Ch. 1 (Pt 1): Birth Exactly as Designed

REPRO MYTH: Reclaiming Birth, Healing History, and Restoring Power

This is REPRO MYTH: a serialized release of my first unpublished book on women’s bodies, birth, and the systems that have shaped how we understand them.

Each chapter builds on the question: What if much of what we’ve been told about birth and our bodies…isn’t actually true?

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The first time I was in labor, half the unit rushed in to stabilize the baby. The second time I was in labor, I was unconscious, and the only thing that moved was a shrugging shoulder. As a nurse, I sensed something wasn’t right. Postpartum, the guilt settled in like proof: I was a failure, or so I thought. But these weren’t personal failures, they were institutional successes.

To come to that terrifying conclusion, I had to reckon with the fact that the system wasn’t broken, it was working exactly as designed. And I had to go back and relive those experiences if I was ever going to move forward.

I was 25 years old, propped on my knees, with my ass in the air. As blood rushed to my face, I thought about how this baby, my daughter, should be here by now. I had spent months staring at her ultrasound pictures, imagining her button nose. Savoring the way her scrunchy head would smell of earthy sweetness and soap after her first bath.

This was my first pregnancy, and I thought it would be joyful, sacred even. But all I felt was anxiety and fear. Lines and tubes tethered me into the hospital bed, monitoring every moment.

I had just fallen asleep after getting an epidural, when I was jolted awake by the rapid commotion that came with the team of strangers in my room. Before I had a chance to shake off my confusion, hands pressed all over, and the room turned sideways.

The team had flipped me over, and I heard a pressured voice remark that the fetal monitor heart rate was dropping. But all I could think about in that moment was my exposed backside. There was no outright mention of “crash c-section” but the statement hit the air like an inevitability. I’d seen plenty of sudden escalations before. It just didn’t dawn on me that I would be the one on the bed careening down the hall into a surgical suite.

Thankfully, after repositioning and an injection the fetal heart rate stabilized. The monitor was once again chirping away happily. Staff filtered out of the room, and just as quickly as it had begun, it was over.

By early morning, they placed me in lithotomy and the resident physician, and her entourage of medical students, delivered me. A healthy baby and no surgery.

According to the chart, everything went perfectly. But somehow, I ended up completely hollow.

Why did I feel like something had just been done to me, not with me?

Just a few hours earlier, I had been working on the other side of the rails. I was on a weekend string of twelve-hour shifts on a mother/baby unit. That day, I had been in labor since the seven AM shift change, but I continued working through it.

I had a bad habit of not listening to my body. Later in life I’d learn that the technical term is a lack of interoception. Before I had the words, I had the conditioning. I’d learned since youth to master holding it. The ways I’ve contorted my pelvic floor would make a physical therapist cringe.

Worse, nobody teaches you in nursing school how to balance unending call lights and phone calls, charting, and medication management, and how to actually self-prioritize. So you hold it, push through, and don’t cause a fuss.

I recognized the contractions early that morning. But I chalked it up to Braxton-Hicks and assumed they would go away. Instead of sitting down, eating, or hydrating, I kept on working. By the three o’clock afternoon shift change I picked up a new patient, and my labor picked up as well.

I leaned over to check the vital signs of a new baby boy, while his recovering mother told me how her water broke at Fazoli’s. And suddenly, as if she had imparted her labor magic on me, my water broke right there. Warm and unmistakable, running down my leg and into my scrubs.

Frozen in place by shock, we locked eyes as my pants soaked through. I awkwardly excused myself, waddled to the door and leapt out. My panic was already rising. This was not something I was ready for. I called my charge nurse from the toilet:

“Hey, uh, so my water just broke.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” I could see her flipping through the staffing log. “All right, you better head downstairs.”

I quickly stuffed toilet paper into my pants with shaking hands, grabbed my bag, and then stopped by my patient’s room to say goodbye. When I told her what had just happened, she broke out in uproarious laughter. Pure joy, while I was still silently panicking. I chuckled nervously alongside her, said goodbye, and headed down to labor.

In my naïve, magical thinking, I imagined my birth would be thrilling and fast, probably unmedicated, just like the ones on TV. I felt even more sure of this given the fact that my bag of water had just ruptured dramatically in a patient’s room.

I’d seen plenty of deliveries in my training; had religiously studied my OB textbook. The process was not a mystery to me. But what I didn’t understand was the culture, and what happens when it comes down on a body inside the system.

Because that’s where I was: in the land of deliverance. A place optimized for throughput, risk management, and liability mitigation.

I had chosen a kind midwife for this birth, who I thought would protect my experience. But what I failed to understand was that she practiced inside a hospital system built specifically for surveillance and quick turnaround. When it came to birth, decision-making authority rested with the physicians and administrators who directly oversaw my midwife. Authority certainly was not conferred on laboring women. When it came to choice, protocol overruled.

With a sinking feeling I remembered that my midwife was on vacation. She had gone, and with her went my entire birth plan. I didn’t have a doula or anything written down. I hadn’t even read a birth prep book. I had no idea how different it would feel to be in the bed, instead of beside it.

I labored quietly and compliantly for a few hours. I felt a smidge of confidence when one of the nurses complimented me on how well I was doing. But that was just code for how manageable and quiet I was. Having gone hours now without food and water (protocol wouldn’t allow it), my body was quickly tiring out. My uterus, the prime muscle working hard, was running out of energy to sustain it.

When my husband finally arrived after his hospital shift in the evening, the contractions intensified.

Soon after I was asking for the epidural. And soon my pain receded like the flowing tide of the ocean washing relief over me. The room was quiet again, I was quiet, save for the beep of the machines. I appreciated those few moments of rest, before the chaos of the monitor dropping.

In many ways my labor was much like an out of body experience. I didn’t want this intimate moment of my life, delivering my first child, to be done in front of a bunch of strangers.

After the many hours of being managed and then stared at for forty minutes of pushing, a nurse put my daughter on my chest, and I felt disconnected.

I thought I was supposed to sob and feel rapture, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything. Why did women on social media seem to always do that? What was wrong with me? Later, I looked over and saw my baby on the warmer waving her arm towards the lights. The room had emptied, the unit had suddenly gotten busy, and staff had moved on. My husband was asleep on the couch and my legs were still numb from the epidural. I ached to hold my baby, I was ready now. But I couldn’t reach her.

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This is the REPRO MYTH series. New chapters are published Thursdays.

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Next: Chapter 1, Part 2