Status Updates From Invisible Labor: The Untold...

“Part of why we’re in the mess we’re in,” says Lynn Paltrow, founder and former executive director of Pregnancy Justice, is that the fight for reproductive rights “isn’t just for abortion or, you know, access to VBAC. We have not evolved to a place in which we regard pregnancy, the capacity for pregnancy, as human health.”

pregnancy [should not be] an exception to consent. And it [can only be] an exception [if] we carve out those who are pregnant as a lesser class of citizen with fewer civil rights than those who are not pregnant, an issue that Cantor says raises serious concerns about equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

AT THE NATIONAL AND STATE levels, VBAC is legal. But a patchwork of official and tacit restrictions in virtually every state makes it difficult and, in some places, effectively impossible to try for one. According to a 2011 study by the International Cesarean Awareness Network, the most recent year for which information is available, about 1 in 5 hospitals refuse to permit VBAC, an estimated 800 of 4,500 hospitals.

[I]n Jewish law, “the woman’s life always takes the precedent until the child is born,” Shana Schick, the Bar-Ilan University lecturer, said […] In fact, there’s no question about whether it’s permissible to kill a baby to save its mother’s life. “Before it’s born, it’s not a nefesh,” or soul, she said. It only becomes a soul when it takes its first breath.

Among unplanned cesareans, there are, roughly, three types: nonurgent cesareans, meaning that decision to incision should be within about an hour; urgent, which should occur within thirty minutes; and extremely urgent emergencies, when there is an immediate threat of death to mother or baby. In these very rare situations—also known more terrifyingly as “crash” cesareans