Episode 367 Katie's Unmedicated Breech VBAC

The VBAC Link

Katie has had a Cesarean (failure to progress), a VBAC, and most recently, an unmedicated breech VBAC!

She talks about the power of mom and baby working together during labor. She is 4’10” and attributes so much of her first successful VBAC to movement.

Katie’s most recent baby was frank breech throughout her entire pregnancy. After multiple ECV attempts, she exhausted all options to seek out a vaginal breech provider. She was able to work with providers while still advocating for what felt right to her.

Though there were some wild twists and turns, this breech vaginal birth showed Katie, yet again, just what her body is capable of!

The VBAC Link Blog: Why Babies Go Breech & 5 Things You Can Do About It

The VBAC Link Blog: ECV and Breech

How to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for Parents

Full Transcript under Episode Details

Julie: Welcome, welcome. You are listening to The VBAC Link Podcast. This is Julie Francom here with you today. I’m super excited to be sharing some episodes with you guys this year and helping out Meagan a little bit and keeping things rocking and rolling here at The VBAC Link.

I am excited to be back, and I am especially excited to be joined by Katie today who has a really, really incredible story about her three births. Her first was a C-section. Her second was a VBAC, and her third was an unmedicated breech VBAC. I absolutely love hearing stories about vaginal breech birth because I feel like it’s something that we need to bring back.

It’s only fair to offer people options when we have a breech baby. I don’t think it should just be an automatic C-section. I’m excited to hear her story. I’m excited to hear her journey to find support in that regard.

But first, I’m going to read a review. This review is actually from our VBAC Prep course. If you didn’t know, we do have a course preparing you all about all of the things you need to know to get ready for birth after Cesarean. You can find that on our website at thevbaclink.com.

But this review on the course is from Heather. She says, “This course was so helpful especially with helping to educate my husband on the safety of VBAC as he had previously been nervous about my choice. We watched all of the videos already, but will also be reviewing the workbook again right before birth. I highly recommend.”

I absolutely love that review from Heather because I feel like we get a lot of these comments about people and their partners really being on board and invested after taking the VBAC prep course with their partners.

This course is chock-full of information about the safety of VBAC, and different types of birth situations. It talks about different interventions and hospital policies that you might encounter. It talks about the history of VBAC. It talks about all of the statistics and information. It talks about mental prep, physical prep, and all of those things. There are videos. There is an over 100-page workbook. There are actual links to sources, PDFs of studies, and everything you can even imagine. It is in this course. I also highly recommend it.

Anyway, thank you, Heather, for that review.

All right, let’s get rocking and rolling. I am so ready to hear all about Katie’s birth stories. Katie is right here snuggling her sweet little baby with her. I cannot wait. I hope we get to hear some little sweet baby noises. They are kind of my favorite. But Katie, go ahead and take it away, my friend.

Katie: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here and hopefully share some things that I would have loved to have shared with me. So let me just start from the beginning with my first baby 5 years ago.

I was planning to have a birth. I wasn’t quite sure what it would look like, but I thought I wanted unmedicated. It was my first baby, and I wanted to labor spontaneously. The labor was long, so 3+ days of labor. It ended in me getting to 10 centimeters and pushing. However, due to fatigue and the multiple interventions that I had and the cascade of interventions, I believe, resulted in a diagnosis of failure to progress so I had a C-section.

It was, I would say, disappointing to me not because of anything except that I would have loved to continue on my path of vaginal delivery. That wasn’t in the cards with this one for me.

Then with my second 2.5 years later– oh, I should also say that I was at a teaching hospital. There were lots of people. They were very pro-intervention. You name it, I had it across those 3 days.

So 2.5 years later when I got pregnant, I thought, “Okay. I know I want to attempt a VBAC.” My husband, my partner, was so on board. He got a shirt that said, “You’ve got this.” He was wearing it all of the time. We watched a ton of positive VBAC birth stories on YouTube. We listened to podcasts like this one. We followed all of the things on social media and prepared with an amazing doula.

