From My Shelf Books hosts Brooklyn James, Twin Tiers native and author of the birth memoir
Born in the Bed You Were Made: One Family’s Journey from Cesarean to Home Birth, for a book signing on Sunday, July 7th from 12-2pm at 7 East Avenue, Suite 101, Wellsboro.
The memoir heralds accessibility, choice, and human rights in childbirth.
As a postpartum nurse, induction, intervention, ultimately cesarean were nothing new to Brooklyn…until she was the one atop an operating room table birthing her firstborn through an incision in her uterus. Coming to terms with the medicalized birth, she undergoes several unexpected health issues—fallout from a medically unnecessary cesarean, secondary infertility, miscarriage.
So then begins her exploration of evidence-based and patient-centered maternity care, of all that is and all that can be in birth. The impetus for penning her own, it was women’s birth stories that informed and inspired Brooklyn to go beyond What To Expect and to discover what she expects from birth.
With this clear expectation and with the support of a sagacious midwife, Brooklyn and her family—to include her firstborn who took an eager role in cutting the umbilical cord—experienced the adventure of a lifetime in birthing their second born in the comforts of home and in the bed he was made.
“Like many women, I did not have access to any other birth but a hospital birth,” Brooklyn said. “My insurance provider would not cover home birth or birthing center birth, both of which were more desirable to me. Insured through the hospital in which I worked, my birthing options were further limited to that hospital system. A system that had yet to integrate midwifery, in the rather progressive city of Austin, Texas, nonetheless, where competing hospitals had.
“After some school-of-hard-knocks education, that was the first thing I did in shoring up any future birthing rights. I found a healthcare sharing ministry—not exactly insurance, exempt from the ‘individual mandate requirement,’ but has a similar system of premiums and deductibles only in different verbiage—that covers any birth of my choosing.
“Without awareness of, reflection upon, a conscious mulling over of these rights, birth became something that happened to me. It wasn’t until I approached birth as a right that it became a rite, an experience, more than a medical event. Even if medical care is part of a birth, birth is a profound rite of passage and should be treated as such. How different our birth experiences would be if they were not herded by insurance, liability, money, the clock, and the systematic approach, but by practices that safely nurture the human right to choose the circumstances of birth.
“Some insurance companies, and individuals, view home birth as ‘medically inappropriate’—unsuitable, risky, subpar to hospital birth—when the fact is there is no such thing as ‘risk-free birth’ in any setting. I was a ‘healthy, low-risk patient’ who endured nearly every intervention on the menu, ultimately a medically unnecessary cesarean in a hospital yet found complete shelter and efficacy in a home birth after cesarean (HBAC).
“No birth is more superior to another. I care not how anyone births. I do care that everyone has accessibility and choice, and that everyone is supported in their right to birth however, wherever, and with whomever they so choose.”
