Thank heaven this doctor has figured out the cause of breech babies! The act of sitting down to write a birth plan causes the baby to flip right over!

(Or…doctor was trying to deflect criticism for not detecting the breech PRIOR to trying to induce the mom.)

Oh so that’s why my baby was breech too??

I had a c/s for a breech baby. My OB was just about to break my water and was checking my dilation when he realized he was feeling something softer than a head…..he had ignored my concerns in the last couple of months that a 3D nonmedical ultrasound outside the dr’s office had shown she was breech and I mentioned that I wasn’t being kicked in the ribs.

To the OP, sorry this happened to you And no, it definitely wasn’t caused by your birth plan.

Are you sure it wasn’t that she didn’t have a doula, midwife, twinkle lights, incense etc? I think the absence of those things may have been the jinx…

They really don’t like birth plans do they?

Or maybe she had a jackass OB who didn’t bother to confirm presentation by either Leopold’s or ultrasound before he ruptured her. Moron.

Ugh. My birth plan pretty much reads “I’m cooperative, but if you mess with my right to informed consent, you will be asked to leave the room and find someone else that will replace you.” It actually starts out with “After multiple failed attempts to discuss my original birth plan, I have re-written it to be the short plan below.”

Hey doc, you know when you put your hands on the Mom’s belly and you sort of mush it around? Well, I’ll tell you something; it’s called palpating and there is actually a purpose for that. It’s to let you know how and where the baby is. One hand makes the form of a C, and you put it down near the pelvis, if you gently squeeze your fingers together you should feel a narrow part of the baby, upon giving a little wiggle you will either feel a head wiggle, or the whole body moves. If the head wiggles, the baby is head down, if the whole body wiggles you just gave the baby his/her very first bum shake.

There are other ways to determine a baby’s position that don’t require ultrasounds. As a Mother 5 times, I have learned quite well to determine where my babies are in utero, you, as a professional, I should think would know better than I.

Maybe it’s time for a refresher course? I suggest a rotation following a midwife around for 8 weeks. Learning to use such things as intuition, and palpation, a fetoscope, and to stop relying on fetal monitors, and ultrasounds to determine baby size and direction.

*eye roll*

Well, now I know why my daughter was breech from the get-go: I knew what I wanted from her birth before she was conceived, and made it very clear to the CNMs I was seeing.

Thirty years ago, we didn’t know enough to call them “birth plans.” We also didn’t know enough to call ourselves “doulas,” we just helped each other when we had our babies, and we were too busy taking care of our babies to put a name to what we were doing and call it “attachment parenting.” (No disrespect at all to Katie Allison Granju, Penny Simkin, Polly Perez, Tine Thevenin, or Bill & Martha Sears. My friends & I were just doing all of it long before any of them, except Tine, were writing about it.)

The same thing happened to my mom with me in 1984. You would think that its the responsibility of the nurses and doctors to check a baby’s position before starting an induction.

JINXED!

Thank you for expressing your professional opinion, in such scientific terms no less. It is reassuring to know that after ten plus years of med school, internship, residency, and specialist training, the technological solutions you propose to what your medical training assures you are deadly emergencies of birth are, in fact, backed by voodoo.

Unfortunately, I have an alternate explanation.

Having a birth plan did not “jinx” me, because I know you never read those things anyway. You have your administrative professional take the birth plan in back to be Xeroxed and stored in the patient’s file, never to be looked at in your presence again, and give the original copy to the labour nurses at the hospital your “patient” will “deliver” at, so they can laugh at the details while they drink coffee and eat treats brought to the nurses’ station by Dr Dunkin.

The “jinx” refers to the hijinks I should have expected regarding the “management” of my labour. Cascade of interventions and all that.

Next time I’ll know better. I’ll cast a circle of salt around me inside the border delineated by the strands of twinkle lights, to protect myself; then, I’ll start to call the corners, think for a moment, change my mind, and call my midwife instead.

Problem solved.

So sorry OP! My Dr pulled the same garbage with me with my first. I swear that woman used my birth plan as a checklist of what to do to me. She was reaching for the salad tongs when I finally had enough and pushed my DS’s giant sideways head out. Luckily she had a low c-section rate, although she was just as interested in interventions as any other Dr I have met.

saying you got ‘jinxed’ really makes the ob sound like the kind of ‘doctor’ who might be more comfortable with casting lots to determine if a procedure is necesary. I really dislike it when ppl in any trained feild start tossing around ‘luck’ or some version thereof, positive or negative. Appeals to luck should only be heard from the desperately unskilled in my view. And I found out how to make sure my ‘birth plan’ got read, put a space for the doctors and nurses to sign it at the end. When I first gave it to ob during prenatal she flipped through it, started to say everything was fine, saw the signature line, and went back and carefully read everything.

@sara, yeah, mine did too but the theory is sound…..;)

Heck, that should have been detected by a doppler, Doc! My own doctor, who knew and SUPPORTED my home birth, told me that when I checked for a hb I should hear it below my navel. If it was higher, I was most likely breech. Luckily, I felt her moving the day she decided to turn (most uncomfortable day of my pregnancy) so I didn’t have to worry over it. But really? These doctors with all their technology and book smarts which somehow far outdoes the wisdom of mothers and midwives misses something as easy to detect as a breech?

This comment reminds me of something I saw in Marsden Wagner’s book, Born in the USA. Doctors were circulating a facetious memo that assigned women a certain amount of “points” depending on which factors on a list applied to them. The more points a woman “earned,” the closer she got to the high-point category of warranting a scheduled cesarean.

One of the qualifiers was having a birth plan (1 point) with one point for each additional page.

Other qualifiers included being a lawyer (or married to one) and bringing along new age CDs. These and other factors made a woman deserve a cesarean as punishment.

Ha ha, doctors. It must be fun to joke about slicing open women in order to put them in their place.

I’m sure the amniotomy when the babe was in breech postion had nothing to do with the need for the cesarean at all

So these stat and tech loving geeks that grow up to be obgyns believe in jinxes? Seems odd. But I’ve read variations of this tons of times before.