Why All the Birthing Guilt?

My son, 1 day old.

Call me new-fashioned, but I'll have my babies in the hospital thank you. Yes, it surprised many of my friends that I wouldn't be pursuing a homebirth, but I wanted to know that there were doctors and nurses available at a moment's notice should anything go horribly wrong. Ok, so this isn't very "hippie" of me. Crunchy granola be damned - I'll take the nurses please.
I didn't plan on having an epidural, but I also didn't rule it out. I waited many many hours. I tried to go natural. But it was going so slowly that at a certain point I couldn't take it anymore.
So my birth story didn't go exactly how I envisioned. Did I let that weigh me down as a new mom? Did I feel horrible and guilty that I didn't give my son the best possible start to life? Surprisingly, no. I had plenty of other things to worry about. I was thankful I didn't have a C-section.
But the sad thing is many new moms do let an birth story with unplanned interventions make them feel like a failure, sometimes even leading postpartum depression. Why? Did they truly have that much control over it? Not that you let medical practitioners do what they please to you, just that at a certain point you have to accept that your body can do only as much as it can do. Your body can't control if you have a placental abruption, or if your baby is sunnyside-up, or if their shoulders get stuck, or they swallow meconium and have to be rushed to intensive care, or myriad other complications that most birthing classes can't possible prepare you for. These are the things that scared me into the hospital. Would I have had a safe homebirth? Probably. I didn't really want to find out.
It's great that people are beginning to lash back against needless interventions in favor of homebirth. If that's what you want, great. The rising number of C-sections is pretty terrifying to be sure - counted at 32.9 percent of all births in 2009.

"C-sections are now at an all time high. Nearly one in three babies were delivered via cesarean in 2009. Since 1996, the C-section rate has increased nearly 60%." - CNN Health, Dec. 21, 2010. Reporting information from the CDC's "Births: Preliminary Data for 2009" (pdf).

The women who really should be feeling guilty - the ones who chose to have a planned c-section out of convenience, or who asked for drugs the second their feet passed the hospital door - are the ones who don't feel guilty. The women who try so hard for a natural birth should be proud that at least they tried, that they educated themselves and were their own best advocate in the process.
So much emphasis is placed on birth. Yes it is awesome and spectacular and draining and all-consuming and incomparable. But it's just the beginning. I feel that I would have been far better served by taking a parenting class than a birthing class. Birth is just one (or two) days - parenting is forever.
Women need to stop envisioning perfectly natural, blissful births. Yes these are possible, something to strive for, but not something to feel guilty about not achieving. Generally the truth is much messier and entirely more unpredictable. Save your guilt and shame for choosing not to breastfeed.