ICAN VBAC (and BAC and BAC and BAC!!!)

Okay, for those of you who aren’t in the know:

ICAN = International Cesarean Awareness Network  (www.ican-online.org)

VBAC = Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (http://www.vbac.com/index.html)

First, let me say that the ideal thing to do is to prevent the first Cesarean. But with one out of four women in the USA being cut open in birth (and in some hospitals, one in two!), this obviously ain’t happening. More and more women are being cut for no good reason and then finding they are not allowed to VBAC in the hospital with the very OB that cut them open. So, where do we go from here? Well, some of us go to La Leche League meetings, maybe a Moms Club, or maybe a psychiatrist. Too many of us isolate and think we’re broken and/or crazy. lazy and weak- and, perhaps even worse, alone in thinking we are broken and/or crazy, lazy and weak. Some of us find our way to ICAN, and I was reminded at an ICAN meeting last night how crucial it is that we find those moms so they don’t remain alone in their anger, guilt, regret, remorse and sadness.

I found ICAN when my eldest son was about 5.5 months old. I was on a Yahoo list for Elimination Communication (EC) a.k.a. “diaper free” babies, when I met a goddess named Krista. She was smart and witty and for some reason I trusted her. So it really shivered me timbers when she suggested, ever so gently, that my so-called emergency C-section may not have been a true emergency. She even went as far as to tell me that I may not have even needed a Cesarean. In other words, it might have been avoidable, preventable, unnecessary, or whatever adjective you want to use to describe it. The very suggestion kept me awake for a few nights. I scoured the internet for The Truth, and I found various versions of it. But time and time again, on sites like Birthlove (www.birthlove.com), and ICAN and Kmom’s Plus-size Pregnancy site (), I read my own very raw story over and over again. It seemed the more I read, the more I realized that my situation wasn’t so unique, that my Cesarean may not have been a life-saving procedure (in fact, it may have been life-threatening), and worse still that I may have consented to it by agreeing to an induction on my due date for no reason other than fear of a large baby.

More to come…