Please don’t let an unnecessarily traumatic birth experience keep you from having more children and the family you planned.

This is one of the saddest (& most frequent) stories I encounter.

The story of someone who had a traumatic birth now questioning whether they want more children.

These people had a plan - a vision of their future family - and what they were put through just erased it. Their experience of pregnancy and birth was so scary and they felt so out of control that they now question whether going through it again is worth it.

The thing that makes me the most angry?

Most birth trauma is avoidable, and therefore totally preventable in the future.

What happened was DONE TO THEM. It didn’t have to happen. It’s almost never an unavoidable fluke.

Sure, there are true emergencies that could not have been prevented. And for those situations we are all thankful for emergency medicine.

But for the most part, that’s not why birth trauma happens.

It happens because we don’t trust women and don’t trust birth.

We intervene unnecessarily. We weigh and measure and critique every inch. We scan and test and monitor.

We introduce doubt - make you second guess your instincts - and then you let us take the wheel.

So when we tell you that your baby is too big, you let us induce you or schedule a c-section. And that’s where it begins.

If you have had a traumatic birth and are questioning whether you want more children, please don’t let a bad experience take your future from you. The next time doesn’t have to be that way - you just need to choose your providers and birth location very carefully.

The more control you have, the better.

Don’t let anyone take your family’s future from you. They’ve taken too much already.