This week’s Imperfect Parent Blogger of the Week award goes to Brigette Russell over at Moralia. We strayed from the seemingly recent pattern of picking “ha ha” posts and went with the other direction we like to take here at The Imperfect Parent — looking at social issues and insight to the various choices we have to make as parents. Brigette won for this post, about how — like formula feeding mothers — there seems to be a stigma to c-section delivery, despite the reasons for having one.

We hear repeatedly from natural childbirth advocates that birth should be a natural rather than a medical event, that doctors and hospitals cover themselves against insurance risks by performing excessive and intrusive procedures that make surgical deliveries more likely, and so forth. We hear the laments of women who took their natural childbirth classes, did their breathing exercises, and went to the hopsital with a detailed written “birth plan” that called for no drugs, no IV, no fetal monitoring, delivery by a midwife rather than a doctor, lots of walking around and calming music, delivering in a squatting rather than prone position, maybe even in a bathtub, and hubby there all the while with video camera in hand to capture the magic moment when mom brought forth new life through her own valiant labor, a creative force of nature rather than a patient surrendering her maternal power to medical practitioners — only to have things go terribly wrong and end up drugged and catheterized on an operating table as doctors sliced open their bellies and removed their babies, robbing them of the earth mother fantasy that had been playing itself out in their heads for months.

Read the whole thing. Also, while you’re here, remember voting is open to determine July’s Imperfect Blogger of the Month — you can vote every day until midnight this Sunday.

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