Babble Talk: Do We Still Judge Women For Having C-Sections?

I have had a C-section. So has Tova Mirvis. So have many women. So why do so many of us still feel like we’re being judged for it?

That’s one of the questions Mirvis tackles in her Babble essay, “In Praise of the C-Section,” a thoughtful piece in which she acknowledges the sense of inferiority that can result from having a Caesarean, as well as the need — however irrational — to justify one’s reasons for doing so.

“When I was pregnant with my third child, I accidentally wandered into a conversation in which two mothers I’d recently met were extolling the virtues of homebirths and water births, midwives and doulas,” she writes.
“When the well-meaning moms asked about my birth plan, I told them I was having a scheduled C-section. Their faces conveyed self-righteous disapproval and my mind was immediately awhirl in disclaimers: I was
having the scheduled C not because I wanted the convenience, not because I was afraid of labour, not because I didn’t want to miss my manicure appointment. ‘My oldest son would have died if I didn’t have a C-section!’ I said instead.”

Every woman who has a C-section has a different reason for doing so. In Mirvis’s case, as she describes in more detail in the essay, she went that route with all three of her children because of complications, including last-minute ones during her first delivery that threatened her son’s health. Other moms may elect a C because they’ve lost, or nearly lost, a child in the past and want to take whatever steps they can to control the process. And still others, like me, have C-sections because there is no other option. My son was breech and few OBs are willing to risk a vaginal delivery under those circumstances.

Are any of these mothers less motherly because of the types of deliveries they had? I may be biased since one of them is me, but I think most would say, no, of course not. But what about a woman confronted by no extenuating circumstances or complications who chooses to have a C because she doesn’t want to have a vaginal birth?

Aha, this is where the judgment comes in. Having a C-section when you don’t necessarily need one is indicative, to some women anyway, of a lazy, shallow and self-absorbed mother, someone who doesn’t have the cajones to do a little pushing, grunting and panting. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I can understand where the perception comes from. Elective C-section mums have the same reputation as the boss who takes credit for all of her employees’ great ideas: they want to revel in the glory without having to do any of the hard work.

But here’s the truth of the matter, something Mirvis wisely points out at the end of her essay: How we deliver our children ultimately has nothing to do with what kind of mothers we are. So maybe we should stop judging the elective (or non-elective) C-section mothers, or feeling guilty for not having vaginal births, or developing inferiority complexes because we broke down and got an epidural. Maybe we should realise that the test of our motherhood really begins once that healthy child arrives on this Earth and in our arms.

As Morvis writes, “If the experience of childbirth is in fact a crucial process, then let it be the process of teaching us that our children will emerge in ways varied and complicated, not necessarily in times or manners of our choosing, neither made in our image nor as proof of our prowess. Let birth remind us that, with children, so little goes according to even the most well-drawn plan.”

Well said.