I went into spontaneous labor again and this time, I was sure I wanted– actually, I should say I had a membrane sweep, and then I went into spontaneous labor. I was sure I didn’t want interventions for this one. My doula was on board. My partner was on board.

I labored at home for quite a while. I came into the hospital. It was the same hospital. That doctor was not so supportive of me attempting a VBAC, however, another OB had said that because of our family planning, I said, “I think I want more kids,” another OB told that OB, “Hey, let’s make it as safe as possible to do what she wants, so let her give it a try.”

My doctor was semi-supportive, but I came in. I was 9 centimeters. It was unmedicated. I was in there for less than 3 hours. I pushed the baby out with a bar. I was squatting. They didn’t even know the baby was out. In fact, the baby started crying, and it felt like minutes or hours in my mind, but it was just a couple of pushes. My doula said, “Baby out. Baby out.” Everyone rushed because they were so surprised because normally, I think, folks labor on their backs, and I had requested a bar.

That was pretty amazing. It was just me and my son doing the thing. It was incredible. I remember that OB who was skeptical said, “You did it. You’ve changed my mind.” So that was exciting.

3 years later to now, I became pregnant with my third baby. I went in for my anatomy scan at 20 weeks, and the ultrasound tech said, “Baby is breech. No big deal. Tons of babies are breech.” Because I have some other health complications, I guess they deemed me as high risk. I went to multiple ultrasounds, so that means I get to see my baby once a month which also meant I continued to see that baby was breech each time. Each time, they kept saying, “Oh, don’t worry. Plenty of time. Plenty of time to turn.”

As we approached my due date, I was like, “I feel his head. I don’t think he’s going to turn.” So they started to let me know what type of breech he was. My baby was frank breech. There are a few different types of breech positions which I didn’t know prior to this baby, but now I’m very well-versed in the different breech positions.

Frank breech is basically a pike position. The feet are by the head, and his little rump was just hanging out in my pelvis. I was also hoping to birth at a birthing center with my doulas. This was different than that learning hospital that I shared because I just wanted a different experience where they were less pushy with interventions. I knew that with my last birth that they used the term “something pelvis”, but anyway, I was ready to do something different with less people in the room.

However, when they found out that I was breech, I was told what I think is the stock option which was, “Hey, if baby stays breech, but don’t worry, there’s plenty of time and he’ll probably turn, but this is what we’ll do. We’ll try an ECV, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll schedule your C-section. We’ll give you an epidural, try the ECV one more time, and that way, you can go right into your planned C-section. But don’t worry, we have time. The baby is going to turn.”

I left and was like, “I don’t want that. My baby is healthy. I’m healthy. I am on the fence about this plan.” Now, I’m 36 weeks so at 37 weeks, I go in. We have the ECV. They give me the shot to relax my uterus. The ECV is the external cephalic version where they put their hands and try to rotate the baby. It was unsuccessful.

So I said, “Can we try again?” She looked at me like, “What?”

She said, “We’ll try again with that epidural when you schedule your C-section.” I said, “No, no, no, no, no. Can we try again?” This is where, I think, that advocacy and that information and research are so important. She said, “Sure. We can try it again.” We scheduled another ECV.

I went back in, and it was also unsuccessful with her. She could tell at this point, I was grieving what I thought was the end of this journey for me, and also not necessarily on board with the protocol they had put in place.

We planned. I said, “Hey, can I try a different provider?” I know that you can do up to four ECVS. I’m not suggesting that people do that. I just wanted to make sure that I did everything possible for me and baby to have a vaginal birth. They seemed pretty gung-ho about not delivering unless baby was head down.

She said, “Sure. We can do that.” That was also unsuccessful.

