had a cervical check and I was barely dilated 2 and my cervix was very posterior.
I had no idea how the pit would work on me and baby so we just waited. Annabella was so squirmy, they couldn’t keep her on the monitors, Anna had to hold them on and move with her …

After awhile the Dr came in and wanted to look for Annabella and when she couldn’t find her well stated the baby was breach and we needed to go have a c-section. I looked at this woman and told her no, baby had not flipped I would have felt it, and I was not getting a c-section today. That if baby had turned, then we would turn off the pit, and I would go see my Chiropractor to help move her around again. I don’t think the Dr liked me. I didn’t care. So she ordered an ultrasound just to see, and I was later told she knew baby was breach and had started the paperwork to send us on.

Annabella was in fact not breech. She was head down just not really engaged. I felt so good knowing I was right. All this happened about 11am. There had been no increase in the pit for awhile … We started upping it again.

During these times since Annabella wasn’t staying on the monitor anyway, I was up. I walked and rolled on the ball. I leaned over the ball to do pelvic tilts. Pretty much anything I wanted. I really enjoyed that. I was eating and drinking … At 2pm I declined another cervical check …

I was standing and rocking my hips back and forth during the waves, and they were nice. Just these waves, they never were uncomfortable. I didn’t feel I needed to go in to off during them so I just stayed in center moving as I felt I needed to. Anna would come in and check baby with a Doppler, and the let us do our thing.

About 4 the Dr was back, she wanted to see where we were so we checked. I was 4cm, and my cervix was no longer posterior, about 70% effaced.

• The Dr. said I was not where she would like to see me by now. She wanted to break my waters and move things along.
• I told her no thanks; I felt we were doing fine. Baby was fine, so was I.
• She didn’t look surprised. She did get quite nasty though, and told me if I didn’t do things the right way this will land in a c-section and was putting myself and child at risk. That she was going off shift and there would be someone else.
• I … looked her square in the eye and told her that my child in fine.
• I am not having a c-section to please her that if she had not noticed this was MY birth. I was the one doing things, until someone can show me that my child was unsafe I would do this all night if needed. That was the RIGHT way.
• Also that it was a good thing that she was going off shift, because she was fired. I didn’t want her back in my room. I didn’t need any one in there being negative. I was sure there were other people around who could catch this child, and if not I would do it myself.
• She left the room in a quick hurry, and as I turned around again, my husband and … the nurse were all just kind of staring at me.

My husband was stunned, and asked if I could do that, firing the Dr. I told him I didn’t care if I could or not, she wasn’t coming back to my room …I don’t know how things happened from there, but another Dr. came in and introduced himself about 45 min. later and was way more respectful than that woman had been.

We continued, at 7pm the waves were more intense and almost on top of one another … I started to shake and shiver but I wasn’t cold. I vomited all over, and then with the next wave I felt pushy. soon there after my waters broke during one of the pushy waves.

A study of hundreds of thousands of British schoolchildren found that those born at 39 weeks are more likely to need extra help in the classroom than those delivered after a full 40 weeks in the womb.

… With most planned caesareans carried out at 39 weeks, the finding raises concerns that women who have the operation for non-medical reasons could unwittingly be endangering the health and prospects of their children.

… Almost 18,000 had been classed as having special educational needs. The term covers learning disabilities such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and dyslexia, and physical problems such as deafness and poor vision.

The risk was highest in those who spent the shortest time in the womb. For instance, babies born at between 24 and 27 weeks were almost seven times more likely to need help at school than those delivered at 40 weeks. But even being born just a few weeks early made a difference …

Those born at 37 weeks were 36 per cent more likely to have learning difficulties, while for those born at 38 weeks the figure stood at 19 per cent.

Babies born at 39 weeks … were 9 per cent more likely to have special needs …