The Myth of Normal 125

At age thirty-four Dolman was already the mother of a seventeen-year-old son, born when she herself was a scared teenager. Because her labor had progressed slowly, likely owing to her stressed state of mind, she’d had a Csection. She was intent on a vaginal birth next time. After three years of trying, she and her partner got pregnant with a daughter. “From the first moment I vowed that I would not have a cesarean section this time around. I would deliver my daughter the way that Nature intended me to. I would trust my body, I would get the proper support I needed to do this.” She did her due diligence, interviewing as many doctors as she could. “They all said, ‘Once a cesarean, always a cesarean.’ They weren’t even willing to speak with me about it. ‘I’ll take you as a patient,’ they told me, ‘but we’re going to be scheduling your cesarean.’” Medically speaking, the doctors were completely off base. By the time of her daughter’s conception, the safety of vaginal birth after cesarean section (VBAC) had long been documented, with the supposed risk—the uterus tearing under the pressure of labor contractions—shown to be negligible, posing no impediment to an unmedicated delivery. Indeed, a high-risk perinatal specialist who had evaluated Dolman’s uterus with a detailed scan affirmed that her chance of such a mishap was no greater than if she had never been pregnant. In a sign of how deep the indoctrination runs, the obstetrician still balked at the vaginal option. The one doctor who had finally agreed to support Dolman’s preference for natural labor got cold feet at the last possible moment. Following a routine fetal-monitoring session, which showed no abnormality, Dolman was physically barred from leaving the hospital, threatened with arrest, and browbeaten into accepting the surgical delivery of her daughter. After this harrowing experience, she suffered what she calls “a version of PTSD . . . I was unable to function in my daily life. I felt like a failure as a mother, unable to comfort or touch my daughter in her first moments of life. I felt like I had nothing to do with her even being here. I felt disconnected from her. She cried if she needed me, but I didn’t feel that I was enough. Throughout the first year of her life, I cried myself to sleep every night.”