At this point, the OB said, and I appreciated this. They said, “I feel really uncomfortable delivering a breech baby. I think you should go to our sister hospital in a city away if you are considering breech because we don’t have a NICU here.” That felt reasonable to me because I had said to her previously, “I hear you, and I hear that protocol with what you’re suggesting. I also feel really healthy, and I will absolutely change course if me or baby’s health is in jeopardy, but unless that is imminent, I consider breech a variation of normal,” so I didn’t necessarily think that was the rationale for the C-section knowing what that recovery is like and knowing that I had a 5 and a 3-year-old back at home.

Julie: Oh, I love that so much. I love that they gave you options, and they admitted that they weren’t comfortable with it. So many times, doctors will be like, “We don’t do breech here.” They don’t tell you that it’s because they haven’t been trained or they’re not comfortable with it or it’s not safe, they just tell you that’s not the protocol, and they don’t offer you other options. I really love that, and I love the conversation you had where you were like, “I understand the risks, but however, this is how I feel.” I think that’s a really healthy way to go about it on both sides. So, cool. Kudos to your provider.

Katie: Yeah. Then that doctor suggested this. It was in the underground world. It wasn’t like, “Go to the next place.” She also suggested, “Why don’t you consult with UCSF?” That’s the University of California San Francisco. That’s maybe an hour and 20 minutes with traffic, and it can be up to 3 hours, but they do breech birth there.

She referred me to have a consultation with UCSF to talk about breech birth which they are very comfortable with. The consultation was great. The people were really helpful. They also had a lot of requirements for me to deliver there. Those requirements were things like an anatomy scan to ensure that the head and rump sizes were comparable for safety of baby. They wanted me to do a pelvic pelvimetry MRI.

Julie: Pelvimetry?

Katie: Yes. They said, “You have a proven pelvis,” which is the word I couldn’t remember earlier, but because I’m very short– I’m 4’10”--, they just wanted that in this case. I said, “Sure. I’ll do all of the things if this is the place where I know I can make that birth plan with you and we can do it.” Then they said, “We also give you an epidural. You’ll birth in a birthing room, then we’ll transfer you to an OR. You’ll have an epidural, and that’s in case anything goes wrong.” I fully understand the risk and the why behind that, but given with my first baby, one of the interventions was the epidural and I labored on my back, I wasn’t quite confident that was the way baby and I were going to do this because what I found in my second birth is me and baby working together and moving together was what, I think, was all of the difference in the world for us to be able to meet each other.

That gave me a little bit of pause, but nonetheless, I was like, “Okay. They are being upfront with me about all of the things I need to do.” I had the anatomy scan. Rump to head ratio was 1:1. It looked great. They were scheduling this MRI for me to take. Now, keep in mind, I’m 38 weeks pregnant now.

The other things I was concerned about, or more my husband I should say, was that San Francisco, like I said, is about an hour and 20 minutes away from me. With traffic, it can be 3+ hours.

Julie: Oof. I’ve driven in San Francisco during traffic and let me tell you, it is a nightmare.

Katie: Yeah. My husband was like, “What if you don’t get there in time? How are we going to make this work?” These were all pauses that we had around it.

Nonetheless, we were on this track and UCSF was so helpful and wonderful. I’m so grateful for my provider for recommending this consult. Then my doula, as well as other providers, started sharing information with me. I want to say it’s an underground network of knowledge where people aren’t advocating for vaginal birth on the record because either the hospitals don’t want to or don’t condone it for whatever reason. I guess you can guess the reasons whether it’s money or policy or education and patriarchy, but there is definitely a need. Breech babies are born all of the time.

They said, “There are three providers at that sister hospital (that my doctor had initially recommended that was 15 minutes away) who are experienced with breech.” I thought, “Okay. In the event of an emergency and I went into labor, that’s where I want to go.” They had a NICU. They had all of the things that made me want to feel more at ease knowing that we were doing something new to me and to keep myself and my baby safe.

I still told the UCSF doctors, “Don’t worry. I know I’m 38 weeks, but my other babies came at 40 weeks and 1 day, so I’ve got 2 weeks. He’s cooking for 2 more weeks.”

Then, at 38 weeks–

Julie: Third babies, man. Third babies.

