Cesarean Awareness Month!

As the recent Grassroots Network message referenced, April is Cesarean Awareness Month. There is an article available from Associated Content about it here. There is also more at ICAN, the home of cesarean awareness, prevention, and advocacy.

Appropriately, articles about cesareans have been catching my eye this week. From a newspaper in Sydney, Australia we have: Caesarean beliefs 'misguided.'

From the article: "WOMEN who choose to have an elective caesarean in the belief that it will prevent incontinence and genital prolapse are 'misguided' and may be putting their health, and that of their baby, at unnecessary risk.

That is the view of Jenny King, a urogynaecologist at Westmead Hospital, who questions the right of women to choose surgical births to avoid pelvic floor problems.

Evidence is mounting that repeat caesareans cause harm and there are doubts that they provide the protection they were thought to provide, she said."

From a completely different perspective there is also a recent article called In praise of the c-section: I'm not sorry I didn't have a natural birth. There is a lot of food for thought within this article and I hope to have a chance to post about more it soon. There are fundamentally different worldviews among women when it comes to birth and birth issues (a medical model/view and a normal/health/holistic/midwifery model/view). Though it can be extremely difficult to read "the other side" and try to really "hear" what someone from that worldview is saying, I think it is really important to pay attention to differing perspectives. Having your "ideology" challenged causes you to deepen, refine, evaluate, and analyze your perspective and beliefs (and sometimes to change them).

There is also a cesarean awareness video called Frozen Smiles linked to from the Passion for Birth blog (this is one of my favorite blogs to check in with every week!).

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Molly
CfM Blogger