You have about 40 weeks to mentally wrap your head around giving birth. You'll read and watch birth stories unfold, take birthing classes, and write out your plan to share with your birth team. You'll be as ready as you possibly can be, but what happens when those contraction waves start flowing? What happens when reality hits and you realize that you are actually going to birth a baby?

More than 1/3rd of unplanned c-sections that occur in the United States are due to women “Failing to Progress” during their labor.   This statistic is upsetting.  If mothers were properly educated on labor, birth, and their rights during the entire process, the statistic would be drastically lower. A failure to progress generally means a failure to wait, a failure to allow the woman’s body to work, and a failure to let a woman own her body.

You have in your arms a beautiful child already, maybe more than one. You are all happy and healthy, but something about your previous birth haunts you. Something says, “I want to do it different next time.”

It seems that the only acceptable vaginal birth is one that follows the not-so-normal bell curve that people assume labor to be defined.  You know, the dilating a centimeter an hour, and pushing immediately at 10 centimeters.

It's not easy to move on after losing a baby. It's not easy to watch as the rest of the world continues spinning like normal while you find it hard to put one foot in front of the other. Somehow, though, we do it, but we don't have to do it alone.

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a document yesterday that discusses the healthy laboring mother and how to help her have a successful birth.