Don’t Cut Me Again: VBAC Anthology Review

I am rather well-disposed toward Angela Hoy. I wrote a post about her VBAC blog when she was expected her son and, as a writer, I use her Writer’s Weekly site when I am looking for more freelance work.

More importantly, through writing this blog I am interested in sharing information with women about pregnancy, birth experiences and recovering from childbirth whether it was the kind of birth we wanted or the kind we ended up with. All three of those interests converge in the VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean) discussion.

I was thrilled to receive a review copy of Don’t Cut Me Again: True Stories of Birth After Cesarean compiled by Hoy.

I read the book in two ways. First, I looked at it as a written product. Then, I looked at it as a piece of birth activism.

As a product, I was disappointed. The collage of baby pictures as a cover is an example of how cute can’t save a poorly-conceived design. There are a few typographical errors in the early chapters and, in one of the footnotes, the word contraction has been unfortunately replaced with the word transaction. I make similar mistakes while writing this blog on a regular basis. The difference being that I have not committed Babylune to the permanence of paper and the posterity publishing in book form implies.

Clearly, production values are secondary to ideas, to the basic communication of essential information that supports and empowers women. Don’t Cut Me Again! becomes a tome of birth activism when the collection dares to wade into the contradictions and diverse complexities of personal experience. Together, the birth stories both defy a medical establishment that is driven by liability concerns while it celebrates several OBs who support women as thinking, intuitive, capable beings. The essays, each written by women who have had between one and three VBACs, guide the reader into a birth culture populated by mid-wives and doulas without exalting these professions with the kind hero(ine)-worship that can be dangerous and, in the case of one mother who was given the drug cytotec by her midwife, did become dangerous.

Balance is the defining feature of the collection. There are plenty of stories from women who were duped into C-sections by doctors who were more concerned with their own convenience than the health of mother and baby, or who ended up with surgical births through poorly-administered pain relief that disconnected the mother from monitoring her body. Refreshingly, there are also stories from women who are grateful to sensitive health professionals whose skills saved mother and child from serious harm.

Overall, this is a book that encourages women to educate themselves about their birth options, to remain involved in the birth process and to insist on making their own decisions. Not only is that radical thinking. It makes for compelling reading.