The VBAC Blog

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Panel Urges New Look at Caesarean Guidelines
“A panel of medical experts on Wednesday recommended steps to reverse a trend that has dismayed many pregnant women: the increasing difficulty of finding doctors and hospitals that will let a woman try to give birth normally if she has had a Caesarean section in the past…”

Home births on rise
“…But others defend midwifery as a safe option for women and say Oklahoma’s growth in midwifery births is not unique.”

Weighing the risk and rewards of vaginal birth after a C-section
“She knew the statistics about vaginal birth after a C-section, that only about 60% to 80% who try for a VBAC actually have one. But she also knew that when the time came, she’d just have to decide for herself…”

Groups seek balance with births
“For many years, the thinking in the medical field held that “once a C-section, always a C-section. But then surgeons developed a new incision, the so-called bikini-line, for cesarean sections that opened the door for women who had delivered by cesarean to try to deliver vaginally in subsequent pregnancies, a so-called VBAC or vaginal birth after cesarean…”

Options shouldn’t be limited by a C-section
“After she had to undergo an emergency cesarean delivery with her first son nearly two years ago, Erin Sarauer remembers a difficult recovery featuring a long hospital stay and limitations on how much weight she could lift…”

Why vaginal birth after C-section is getting more attention
“I honestly thought I’d never be able to do it,” Winslet said in 2004 magazine interview about the birth of her son in New York. “It was an incredible birth. It laid all the ghosts to rest. It was really triumphant.”

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DON’T CUT ME AGAIN! True Stories About Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC)

Have you had a cesarean section (c-section) and are you pregnant again? Is your doctor or hospital trying to force you to undergo another c-section, just because you’ve had one previously? Are they spewing statistics about the potential consequences of Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC), but not telling you how dangerous another c-section can be?

Click HERE to read more.

Click on bold items below to read the articles.

VBACs: Breaking the repeat cesarean cycle
Monica Cornish delivered her first child by cesarean section. “My baby was breech and my recovery was difficult due to some problems with the incision healing,” Cornish says. “They basically had to reopen it and leave it open for a week to drain all the blood out…

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Doulas of Central New York seeks positive birth stories

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Birth by appointment
When Emma Lincoln was getting ready to deliver her first child, she told her doctor to schedule a Caesarean section. Neither Ms. Lincoln, who lives in Salisbury, Md., nor her baby had any medical issues that would warrant the surgical delivery.

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You Try Saying No to a C-Section
According to Listening to Mothers II, the largest survey of women’s experiences during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period, one quarter of the survey participants who had cesareans reported that they had experienced pressure from a health professional to have cesarean surgery…

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Home Birthing is *Gasp* Safe!
A large-scale study in the Netherlands has found no difference in death rates of either mothers or babies in 530,000 births. Whether you give birth in the hospital or in the comforts of your own home, the stats are the same.

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Washington Times Examines Increase In Elective Caesarean Section Deliveries
Changing attitudes toward c-sections, doctors and insurance companies’ concerns about malpractice lawsuits, and some women’s perception that scheduled births are more convenient have led to the increase in c-sections, which carry risks of complications from anesthesia and longer hospital stays and recoveries than vaginal births….

Iowa’s Cesarean Numbers Climb to All-Time High
“Houchins blames the higher number of c-sections on the choice of many doctors to avoid the vaginal-birth-after-cesarean method (VBAC).”

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Secondary Cesarean Sections Pose Risk Factors
“Doctors warn most expectant mothers with a previous Cesarean section about the risks of vaginal birth following a Cesarean (VBAC) but not about the risks of multiple Cesarean sections both to mother or her baby.”

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Birth by surgery: The skyrocketing cesarean rate
“Two weeks before Kristi Ashley gave birth to a son in 2007, an ultrasound exam estimated the baby at a hefty 12 pounds, 10 ounces — too big, her doctor believed, for a safe vaginal delivery. After the child weighed in at 9 pounds, 4 ounces in the delivery room…”

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C-section births fall
“North Adams Regional Hospital performs significantly fewer c-sections than other hospitals around the state…”

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Need for transparency increases as Cesarean section rates rise
“Research conducted by the World Health Organization shows that these risks of cesarean outweigh the benefits when the c-section rate exceeds 15%.”

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C-Section horror
When doctors wait too long to operate. This occurred in South Africa.

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High blood pressure killed Chandra after C-section
“Shortly after a C-section to deliver her son, Chandra Mahabir’s blood pressure raised to such a high level that she suffered blood clots in her lungs and pressure on the brain causing her to die”, an autopsy revealed.

Click HERE and read both of the top articles.

Here’s a snippet:

In perhaps hundreds of these cases, the children have all the classic symptoms of regressive autism; following vaccination a perfectly healthy child experiences high fever, seizures, and other illnesses, then gradually, over about three months, loses language, the ability to make eye contact, becomes “over-focused” and engages in stereotypical head banging and screaming and then suffers developmental delays characteristic of autism. Many of these children had received the autism diagnosis. Yet the radioactive word “autism” appears nowhere in the decision.

Instead the vaccine court Special Masters rest their judgments on their finding that the vaccines caused some generalized brain injury, mainly Encephalopathy/encephalitis (brain inflammation) or “seizure disorders” — conditions known to cause autism-like symptoms….

ALSO SEE: http://www.nvic.org/