- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
This is such a weird subject, I think-- I am really surprised that so many women are drinking the c-section coolaid and buying into this notion that vaginal births cause lifelong incontinence in any more than a tiny fraction of cases, not to mention brain damage to babies (what the--? I have a wooden nickel to sell the person who mentioned that one). The c-section rate has increased very recently in large part because of litigation and overly-cautious doctors, normalizing it statistically, and so women now see it as a "choice" or an "option" because it is so common. Which is totally fine if you want to go that way --who cares how women give birth?-- but this notion that it is safer, or that vaginal birth is "dangerous" or typically damaging to women's bodies is just simply not true.
This issue kind of has parallels to the bottle vs. breast feeding debate. There was a time when the medical community convinced women that formula was "safer" because it was created in labs, and women's bodies were defective and unable to provide for infants as well as science. Lo and behold, turns out that was a crock, albeit a profitable one for formula companies. Has anyone bothered to mention how much the medical establishment stands to gain by normalizing expensive c-section births and scaring women into doubting what women's bodies have done competently for all of human history?
I think it embarrassing that women are so ready to doubt themselves and their abilities in so many ways in the face of medical trends and pressure, this just being yet another example (plastic surgery, anyone?). I am giving birth in May, and call me crazy and risk-loving, but I am going to face fetal brain damage and lifelong incontinence by trying for a vaginal birth, on the odd gamble that my body knows what it's doing.
