Highlights
“I can’t put my wife through that again.” That’s what Mark Cavaliere thought when his wife was pregnant with their second baby. He was referencing the birth of their first child, who was born via emergency cesarean section. “It was very difficult for both of us,” he said of the birth. “She couldn’t even really talk about it for about a year.”
Cavaliere is the founder of Southwest Coalition for Life, which includes The Guiding Star Southwest Birth and Wellness Center, part of a network of full-spectrum healthcare spaces for women. When I heard him speaking about the impact of women’s birth experiences on their lives—including their decisions about future pregnancies—I knew I had to write about it. This is something I’ve long believed: that whether we’re talking women ending their pregnancies or simply choosing not to get pregnant, part of the problem is the experiences women are having during their births.
Ann Ledbetter is a certified nurse midwife who also shares her thoughts and experiences on her Substack, A Moderate Midwife. She sees the connection as well. “I wish people understood how often women tell me that a traumatic or dangerous birth,” she writes, “or one in which their choices were ignored–played a decisive role in their decision to avoid another pregnancy.”
Birth impacts women deeply, whether they realize it or not. I’ve personally spent no small amount of time thinking about my own three births, in order to integrate the intense and vulnerable events into the story of my life. My first was in a hospital and was an okay experience for me at the time, mostly thanks to a doula’s support. My second occurred in a different state to which we had just relocated and was a sudden C-section that felt coercive and unnecessary. My third was a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) at home, wonderful and extremely redemptive. Cavaliere’s aforementioned anxiety about their second birth was relieved when his wife also ended up with a VBAC. “It was a very healing experience for us,” he said.
To be clear, a positive birth experience doesn’t depend on the birth going a certain way. Contrary to much of the loud social media rhetoric, it’s not homebirth vs. hospital, or even cesarean vs. not (though c-sections are overused, which is well-documented and which Ledbetter has also written about). Cavaliere and his wife now have six children, and in an interview, he acknowledged the complexity of birth.
“We’ve had a wide variety of experiences, each one unique,” he said. Indeed, it’s important to acknowledge that sometimes interventions—even interventions like surgery—need to occur for the safety of the mother or the baby. But what does matter for a positive birth experience, and what can always be controlled, is how the birthing woman is treated during and after the birth. Is she centered, honored, and respected? Or is she sidelined, coerced, or pressured?
Cavaliere’s wife’s experience with birth led him to bring this awareness into his pro-life work. “Around 62% of the women at abortion facilities already have children,” he said. “When you start talking to them, you oftentimes will realize that the experiences they’ve had around birth have impacted them. They don’t even always realize it, but they’ve typically been through some sort of birth trauma or postpartum struggles.”
Until our culture begins to embrace a different story—that motherhood and birth are incredible, empowering experiences when properly supported—the birth rate will continue to reflect negativity and fear.
One example stands out in his memory. He described a young couple considering an abortion of their second pregnancy after a traumatic experience with their first child’s birth. As they explained that they just “can’t” have more babies, Cavaliere sensed a familiar story. “The husband was saying ‘I can’t put my wife through that again—it was just a nightmare,’” he said. “Having an abortion seemed like a less traumatic option for them than going through [it all] again.”
As this couple worked with Mark’s staff, they learned about the services that Guiding Star could offer them throughout pregnancy, during birth, and in postpartum. They also talked with the wife about birth. “We tried to communicate ‘this is a beautiful thing—you can do this’,” he said. Cavaliere shared how the young couple began to get emotional as they felt the possibility of the true support that can exist in maternal care. As the conversation ended, the husband said: “If that’s really available to us, we actually want to have five more babies.”
The team knew they were really onto something after that. As Cavalier explains:
This was a confirmation for me. Here was a couple who said, ‘We can never have more than one baby because of this experience of childbirth,’ and all it took is for them is to know that there’s a place where we will walk alongside you the entire way.
In addition to the negative maternal care experiences in the medical system, birth—and motherhood writ large— is also perceived as negative. “It’s one thing to be out there talking about the beauty of motherhood and childbirth, but we’re still working against a culture where these things are often depicted as dramatic and negative and scary,” Cavaliere said. “So many women don’t understand that [these things] can be a positive experience.”
It’s true. Powerful cultural narratives make motherhood seem like a miserable—or at least, not aspirational— choice. Young people are often terrified of it all, and the birth is often at the center. I have an acute memory of my first pregnancy: crying to my family at my brother’s house because of anxiety about the upcoming birth. Until the culture begins to embrace a different story— that motherhood and birth are incredible, even empowering experiences when properly supported—the birth rate will continue to reflect this negativity and fear.
The other factors aside, birth itself is a substantial affair, and there’s simply no question that we need to improve the state of maternal care in the United States. We need to tell better cultural stories about birth, but most importantly we need to improve the actual experiences of women. “We need care that speaks to their dignity as a woman, where women feel safe,” Cavaliere says. “A woman’s experience in pregnancy and birth sets her up for the rest of her motherhood, including how she views future pregnancies.”
I couldn’t have said it better. The business of being pro-life—and the business of pro-natalism —is effectively the business of pregnancy, birth, and parenthood. Helping to ensure that these experiences are positive for women and their families should be at the top of the agenda.
Amber Adrian is a writer, humanities teacher, and mother of three. She lives in the Midwest, USA, with her husband and three daughters. You can find Amber’s work on motherhood and culture on Substack at One Tired Mother.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Institute for Family Studies.
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