April is Cesarean Awareness Month and there are a lot of opinions out there. A lot of the opinions tend to skew negative and I wanted to introduce another view, one from a mother who’s had both a vaginal birth and a c-section that resulted in two tragically different outcomes. 

My first pregnancy, with my beautiful baby girl Elizabeth, was a perfectly normal and boring one. No issues or extra appointments. Every month passed by smoothly, every appointment was marked with smiles and cute ultrasound pictures we hung on the refrigerator. Her birth...was much different. On the day of her birth, things progressed in a typical way, or at least that’s what I was told. During the 12 hours I was at the hospital, there was never alarm or cause for concern until Elizabeth made her way down the birth canal. Even then, I was calm, the people around me were calm and I thought everything was going smoothly ... until she appeared. When she was handed to me, I held her for 10 minutes, looking into her beautiful eyes and soaking in that life-changing moment when a doctor told me something was wrong with her breathing and she needed some medical attention right away. In shock and total compliance, I handed her over to him for what would be the beginning of the worst 6 weeks of my life. Elizabeth was born with meconium aspiration, a seemingly common situation that most babies survive. My baby, however, did not.

I’ve replayed these moments in my head over and over and over. I’ve thought to myself that only if we knew something was wrong or if I had a C-section, maybe I could have saved her. I wished I had a C-section. I know it’s futile to look back and want the past to be different but I live with this thought a lot, this idea that cesarean sections can save lives. 

This feeling was compounded this past year when I gave birth to my son, Jackson, via C-section. Something we didn’t plan on but hadn’t ruled out. We were taking a ton of precautions during this pregnancy and planned to induce early to help mitigate any chance of meconium aspiration happening again but fate stepped in. In my last appointment before I was going to be induced, my son, at 37 weeks, decided to turn breech. After hours of emergency consults and given my history, both of my doctors strongly encouraged me to schedule a C-section for that next morning at 7am, 12 hours away. Knowing everything I knew, I didn’t hesitate. I knew this was the safest and best way for my family. My son Jackson, sleeping in his crib right now, is proof of that.

I wanted to share this extremely painful story hoping to pave a new narrative for expecting moms, who might think a c-section is a bad thing. I know for sure it saved my son and can only wish it could have saved my daughter. How your child makes it into this world doesn't matter as much as if they make it.

We need to stop judging how babies are born and start celebrating the miracle that is life, how fragile it all really is, how a few seconds can mean the difference between life and death, and how C-sections save lives. 

jodi xx