Why Your First Birth Matters – Our Lives, Our Births

Why Your First Birth Matters

If you are expecting your first birth and labor, you have a strong possibility of having a surgical delivery. More than 1 in 3 women in New Jersey can expect to deliver their babies in an operating room. There is nothing wrong with cesarean section in and of itself. Cesareans save lives. The reality is that surgery is often performed when a life or death situation does not exist. Just a point in the labor where the routine obstetrical interventions have eliminated the likelihood of a vaginal birth happening. Once we have unnecessarily taken away nature’s control of this natural process, we must necessarily intervene in an unnatural way.

Your First Birth Sets the Stage for Future Births

Once a woman has had a cesarean birth, she has a decision to make about how she will give birth in the future. The “safest” birth is a repeat vaginal birth, which is why a woman’s first birth matters!   Obviously, any woman with a prior surgical birth does not have the option for that. She must decide between 2 types of birth that carry significantly more risk-Vaginal Birth After Cesarean and Repeat Cesarean. So we see that it is of greatest importance that a woman have every opportunity to deliver vaginally, the first time and thereon, in order that her childbearing years will be as safe as possible.

Ep. 5 in the Our Lives, Our Births Series – First Time Moms

This episode of “Our Lives, Our Births” focuses on the Midwives of New Jersey’s efforts and philosophy about birth specifically focusing on a woman’s first birth. We have been working diligently over the past 5 years to develop a program that improves a woman’s chances of having a vaginal birth despite the obstacles she faces in our current culture. One of the biggest obstacles is our culture’s general acceptance of a need for surgical birth up to 3 times more often than the World Health Organization recommends. We hope this episode will help women realize that they need to take an active role in preventing the need for cesarean for their first birth. We hope to illustrate that first-time moms can give birth with confidence just like women have done since the beginning of time.