Katie: Right? At 38 weeks, 4 days, I wake up. I should say, sorry. The UCSF doctor also said one other thing to me. She said, “Please do one more ECV, and this time, do a spinal.” I was like, “Ugh, this sounds awful.” But I understood the rationale. The safest way to come out was head down. I wanted to compromise and do everything in my power to do that. She said, “Because they hadn’t done a spinal previously, there’s data that shows it’s more successful.” She shared all of that research with me, so I requested that from my local doctor.

My doctor was like, “We don’t usually do this,” but to their credit said, “We will. We will absolutely do it.” Keep in mind, I went in. I was like, “I know that this baby is loving where they are at. They are not moving, but if I don’t try it, I’ll never know.”

Knowing the risks of ECVs, and knowing all of these things, I did do that because it was a request of the hospital that was going to be potentially the hospital where I give birth, so I wanted to make sure to follow all of the things.

I do that. It was also unsuccessful. Then, now fast forward to 38 weeks and 4 days, I wake up and it’s been a couple of days since that ECV. The spinal they give you is on your back. I wake up and I have some stomach cramps. I thought, “Man, this is strange, but it’s probably from the ECV,” because in the past, it did cause some cramping for me. Because I had the spinal, I wondered if perhaps it just was residual.

In my past labors, all of my laboring started with my back. I had a little bit of back aching, but it was again, I chalked it up to the spinal and just recovering from that. I went about my day. It was right before Halloween. I’m telling my partner, “Let’s carve pumpkins.” My 5-year-old had a soccer game. I’m trying to get him ready, and I keep getting these cramps. They start to be regular.

I thought, “Oh.” I’m 90% sure I’m in labor. This labor just felt different. Maybe it was because it was a breech baby. Maybe it was because it was a third labor, who knows? But nonetheless, it took me a while to get there. Maybe I was thinking it wasn’t happening and willing that 40-week mark.

Nonetheless, I was laboring. I texted my doula, and I’m timing my contractions. We had agreed that she would come over earlier this time because the baby was breech. All of the doctors said, “Labor at home. Come in during active labor.” We agreed that I would come in earlier than I did last time because of the circumstances. She comes over. She says, “Where I’m laboring, if the contractions are feeling intense, however, I can talk and laugh in between them,” so we agreed that I might be 5 centimeters. I just started to think, “I’ve got to lie down. I feel super tired. I had this ECV. I want to keep my energy up,” thinking this could be a long labor. Let me eat something.

Then she says, “Just go. Sit on the toilet because your body does something different.” I do that. It’s 1:00 in the afternoon now, and my water breaks. My husband was packing the bags to get to the hospital thinking, “Where do we go? Do we go to UCSF? Do we go to that sister hospital?” I say, “My water is broken.” I have another contraction. She’s watching it. She was like, “We’ve got to–”, and I started to feel nauseous which are all signs of labor.

Julie: Good signs.

Katie: Yes, so she was like, “Let’s go. Let’s go now.”

We get in the car. I think this is funny. It’s a little on the side, but my husband had set up the car seat right behind me. I’m laboring. I’m definitely contracting and trying to retract my seat. There is this car seat, so I just remember picking it up and tossing it across the side saying, “Why would you set this up here?” He’s looking at me, “Oh, you are really in labor. This is clear.”

I’m trying to lay down. He has the GPS set. I am in the car. We get going. It’s now between 1:00 and 2:00 on a Saturday. There is a ton of traffic and construction. I’m looking at the GPS and I see 25 minutes to the sister hospital, and to San Francisco was 3 hours. We don’t have 3 hours.

My doula says, “Where are we going?” I say, “That sister hospital. Let’s go.” I also happen to know that there are three doctors there through that grapevine and underground network who are experience at delivering breech babies there, so I thought the odds of me having one of them would be beneficial. I would much rather have had conversations with all of them, but I didn’t plan to go there thinking I was going to go to UCSF.

