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| A pregnant woman talking to a doctor. Image source. |
Wrote this a while ago, when I was 30 weeks pregnant
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So I'm 30 weeks pregnant, and just had an ultrasound to check how the baby is doing. Turns out my baby is breech, which means its butt is pointing down. Ideally we want the head to be pointing down, so the head can come out first when it is born.
The doctor said we don't need to be concerned about it, because the baby will probably turn on its own before 36 weeks. (A full-term pregnancy is 40 weeks.) But if it doesn't turn, I would have to have a c-section.
See, most obgyn doctors believe that, if the baby is in a breech position, it is more risky to try a vaginal birth than a c-section. If you search online for more information about this, you'll find there are some doctors and midwives who think vaginal breech births don't have to be risky; we don't need to always choose a c-section if the baby is breech. So from what I can tell, this question might not be settled, and maybe in the future there will be different standards about when to choose a c-section and when to try for a vaginal birth.
But anyway, the situation right now is that most doctors say you have to have a c-section if your baby is breech. Why? Because it's less risky. If you have a vaginal birth where the head isn't the first part to come out, there's more of a chance the baby might get stuck and can't breathe, or the umbilical cord will get pinched and cut off the blood supply for the baby- and these things can lead to injury or death for the baby. So even though the majority of the time, a vaginal breech birth would turn out fine, it's better to just not risk it. Let's do a c-section instead.
So I'm learning about all this, about the risks and the reasons that c-sections are preferred, and I'm thinking about "pro-life" propaganda that talks about doctors as if they are looking for any excuse at all to kill a fetus. The way "pro-life" advocates talk about so-called "partial-birth abortion" (which is not a real thing) and "late-term abortion" (also not a real thing). About "ripping babies out of their mother's womb." The way "pro-life" advocates talk, you'd think there are tons of obgyn doctors running around, trying to find ways to sabotage a 9-month fetus's health, completely heartless about if it lives or dies.
But here I am, in the actual reality of the real world, where my doctor says if the baby stays in the breech position and doesn't turn its head down, then I would have to have a c-section because that's the least risky for the baby. (His actual words were "you don't have a choice" which I found kind of interesting, but I don't think it's useful to analyze the exact words because that bit was just kind of an offhand remark in the context of a conversation about "is there anything I should be doing now so I can avoid having a c-section?")
Yes, here in the REAL WORLD, doctors are very careful about protecting a fetus's life. If you go to get an x-ray, the doctor or nurse will ask beforehand if you could be pregnant, just in case. When I had an unrelated health problem about a month ago and went to see a different doctor for that, I made sure to tell him I'm pregnant (even though it's obvious) and I asked if the treatment would affect the pregnancy, and he ended up giving me something different than the normal antibiotics, because we didn't want to affect the baby.
So I hear this "pro-life" rhetoric which says there's a huge widespread problem where doctors are looking for reasons to kill a perfectly healthy 8-month fetus, and wow, nothing could be further from the truth. If you actually read about pregnancy and birth and c-sections and everything, you see that it's not like that at all. It's about weighing the risks and choosing the option that has the LEAST risk for the baby and the pregnant person.
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Update: Yes, after this, the baby did turn and I had a normal vaginal delivery :)
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