Birth Story

My 12-year-old daughter Maeve was a full day old before I met her.

I had suffered an amniotic fluid embolism before she was born by emergency Caesarean section, and spent the night of her birth, and the following day, in the intensive-care unit at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

My obstetrician promised me Jello if I would walk across the skybridge back to Prentice Women's Hospital, the NMH facility where Maeve was born. The real incentive, though, was the chance to see Maeve and hold her. She was quite a little beauty, with bounteous dark hair.

I don't remember much of our early experience of breast-feeding but it progressed slowly. Maeve, who was just shy of seven pounds at birth, had had several bottles of formula before we met, and the formula kept coming, along with breast-feeding.

No one told me this at the time, but the fact that I had hemorrhaged during Maeve's birth raised the question of whether I would be able to breast-feed at all. Severe blood loss can cause a condition called Sheehan's Syndrome, in which the pituitary gland, starved for oxygen, is damaged to the point where it cannot produce the hormones necessary for lactation. The damage can be partial or total, and can cause other problems as well.

Before Maeve and I went home five days after her birth, a couple of her pediatricians went through the drill with me: Every two hours, around the clock, I was to breast-feed, and then "top her off" with formula.

Now, remember, I had nearly died. I had undergone two emergency surgeries, a Caesarean section and a hysterectomy. I had lost a colossal amount of blood and had been pumped so full of fluid that I weighed thirty pounds more walking out of the hospital with a baby in my arms than I had walking in with her in my belly. I had several oozing sores from a reaction to the tape that had held in the needles attached to various drips. I was a wreck.

At home, we had a major learning curve to address. I had been planning to breast-feed Maeve exclusively, as I had done with her sister, Nora, and we knew nothing about bottle-feeding a newborn. My husband, Ben, who had taken several weeks off work, had to buy some bottles. We had to learn on the fly how to sterilize them. (No one in the hospital had addressed the need to sterilize bottles. Maybe they thought everybody owned a dishwasher. We didn't.) In the short-term, we bought prepared formula.

Then there was the every-two-hour feeding protocol. As if. It worked to a degree during the day, when Ben could help me, but our exhausted family slept through most nights, and Maeve regularly went for eight hours without food. She lost a full pound in her first month of life — a dangerous trend for a developing baby.

We had no help. I don't recall anyone from the hospital calling to see how things were going. We were so depleted that we stumbled from task to task, day to day, though we were in contact with Maeve's pediatrician. But I did persist with breast-feeding, and with time, my milk came in. By the time I went in for my six-week check-up, Maeve was gaining weight and thriving.

Perhaps because it was so hard in the beginning, I cherished breast-feeding Maeve. For the two of us, who had shared a near-death experience, it was a daily chance to refresh our bond. We continued on for three years, encountering more and more raised eyebrows as the months passed. One of my doctors in particular, a specialist I saw a couple of times a year, began to grow shrill after a year about the psychological damage I was doing Maeve by tethering her to me by the breast. I ignored him because breast-feeding had made him nervous from the get-go.

I finally stopped because Maeve was in pre-school and the principal, a woman I liked and trusted, told me I was holding back Maeve's social development by continuing to breast-feed her, by that time usually only at bedtime. I think now that the principal was wrong, but we did have to stop some time. I guess.

Here perhaps is one clue to the conundrum of why maternal mortality in the United States is relatively high for an industrialized nation, 12.7 deaths per 100,000 births in 2007: Two thirds of the women who died giving birth in New York State between 2003 to 2005 were obese, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The Safe Motherhood Initiative provided the figure.

Obese women are more likely to hemorrhage, have high blood pressure, diabetes, anesthesia complications, blood clots and strokes during pregnancy and childbirth.

Not only that, but very obese women, defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 35 or higher, are three to four times more likely to experience a Caesarean section with their first baby than other as first-time mothers are, Anemona Hartocollis reports in the NYT story.

Obesity is not only hard on mothers, but it may also pose problems for their infants. Babies born to obese women are almost three times as likely to die within their first month of life than those born to women with BMIs within the normal range. Obese women are also nearly twice as likely to have a stillborn baby, Hartocollis reports.

About one in five women are obese when they become pregnant, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ga. Obesity is gauged by a BMI of at least 30. A woman who stands five-foot-seven inches tall and weighs about 195 pounds has a BMI of 30.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner's first-person piece in the Los Angeles Times today about her impending birth is a candid, affecting counterpoint to a symposium the National Institutes of Health held last month in Washington, D.C.