We get in the car and are driving in this traffic. I’m just looking at the GPS and at the time ticking down. I’m really quiet which was also strange because with my other births, I was super vocal. My husband and I were thinking, “I’m in labor, but maybe I’m just not as far along, even though my water broke.”

I’ve never been quiet. I was dead silent through this whole thing just staring at this GPS. Then all of a sudden, we’re going on a bridge called the Causeway and I looked at him, and I said, “I have to push right now.”

Julie: No.

Katie: He looks at me and says, “No,” which is not very much– he’s a very supportive person. What he meant by this was that we didn’t come this far to get this far. We’re going to get to this hospital. We are driving, and I just remember internally that I was so quiet going inward. I was talking with my baby, talking with myself and saying, “Okay. We’ve got to get to the hospital. We didn’t come this far to get this far. I’m not having a baby breech unassisted delivery.” That was not something that I was comfortable with.

We get off the off-ramp, and we’re finding the patient drop-off. I’m contracting and I see the sign, and my husband drives right by it. I look at him right after I contract and I say, “You drove right by the patient drop-off. You have to put on hazards. I have to get out now. I have to push.” He’s like, “I can’t. We’re parking.”

So he parked the car, and I was like, “What do you want me to do?” He says, “We’ve got to walk.” Keep in mind, the parking lot where he went is not right next door. It’s a block and a half or two blocks away.

Julie: No way.

Katie: I just was like, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this.” He says, “Yes, you can. Yes, you can. You have got this.” So I was like, “Okay. I’ve got this.” I get up, and I walk. When I start contracting, I’m walking down this busy street. I said, “I have to poop.” I had this big contraction, and I think I possibly poop. I’m just looking at these cars thinking, “Why won’t somebody stop and help me?”

That’s when I channeled back to this idea, at the end of the day, It’s just you and your baby. You are the team.

I contract. We are going. We finally get to the hospital. I have another contraction. I say, “Run in and tell them to help.” He does. I’m holding on to the railing. This lovely woman with her family sees me. She tells her 13-year-old son, “Get her!” I was standing by myself, definitely in labor.” She says, “Get her a wheelchair!” This amazing 13-year-old does just that as my husband runs back. He gets me this wheelchair. I’m sitting in it, but I can’t sit down. Again, I think it’s because I’ve had this bowel movement and maybe I’m in transition. I don’t know.

We get up and pass security, so security is yelling at us. My husband was like, “I’ve got to go. We’ve got to go.” We got to L&D and came in. This amazing nurse midwife welcomes us. I don’t know if she saw me not sitting down all of the way in my wheelchair or what, but she yells, “Get her a room right now.” She says, “We’re going to deliver this baby.” I say, “My baby is breech. Can you help?”

She says, “Call this doctor.” My heart is so relieved because this is one of those three experienced doctors who I know is comfortable with breech delivering. He scrubs out of a C-section, I guess. She helps me take off my pants, and then realizes what I thought was poop was really– it’s called rumping as a breech instead of crowning.

She was like, “Change of plans. Get on all fours.” I just started laboring. The doctor comes in scrubbed out of that C-section. I know that the nurses are saying, “You’re doing great. You’re going to meet your baby,” and all of the things that are so wonderful. I couldn’t speak more highly of the people in that room at that point. My doula joined us because it took her a minute to find us in all of the mayhem.

He tells my partner, “Please make sure she goes on her back.” I had this vision of doing breech without borders on your hands and knees, but given that this doctor was very experienced with breech delivery through this underground network of knowledge, I was like, “Okay. We didn’t come this far to get this far. I’ll do whatever you want. Let’s just see this baby.”

I turn around after, my husband said, my baby was halfway out. He sees the legs drop which again, in a frank breech position, that happens. You see the rump, and then you see the back and the legs drop. He sees the rest of the body come out as I’m laboring on my back which I didn’t do with my first. I wasn’t actually, I didn’t know if that was something my body was down for. But here I was delivering this breech baby.

