To be fair, not every obstetrician who won’t do VBACs is willfully engaging in deception. Some are unconsciously suiting the facts to their beliefs. Some have been convinced by those they take as authorities that repeat cesarean is best. Some are glad to have an excuse to not do what they never wanted to do in the first place. Some have reluctantly bowed to pressure from their malpractice insurance company, hospital policy or colleagues. The result for you, though, is the same: the experts you trust to advise you on what is safest for you and your baby have abandoned that responsibility. With few exceptions, when obstetricians tell you planned repeat cesarean is the better option, they aren’t talking about your or your baby’s wellbeing; they are talking about their own.
Note: For those of you aware of the dangers of Cytotec (misoprostol), a prostaglandin implicated in high rates of uterine rupture in VBAC labors, the study states that Cytotec had only been introduced in 1996, the last year of the study. The study compares uterine rupture rates with induction involving prostaglandin in the years preceding 1996 with 1996 and finds no difference. I expect this is because Cytotec probably wasn’t in common use in its first year. I venture to predict that if researchers looked at a later year, rupture rates associated with prostaglandin would have climbed even higher than they were during the study years.