With her first baby, born 2 1/2 years ago, Brodesser-Akner endured an emergency Caesarean section after 29 hours of labor, she writes. The experience left her traumatized. Now in the early weeks of her third trimester, waiting to deliver her second child, she is hoping for a vaginal birth after Caesarean, or VBAC.

The VBAC has been the subject of a lot of discussion lately. The NIH held a three-day conference on the topic that encouraged supporters of the VBAC -- and there are many -- by recommending that the VBAC be a more readily available option than it has been in the past.

In her essay, Brodesser-Akner writes, "I agree that women should have the right to try for a VBAC; I'm just not sure if they should try for one. Rather, I'm not sure if I should."

Of women who want a VBAC in a particular pregnancy, she writes, "the more honest and maybe the more uncomfortable way to say it, is that they want to give it a shot. They want a TOLAC, a trial of labor after a C-section."

Only 60 to 80 percent of women who attempt a VBAC actually get to have that vaginal delivery, Brodesser-Akner writes; the remaining women wind up getting another C-section. And perhaps 1 percent will have a uterine rupture (with a previous low transverse uterine incision, the most favorable for a VBAC; other types of incisions carry more risk), which can threaten the lives of both mother and child.

"When a uterus ruptures...things go wrong fast — and they go wrong big," she writes, adding that a high-risk obstetrician told her that one-quarter of those ruptures end in hysterectomies, brain damage and/or the baby's death.

"As that doctor said to me, 'The risk may be low, but it's 100% when it's happening to you,' she writes.

Brodesser-Akner is right. Every pregnancy is different, and I can assure you from experience that when you find yourself living out that small, shocking statistic, it is 100 percent real. And I am one of the lucky ones.

But why couldn't she be in that 60 to 80 percent of women who have the "normal" birth experience she says she desires? And if she births in a hospital with capable OB/GYNs who perform a good number of Caesareans -- and 24-hour anesthesiology coverage -- she should have the backup she requires in case of an emergency. That shouldn't be hard to find in Los Angeles.

Any birth can take a turn toward the worst-case scenario, and it's impossible to fully predict which ones actually will do so. It is probably all too easy for a woman who had a wretched experience during her last birth to imagine all the things that could go wrong.

But the numbers are with mothers in general; that is, the odds are in their favor. The fact that the pendulum might be swinging back toward a trial of labor in some challenging situations is, I think, a good thing. And I am by no means alone.

I would tell Brodesser-Akner what I tell my own daughters, not only about childbirth but about life in general: Don't let your fears rule your life. Don't be foolhardy, but don't think the cosmos is out to get you, either. I know it's a cliche, but it's true: The most dangerous thing many of us will ever do is ride around in  cars (or worse yet, on bikes), and nobody seems to spend much time worrying about that.

Whatever she decides, I hope Brodesser-Akner has a beautiful birth story to tell this time. It should be one of the best days of her life.

Image by Petteri Sulonen

Let's interrupt our Women's History Month programming to consider the news. The National Institutes of Health today begins a three-day session on vaginal birth after Caesarean, a hot topic, given that this practice, which was commonplace 15 years ago, has become scarce in the United States, at the same time that the Caesarean section accounts for nearly one-third of American births.

The VBAC has some passionate champions. While it isn't for everyone, it can work for many mothers, enabling them to avoid major surgery, and perhaps also to enjoy birth as they have always imagined it. The VBAC's decline has attended a steady rise in reliance on the Caesarean section, in part because the VBAC does carry a risk of rupture to the uterus, which can be life-threatening.

So it will be exciting to see what comes out of this conference, which aims to bring the best research available to bear on determining the safety and efficacy of the practice.

The VBAC is also one subject of an article by Denise Grady in the New York Times on Sunday, about a hospital in Tuba City, Ariz., where 32 percent of women who previously had Caesarean sections delivered vaginally, compared with a national average of less than 10 percent.

The rate of Caesarean births at the Tuba City Regional Health Care Corp., where about 500 babies are born a year, is 13.5 percent, less than half the national rate of 31.8 percent. The hospital is run by the Navajo Nation and is partially funded by the Indian Health Service, and it largely serves a Native American population.

What I love about Grady's account is how well this small, poor hospital appears to be doing in addressing one of the major tensions in the modern birth story -- how to keep the blissful experience of childbirth from being swamped by the technology that has been developed to keep it safe.