Of course, I should have known. Women are amazing. We do amazing things, and our bodies are built for this work. I labored, and then I felt him come out completely. I held my breath for a second because what I do know, and excuse me if this statistic isn’t 100% accurate, but my understanding is that 1 out of 7 babies born head down might need resuscitation, but 1 out of 3 babies born breech might need resuscitation.

So one of the things I was pausing for at this moment was to hear this sweet baby’s voice, and so I just start hearing crying immediately. They tell me that his APGAR score was 9/8 which was exactly the same as my first VBAC.

Julie: That’s great!

Katie: Yeah. They were like, “Baby is great. Baby is healthy.” They put him on me. I was trying to feed, but my cord was short, so low and behold, I have a feeling that the reason he was not interested in turning is because my cord was kind of short. He just was sitting fine where he was at with my posterior placenta up high.

He and I sat and met each other. We celebrated. The doctor was so funny. He said, “You keep it interesting. You’ve had every kind of birth you could possibly have.”

Julie: You keep it interesting.

Katie: Yeah. Every type of birth you could possibly have.

The nurses came in after. They said they wanted to come in and watch because they don’t see this. They said, “This is amazing. We wanted to respect your privacy.” But they were so supportive of the whole thing. I just felt elated to have the people in the room and around me who believed in me and my baby as much as we believed in us to make it happen.

I should say that I came in at 2:10 to this hospital. I delivered at 2:24. When I say it was fast and this was going quickly when all of those things happened, I wouldn’t recommend any of those things. However, I think that advocacy and all of those things like knowing all of the data made me feel prepared to do that. That’s my breech delivery story.

Julie: I absolutely love that. I love that. I was like, “Aw, dang. Too bad she didn’t have her baby in the car.” No, I mean that would not have been ideal for you, but it is a dream birth of mine. I mean, I would have loved to have my own baby in the car. It would have been amazing. I love the stories. One day, I dream of documenting a car delivery, but alas, here I am still waiting. But it’s fine.

Here’s the cool thing. I really love how you navigated your birth. You sought out all of your options. You made a choice that you were comfortable with. You heard the risks that the doctors were telling you about. You acknowledged them, but you also stood up for yourself and your plan. I feel like when you can have that mutual respect where you can trust your provider and your provider can trust you, I feel like that’s a great place to be.

I love how you adapted and changed plans when needed, but you still stood firm for the things that you wanted. It doesn’t always work out like that when you have to change plans, but I love that you had the plan and you navigated it with the twists and turns and all of the things that come with the unpredictabilities of birth.

I love how you did all of that. I think it’s really important and necessary to have strong opinions about how you want to birth. Like I said before, it doesn’t always mean that the strong opinions that you have are going to hold true about what you actually end up getting.

I think that the value in having those strong opinions about birth is the things that you learn along the way and the things that enable you to navigate through those changes of plans and things like that. I think that’s really, really important for us to be able to have and do and be flexible.

I do have a few different blog articles on our website related to breech babies. Now, there’s one that is just recently published. It was a few months ago. Well, maybe it will almost be a year ago by the time this episode airs. It talks a lot about ECVs, the external cephalic version, in order to try and manually flip a breech baby. It talks about what ACOG recommends and ACOG’s stance on it, things you can do, who is right for it, what may exclude you from having an ECV or attempting one and all of those things.

It talks about the safety for VBAC and how it’s performed, what it feels like, and all of those things. If you ever want to know about ECV, we have a blog for you. It’s called ECV and VBAC: What you Need to Know. It goes into all of that stuff. I definitely recommend looking into it because like we said before, you don’t really know your options until you have them, and the more information you have in your arsenal, the easier it’s going to be for you to navigate those things.

Basically, ECVs are pretty safe for most people. They have a success rate of 60% which is a really cool success rate. It’s higher than 50%. You’re more likely for it to work than not. Sometimes babies are breech for a reason, and they need to stay that way for some reason. There are really only a few things that exclude you which is excessive vaginal bleeding, placenta previa or accreta, if you have really low levels of amniotic fluid, fetal heart rate issues, if your water’s already been born, sometimes providers won’t do it that way, or if you have twins or multiples, I think that excludes you. It’s listed here, and it makes sense. We’ve got lots of babies tangled up in there.

It’s absolutely safe for VBAC as well. We also have a couple more blogs about why babies go breech and some things that you can do about it. I’m sure, Katie, you probably tried all of these things, all of the Spinning Babies protocols, all of the forward-leaning inversions and things like that too that can help.

There’s another article in here about how to turn your breech baby– 8 ways to flip your baby. Like we said, sometimes babies are breech for a reason and they do not want to turn. I’m just really looking forward to the day where breech can be just a variation of normal again. The biggest problem is that our providers are not learning how to deliver breech babies. It does take a different skill in order to do that. You have to be really hands-off. You have to watch for certain things and depending on the type of breech, there are different techniques that you would use. Those techniques are not being taught.

Kudos to your original provider who admitted that they were not comfortable or did not have the knowledge to feel comfortable in delivering a breech baby. I’m excited there are organizations called Reteach Breech, Breech Without Borders, and Dr. Stu. If you know Dr. Stu, he is leading a great mission to bring breech back so that women can have options for delivering their breech babies.

So what happens if you don’t know your baby is breech and your baby is delivered foot first? You can’t just stop and go for a C-section right then. It’s impossible. So to deliver breech babies safely no matter the circumstances, the knowledge there is important. I’m hoping that one day, that can be an option for anybody if they want that.

All right, Katie, I’m so glad that you joined me today. It was so great hearing your story. I love how it all went. I do not pity you having to drive in San Francisco at traffic time. Yeah. I’m glad everything worked out.

Katie: We ended up going to this other hospital closer.

Julie: Yeah, yeah. But I mean just ever, not even in labor. Just ever.

Katie: Yes. Yes.

Julie: All right, Katie. Before we sign off, will you tell me, what is your best piece of advice for somebody preparing for a VBAC?

Katie: Oh, I think it is so important to do two things. One, educate yourself and surround yourself around folks who are down with that education and believing in you and baby. What I mean by that is knowing what’s happening so you can make those important decisions. You understand what consent looks like. You understand those risks. You understand all of the tips and techniques like in this case of breech and turning that baby, and then making sure that you also are advocating and you have people around you who are advocating, but not so stuck on that that you get stuck.

You want to do what’s best for you and the baby, but as you said, breech is a variation of normal. I think that being around people who are supportive of you, they don’t necessarily have to agree with you, but they are working with you, is just so important to empower you because at the end of the day, it’s you and baby doing the thing. People who believe in you as much as you believe in yourself and you believe in your baby are so important to get to that finish line in labor.

Julie: Yes. I absolutely love that. You have to have people who believe in you and who are on your side and who will support you even if they don’t necessarily understand your decisions. They trust you to make those decisions because that is a huge deal.

Katie: And give you the information so that if the information you have is not full or complete, you can reevaluate. You don’t know what you don’t know until you know. I just think that you need to make sure you take it all in if you can unless you don’t know your baby is breech and you find out when you are delivering and you make that snap decision, and it’ll be great.

Julie: Yes. No, I love that. There’s something about people bringing you information especially in a respectful way because I feel like in today’s world, when people disagree with others, it’s very aggressive and condescending and judgmental.

I think it’s important that we can disagree respectfully but also bring information if you are concerned or if you have another point of view in a respectful way as well. I think it’s received a lot better and I think that’s where we can really bring that true change and sway people’s opinions. It’s if we do that in a respectful and understanding way.

Yeah, I appreciate that. Good point, Katie. That was awesome. Okay, well thank you so much for sharing your story with me today. I cannot wait for the whole world to hear it.

Katie: Thanks so much for allowing me the space to do it. I hope that women are able to explore their options and do what’s right for them and their baby and their families.

Julie: Yeah.

Closing

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