You may like your obstetrician. You may enjoy your visits. You may find peeing in a cup, getting on a scale (fun!), having your blood pressure taken, and chatting about your pregnancy to be lovely. But you don’t really LOVE your obstetrician.
You can love your husband or partner, your children, chocolate chip banana muffins and playing dominoes. You can love a good glass of Pinot, long walks on the beach, and a full-body massage. You can love your siblings.
You cannot love cats, because cats are unlovable assholes who make people wheeze and cough and cry.
You can think your obstetrician is a really nice, intelligent human being who is experienced and has a great bedside manner. But you don’t really LOVE your obstetrician.
LOVE is not offering an induction for convenience sake (his or yours). LOVE is not “giving you more room” to push out your baby by cutting your perineum. LOVE is not timing your labor so that you end up with a c-section and a label on your body “failure to progress.”
No, no, really, you’re wrong; I truly do love my obstetrician!
Okay. Just know that it’s not an exclusive relationship on his part; your obstetrician is married to the hospital where he practices. And the hospital does not like you. Nor do the nurses he sees on the side. They roll their eyes at you behind your back — just the latest swoony pregnant woman — and smirk, knowing that, when push comes to surgery, he will choose the hospital and its rules and the nurses over you. He will choose his own schedule over you.
If you love your obstetrician, you’re either in an unhealthy relationship or you don’t know what LOVE is, or you have some really strange ideas about LOVE and need therapy.
Filed under: birth | Tagged: birth, c-sections, hospital birth, vaginal birth |
Erika Gebhardt 
I think you nailed it. Except for the bit about the cats…
I am severely allergic = I hate them for making me feel like I’m going to die when I’m around them. My friend Emily’s cat is kind of cute, he likes to curl up in her bathroom sink and pur.