C-Sections: The Easy Way Out

Everybody knows a woman who has a C-section is just taking the easy way out of labor and childbirth. In fact, many go so far as to say she didn’t really give birth at all. If a woman can get pregnant, she can give birth naturally. It’s science.

Women who have C-sections are just choosing not to give birth the right way. Which is why, if you’ve chosen to have a C-section (because it’s always a choice) instead of breaking your vagina by passing a baby through it, you haven’t actually given birth. You’ve taken the easy way out. And you’re also not a real woman.

Real women break their vaginas the way God intended.

I should know because I am also not a real woman. I took the easy way out. I chose to have three c-sections, and let me tell you, they were each a cakewalk.

To be fair, I tried to let my first baby break my vagina. I really did. But his damn head was so big, he couldn’t fit past my pelvis, and after fourteen hours of hard labor, the doctor stepped in, spent an hour elbow-deep in my honey pot trying to make way for the baby, and concluded I was definitely not a real woman.

She and her team wheeled me back to the operating room—that’s where women who aren’t real go to “give birth”—and delivered that baby themselves. And I was like, THANK GOD, because here I had suffered through a day’s worth of excruciating labor, and finally, someone recognized I wasn’t real and offered me the easy way out.

Whew. That was a close one. I almost had to do it the hard way. (Because there can only be one hard way to do something. Everybody also knows that.)

The second time I chose to have a C-section, my baby was macrosomic, and on the advice of a different doctor who also recognized I wasn’t real, I scheduled my surgery for a week before my due date. The doctor determined that if the first baby wouldn’t fit through my vagina without breaking it, neither would this one.

Unfortunately, my second baby mistook me for a real woman and decided he wanted to be born before my scheduled c-section date, so off to the hospital I went, where I waited four hours in hard labor until an operating room opened up, suffered through a traumatic surgery where there were complications, and couldn’t visit my baby in the NICU because I had to remain tied to my hospital bed after surgery.

It was so easy! Not being a real woman is definitely the way to go.

The third time I chose to have a c-section, I wound up in the hospital at thirty-six weeks because the baby and I were both tachycardic and I was experiencing non-progressive labor. (Non-progressive labor is my jam.)

I spent a week there, where I enjoyed all kinds of easy stuff like not being allowed to eat solid foods, blowing up like a pufferfish from being hooked to an IV for seven days, and enduring contractions that lasted up to twenty-five minutes each before the baby finally reached the magical thirty-seven week mark and they had to take him out of me via c-section.

At first, I was super bummed that the party was over. It was so easy that I wanted it to last forever, this puking into kidney-shaped bed pans and being awoken every hour from what little sleep I was already getting to change positions in order to help the baby’s heart rate.

But then my disappointment turned to elation. I was tickled because just when I thought my run at taking the easy way out was over, I got to spend FOUR HOURS in an operating room while the doctors hack-sawed their way through my scar tissue and the nurse anesthetist placed alcohol swabs under my nose so I didn’t have to endure the smell of my own burning flesh as they repeatedly cauterized my exposed innards.

Gosh, I really miss those days. But the time has come to admit to what many already know: having a c-section is taking the easy way out. It’s not childbirth; it’s vacation. And we had a good run while it lasted.

So ladies, if you, like me, are not real women and chose to take the easy way out with a c-section or three, the jig is up. Everybody’s on to us. Might as well follow my lead and own it.