Babe by Nancy Wainer
Authors Note: Years ago, Nancy learned about an elephant who was pregnant. She started to follow her pregnancy through various news releases and articles. It became clear that a tribute to Babe’s story needed to immortalize her in the public’s eye. