Carly's Story

New mom Carly with her baby Carly lives in downtown St. Paul, so St. Joseph’s Hospital was an obvious choice for its convenient location. But for Carly, there was definitely more to the decision. She had been born by Cesarean section 27 years ago in southwestern Minnesota, and afterwards her mother worked hard to combat the lack of VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean) support at the time. She raised Carly’s awareness of midwife-assisted delivery, and when it came time for Carly herself to deliver her first baby in 2007, avoiding a C-section if at all possible was high on her priority list.

Carly knew that St. Joseph’s Hospital has the lowest rate of C-section delivery of any metro area hospital (11.3 percent compared with a national average of 30.2 percent*) and that mattered to her. “I chose a hospital that was known for its low Cesarean rate. That was the main consideration for me. Then we chose our midwife based on where we wanted to have the baby.”

Carly and her husband Matt took time to familiarize themselves with the maternity care center before the big day. “We took our birth classes at St. Joseph’s and also did the birth open house,” she recalls. “We really got comfortable with the staff. Everyone was so terrific. They really believed in the ability of a woman’s body to do this naturally, without intervention in most cases.”

Two weeks past her due date, labor started around midnight. By the time Carly got to the hospital at 2:00 am she was already six centimeters dilated and she labored in the waterbirthing tub for about an hour. “That was incredible,” she remembers. “I didn’t want an epidural, and the water was just incredibly comforting.”

She would have liked to deliver in the tub, but as the labor grew more prolonged and difficult she had to consider other options. “I pushed for five or six hours,” says Carly. “It was difficult but everyone was incredible, helping me to try different positions, letting me stick with it as long as I could. It was a great team. The nurse, the midwife and my doula all worked together really well and never left my side.”

Her son Calder is living proof that sometimes babies just do what they’re going to do, no matter what our plans are. In the end, Carly did have a C-section. But she felt so supported throughout the whole process that she wasn’t upset with that outcome.

“Even though that wasn’t how I wanted it to happen, it felt okay,” she says. “They really supported my choice for as long as possible. Knowing I had such good care at St. Joseph’s, I was at peace with how it turned out.”

* Source: Centers for Disease Control National Center for Health Statistics report Vol. 54, No. 4 and Nov. 2006 CDC Release