Afraid of repeating a bad birth experience

Bear in mind that your body had never completed a pregnancy or given birth before you had your daughter. Even though you experienced 'failure to progress';, your cervix did in fact progress to dilate to five centimetres, so you were halfway to full dilation. Begin to think about this success, instead of the failure to have a vaginal birth. A possible reason for your daughter's drop in heart rate may have included compression of the cord. Also, a slightly slanted head presentation could have slowed dilation at the same time.

Though a slightly misaligned head presentation is not unusual in a first labour, it is not likely that it will occur again or at the same level of difficulty the next time because your daughter has literally made headway for the next child. Even though she did not come through vaginally, your body stretched in the pregnancy and you have already experienced dilating to five centimetres. There is much more flexibility in your body because of this.

Your body does learn from previous experience and may in fact be more sensitive to the hormones produced in labour next time around. Also, if your daughter's heartbeat did drop because of cord compression, this is not likely to recur in a second labour.

A difficult labour does not mean that a second labour would be the same, or that a second child would not already be positioned heading straight down because of the inner flexibility already described.

Second childbirth is overall statistically much smoother than first. Clearly, this is because pregnancy and labour are not completely new experiences. Even though you had a caesarean when your daughter was born, your body has also experienced a very good part of labour.