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Last week’s announcement that the caesarean rate in Britain has now risen to one in four births, was met with predictable reactions. There was much gnashing of teeth from the midwife quarter, the inevitable mutterings about “too posh to push” and all those hairy-faced ladies from the National Childbirth Trust leapt up to blame the doctors for forcing women into unnatural childbirth. Honestly, these days you’d think the act of having a baby was political. How you choose to deliver your child seems to say more about you than your social class, income or choice of handbag.

You never hear it for caesareans. They are the underclass of childbirth options. Women who have caesareans are treated like failures, or soft, pain-dodging cop outs. Never mind that the latest rise in caesareans has actually been among emergency, not elective procedures, which means that these women will have tried very hard to give birth naturally, or that a caesarean is major abdominal surgery, leaving you incapacitated for weeks.

What is routinely ignored however, is that caesareans have saved more lives than almost any other surgical procedure in history. Natural childbirth is hugely complicated: the large brain of the baby human is required to pass through the tiny, fixed pelvis of its mother. Haemorraghing, infection and obstruction of labour are all frequent obstacles to safe birth and in the past, childbirth has been the biggest killer of women. Not any more. But unlike the pill, the vote or equal pay, or any of those breakthroughs which have given women control over their lives and their bodies, the caesarean is consistently denigrated.

My own story illustrates the point. Expecting my first child at the end of last October, I hopped right on to the natural childbirth wagon. Egged on by magazines, yoga classes, birthing “gurus” and all manner of new age propaganda, my preparation for the big event was all about my own personal female empowerment. I would travel to the astral portal of all feminine life, tripping on the beauty of my contractions, and see the meaning of life through the haze of my pain as I welcomed my baby to the world.

Such was my indoctrination that I believed the strongest painkiller I would need was my husband’s ability to hypnotise me. I wasn’t even allowed to use the word pain. Contractions? No — they’re surges, dear.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach, of course, plenty of women do manage to birth their children with comparative ease. But it is by no means true for all of us. I remember one friend telling me “the problem with childbirth is no one tells you how painful it is”, and she’s right. But then I thought, how difficult could it be if women the world over did it once, twice, even several times?

Aromatherapy candles at the ready, my due date came and went. As did the next two weeks, as I heaved my groaning body up and down Parliament Hill in north London in a bid to “bounce the baby down”. At one point two well-spoken women stopped me to palm a Buddhist chant they assured me would get the baby out. What is this collusion?

At my scan I begged the doctor not to set a date for my induction. Sympathetically he agreed as I was in good health, and I embarked on round after round of acupuncture, reflexology and any sort of hocus pocus that professed to bring on labour. I could have gone for a week’s stay in the Portland for the amount I spent on alternative treatments.

But by November 7 there was still no sign of movement so at 8.30am my husband and I turned up at hospital for the induction. Little did I know then that half of all inductions end in emergency caesareans, mainly because chemically induced labour is stronger, longer and harder and that pregnancies that need to be induced are generally problematic in the first place.

Contractions kicked in almost immediately, but they were irregular and mild. Six hours later another pessary was administered and this time the contractions came on astonishingly strong. Four hours later the pain, I knew, was more than I could bear, and I asked for a shot of diamorphine. But by about 10pm I was only 3cm dilated, still it was enough for them to break my waters in an attempt to coerce my body into doing what it was meant to be doing. No dice. The contractions continued, but the dilation was unbe-lievably slow. I realised I could no longer bear the pain unassisted, and I requested an epi-dural. Sorry, howled for one.

After four attempts to insert the needle into my spine, a consultant anaesthetist was sent for, who managed to get me to sit still long enough to get the needle in. The chief midwife was encouraging, reassuring me I would be able to get this baby out; the doctors supported her.

By morning I was still only 7cm dilated, so it was agreed I should go on an oxytocin drip to speed up the contractions. The dose was doubled, and then doubled again as I stalled at 9cm.

At this point, 30 hours after I had been admitted, the junior registrar raised the C-word. With the natural childbirth lobby ringing in my ears, I asked if I could speak alone to the chief midwife. She agreed with the doctor. Then the senior registrar appeared. Calmly, he laid out the situation. He made no attempt to coerce me into a caesarean and left the decision in my hands.

When I opted to double the oxytocin dose again in a last ditch attempt to get to 10cm, he went along with me, until the baby’s heart rate took a turn for the worse and we caved in to the operating theatre. Once they opened me up it became clear what had happened: my son’s head was wedged at an odd angle into my pelvis, meaning he had been unable to descend. To get him out, he had to be pushed back up, before he could be fished out of my abdomen.

Not a pleasant experience, I’ll grant you, but the fact remains that without a caesarean, both my son and I would be dead. In the last 50 years the emancipation of women has been aided by scientific breakthroughs that have allowed us to manage our bodies and our dual roles in society as mothers and individuals. The caesarean section is one such breakthrough, and it should be celebrated as such.

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