To C-sec or not

The essence of motherhood is the birthing process. The experience of childbirth is unique to every woman. During the work-in-progress stage, many women zip past the nine months with great ease where as others struggle in the initial months of pregnancy itself with some issues. Whatever be the feeling, as women, we love to talk about the time during our pregnancy and the difficulties or none of it that we faced. We talk about the labour pain that we went through and the triumph at the end of it. Hours of pain bore with great valour to bring a new life into this world.

Pregnancy is not always easy as a breeze for many and labour pain is not the only aspect of childbirth. The other aspect is no labour pain. The no labour pain pregnancy or complication marked pregnancy or prolonged labour pain leading to still nothing is culminated with Caesarean sections. C – sections are done when there is a medical indication to do so. These could be breech child position i.e the heads up position(oh the woman has lost the toss here), placenta problems, complications occurring during the normal birthing process due to which the other method of delivery has to be adopted or any other complication affecting normal vaginal delivery. Grandmas/Sasumas tend to pass on a lot of gyan to their pregnant daughters/ daughter in laws saying they must work a lot during the nine months to ensure normal delivery. They even change facial expressions when normal delivery doesn’t occur. “She’s not too strong”, “I told you to keep working but u needed to rest more”, “She doesn’t want labour pain”. All this even though normal delivery wouldn’t have been possible due to complications. They love to keep harping about it and bringing home the point of how important it was to have normal delivery. Well they are not harping for no reason, caesarean does carry negatives for the woman in question but if there are no two ways about getting the child out, then feeling guilty shouldn’t be top priority, taking good care of yourself and the new one should be.

These days even though it’s not medically indicated, women and their families still opt for c -sections to avoid labour pain purely. Many families give their gynaecs a proper muhurat time at which the child should be born and for that purpose they need caesarean. Vaginal deliveries will prolong the auspicious time. Poor normal delivery born children. Wrong timing is it??? They want to be oblivious to the negative impact of caesarean to the child and to themselves too.

When I was expecting my child, the doctor had two deliveries to handle. One me who was undergoing labour pain since night and the other was a muhurat based caesarean delivery. The doctor kept shuttling between the two of us. For me it was a whole new experience. My husband waiting at the door of the labour room seeing me undergo the pain. The other woman wanted the easy way out. Both ways, healthy babies were born under the care of Dr. Sandhya. My son all of 13 now is a handsome and intelligent boy and the other child too must be growing up gracefully. It’s purely a personal choice to C Sec or not.