Vaginal Birth After Cesarean

Vaginal Birth After Cesarean - A sweet reminder why we do this work.

Vaginal Birth After Cesarean is one of those life-altering and deeply empowering moments in a woman’s life. For many, it is not just about how the baby is born, but about reclaiming something that felt lost.

A cesarean can leave behind more than a scar.

It can leave a quiet grief… a lingering sense that something meaningful was missed. A rite of passage interrupted. And for many women, that grief is carried silently, because our culture does not always make space for it. After all, you have a healthy baby… shouldn’t that be enough?

And yet, for some of us, it isn’t that simple.

Words that stay with us

Attending VBAC births has been one of the greatest honors of my career and one of the most healing parts of my own story. Because I understand that feeling too well. My first two babies were born by cesarean for “failure to progress” and a “small pelvis.” Words that, at the time, felt like facts… and settled into my heart like failure.

For those of us who have had our babies delivered surgically, there can be a quiet knowing that something was missed. Not always. Not for everyone. But for many. And layered on top of that can be something even harder…

Shame.

How dare we feel disappointed when we have a healthy baby?

There are no easy words for the conflicting emotions that can follow a cesarean birth. I remember feeling selfish for even acknowledging my disappointment. Embarrassed by it. So I carried it quietly. I often wondered… if my cesareans had been true emergencies, would I have felt differently?

Maybe.

But that wasn’t my story.

And I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had been taken from me. After all, the women in my family had been birthing ten-pound babies for generations. Why would my body suddenly be incapable? It didn’t make sense.

When I finally gathered the courage to speak those feelings out loud, the responses cut deeper than I expected.

“Just be thankful for your healthy baby.”

“Mothers and babies used to die before cesareans.”

Statements like that, while true, carry an unspoken message… That wanting both a healthy baby and a meaningful birth experience is somehow selfish. I didn’t have the language at the time to explain what I felt. I just knew it was there.

A longing.

A pull toward something I hadn’t yet experienced.

When I was seventeen, I didn’t fear natural birth. I grew up hearing stories from my great-grandmother about her own mother leaving in the middle of the night to help neighbors birth their babies. Birth, to me, had always felt normal. Sacred. Something beautiful to anticipate.

So when I labored for thirty six hours with my first, the last twelve of them on Pitocin, I assumed the intensity was simply part of the process. I had no epidural. No one offered. I didn’t ask. When the doctor whom I had never met told me my pelvis was too small and I needed a cesarean, I didn’t know how to question it.

I just cried.

And reluctantly agreed.

But something deep within me stirred, resisted, even then.

“I will agree,” I said, “but you have to cut me so I can have a vaginal birth next time.”

Even now, I don’t fully understand where that came from, only that it felt deeply intuitive.

And mattered to me.

My second birth followed a similar path.

A doctor who told me I had a 50/50 chance of VBAC, but didn’t believe I could birth a baby over six and a half pounds. A few hours into labor, at only three centimeters, I was told once again that this baby was too big. I pleaded for more time and was told it was impossible.

Again I cried and again I reluctantly agreed.

It felt all wrong, yet I had no idea how to stop it.

Those words followed me. As I did more birth work, years later that I began to understand just how much our words matter when talking to woman in her most vulnerable moments. It’s like our brains soak up those words, the ones that support and the ones that can wound - and we should choose them more carefully.

“Failure to progress.”
“Small pelvis.”

These are not neutral phrases when spoken to a woman in labor or early postpartum.

They stay. They shape how she sees herself.

When doubt settled in

Before getting pregnant I was determined to do the research and make decisions based on information, not fear. I found a cesarean support group in Seattle.

For the first time, I heard stories that sounded like mine. For the first time, I felt understood. I sat in that room and cried through the entire meeting, years of held emotion finally finding its way out. There was no judgment. Only validation. And I knew…

I was not alone.

When I got pregnant with my third, I carried more than just anticipation. I carried doubt. I carried loaded phrases about my body’s inability to birth a big baby. I had questions. A quiet ache I didn’t fully understand. I went to the VBAC support group faithfully and when I shared my fears, I was met with voices telling me I could do it and they knew what they were talking about. They had done it too! My midwives helped me through each and every time I doubted.

Finally, the big day arrived: another long, drawn out labor. I never gave up, even when I doubted and my team never let on if they did too. That was the recipe that kept me moving forward. When I was pushing, I still had doubts. But, my midwife didn’t. After only an hour, they started telling me they saw his head and I kept thinking my body was going to fail me any second.

And then… I reached down to see if they were exaggerating. I felt the soft curve of warm, bald little head, and in that moment something changed. Something deep and undeniable. My body was doing it! I threw my head back, laughing and crying all at once as relief and disbelief collided. right behind it came a wave of healing like nothing I had ever experienced. As he was lifted onto my chest, the words flew out of my mouth before I could even think about them:

I looked up into my husband’s blue eyes and whispered, “Babe. I did it!”

At the time, I thought that was such a strange thing to say when meeting my baby boy for the first time. That is until I began attending vaginal births after cesareans. Then I heard it again.

And again.

And again.

“I did it.”

Some whispered it in awe.
Some cried it through tears.
Some shouted it with everything they had left.

Some of the sweetest words I’ve ever heard, “I did it.”

My fourth baby was born at home, weighing ten pounds even. That birth completed something in me. He was only minutes old when I declared, “I’ll be the best midwife now. I’ve done it all.”

Of course, I smile at that naive proclamation in one of triumphant moments in my life. In that moment, it felt like truth. It didn’t take long before I found my niche as a VBAC doula. I attended dozens of VBACs. Many in hospitals, some at home and eventually more than 150 births overall.

Three powerful words

But VBACs…

Those were always my favorite. Because of that moment. That sweet realization. The moment she reaches down and feels her baby head emerging from her body. In that moment her face changes. It’s the moment she knows she did it.

Then come the words, “I did it.”

Sometimes whispered.
Sometimes cried.
Sometimes shouted through tears and laughter.

And every single time… It is an honor to stand in quiet awe and bear witness to healing, strength, and most of all, watching her reclaim something she thought she had lost.