Dr. Howard A. Kelly

In 1888, nine years after Robert Felkin brought back his amazing story from Uganda, Dr. Howard A. Kelly of Philadelphia, a brilliant young obstetrician who would go on to help found the medical school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, announced at a convention of the fledgling American Gynecological Society that he had performed the first successful Caesarean section in Philadelphia in 51 years—that is, the mother had survived the operation.

Very few members of the audience he was addressing that day had ever attempted even one Caesarean section because, at the time, the procedure virtually always ended in the mother's death.

Robert Felkin, a British physician and missionary, reported witnessing a Caesarean section performed by an indigenous healer in Kahura, Uganda, in 1879 that featured antisepsis, anesthesia, cauterizing and sutures.

The woman had been given banana wine, and had been secured to a table with bark cloth at her chest and thighs. A couple of men held her waist and ankles. The practitioner cleaned his hands and the woman's belly with banana wine and water, and then he made one quick, vertical incision through the skin, and a second through the uterus.

An assistant cauterized the wound when it bled with a red-hot iron. The baby was lifted out and the placenta removed. The woman was rolled over so the fluid could drain out of her abdomen, and then the abdominal wall, but not the uterus, was sutured with bark cloth and sharp skewers. A paste made of chewed roots was slathered over the incision and covered with a banana leaf and a cloth bandage.

The skewers were removed after a week. The wound had healed by the time Dr. Felkin left 11 days later, and mother and baby, who mostly had been nursed by a friend, were doing fine, he reported.

What do women need when birth becomes difficult? The Averting Maternal Death and Disability program has identified a handful of intervention capabilities that should be in place for emergencies wherever babies are born.

These "signal functions" include having personnel on hand who are trained to administer drugs by injection -- antibiotics, anticonvulsants and "oxytocics," which can start or speed labor -- manually remove the placenta and other "products of conception" not leaving the body spontaneously, and perform assisted vaginal delivery -- with forceps, for example.

AMDD, a major initiative of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York City,  has worked with UNICEF and other partners for 20 years to bring down maternal-mortality rates in the developing world.

Its directive, issued in 1997, cites two additional interventions that might be necessary to save lives -- Caesarean section and blood tranfusion. These two go beyond the basics of a birth center -- in some parts of the world they are strictly wish-list items -- but they can often make the difference between life and death, as they did in our case.

AMDD doesn't include anesthesiology in its signal functions, although surgery is difficult without it.

We in the United States might view these interventions as humdrum, or even as irksome or worse if they become part of our own birth story, but behind the development of each one of them are amazing tales.

One big surprise of the WHO survey of Asian births was that "operative vaginal delivery" -- the use of forceps or vacuum -- had the highest death rate for mothers of any method.

Ninety-seven women died during the 108,000 surveyed births. Of those, 53 died during spontaneous vaginal births, as would be expected, given that those were the majority of births (75,000 deliveries), for a rate of less than .1 percent.

However, of 3,465 OVD births, nine mothers died, a rate of nearly .3 percent. In a commentary that accompanied the WHO report in the medical journal The Lancet, the editors called the figures "a sobering reminder of the dangers of operative deliveries," although they noted that most OVDs are "high-risk situations that cannot be easily avoided."

Twenty-three of the 16,500 mothers having Caesaean sections "with indications" during labor died (more than .1 percent), and one woman died of the 554 having elective C-sections during labor (a rate of nearly .2 percent).

The report also found that women undergoing elective Caesarean section were  far more likely to spend time after the birth in intensive care than women whose births were spontaneous.

The irony is that while many unnecessary C-sections are being performed in some areas, women in other areas who desperately need them are not able to get them, the WHO report notes.

The rising rate of birth by Caesarean sections has hit Asia, with China reporting that 46 percent of its births now end in surgery, according to a global survey by the World Health Organization reported in the medical journal The Lancet.

Nine countries were targeted in the WHO study -- Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam -- with births in both small and large institutions examined for two or three months in the capital city and two other regions in each country. In all, about 108,000 births were scrutinized at 122 institutions.

China had the highest rate of Caesarean births in the survey. The country with the next-highest rate was Vietnam, with 36 percent, followed by Thailand, with 34 percent, and Sri Lanka, with 31 percent.

Cambodia had the lowest rate of Caesarean births, 15 percent, which is the rate the WHO and other health groups recommend. The C-section rate over all for the Asian countries surveyed was 27 percent.