♥️About Planned Caesarean Birth♥️

There is a lot of negative talk around elective caesareans.

The ‘too posh to push’ narrative . I’ve never actually come across someone who was ‘too posh to push’

The ‘it’s major abdominal surgery, WHY would you choose that??’ narrative.

Listen, until you have walked in someone’s shoes, you can’t talk down on their choices.

The judgement really gets my goat.

I actually care for many clients who have elective sections.

And I’m 100% supportive of their choices.

I don’t mind how they came to their decision making, and I will support them unconditionally .

It’s actually really quite common for people who hire an independent midwife to EITHER want a straightforward vaginal birth at home OR an elective caesarean…..the key point is: BIRTH ON THEIR OWN TERMS .

Choosing a surgical birth is usually an attempt to cut out the stuff that has a high likelihood of derailing into a cascade of intervention, loss of control and trauma. It’s trauma prevention.

Oftentimes the decision is born from difficult experiences with previous births. And an elective section is the way to change the story and avoid a repeat of last time.

Elective sections are also sometimes chosen when antenatal care has been less than nuanced, scaremongery and risk focussed.

As an escape from highly medicalised vaginal birth.

Interestingly, people often have a hard time exercising the choice of elective caesarean, even though NICE guidelines stipulate that people should be able to determine mode of birth for themselves.

Even more interestingly, HCPs often try to deny this choice by offering highly interventionalist vaginal birth instead (induction/epidural/augmentation etc) even though they have just ‘counselled’ people about the dire risks of a normal physiological vaginal birth (which we know is less ‘risky’ overall).

Oh the irony.

Point is, elective sections are often a way to claw back control in an out of control scenario…..and for that they can be rather powerful

Choice is NOT only applicable in the context of physiological birth .

I for one wish we could simply trust people to make the right decision for themselves, while being offered good support, choice and nuanced information .

Freebirth, homebirth, induced birth, elective caesarean birth, epidurals, waterbirth, it’s all good, as long as chosen happily and/or proactively .