[TRANSCRIPT OF ANSWER]

Misconceptions About VBAC

“One that we see often is that the baby’s going to not survive the pregnancy, the mother is going to hemorrhage, she’s going to explode if she walks, that it’s impossible to have a vaginal birth, that the best thing for you is to have a repeat surgical birth. So what we see is that there’s a lot of, I call it doom and gloom, that surrounds that versus the small risk of uterine rupture, which is 0.5 percent or 1/200.

“The fact that a large number of medical societies endorse mother’s attempting a trial of labor who’ve had one to two previous surgical birth. There’s that much literature out or scientific research on moms who have had two or three previous cesareans. So what we tend to see is all the potential, and what we hear from mothers anyway, all the potential complications that can happen, but they are so rare. So there’s a disconnect between what actually is at risk versus what could actually happen.”

Additional Resources

https://mfmunetwork.bsc.gwu.edu/web/mfmunetwork/vaginal-birth-after-cesarean-calculator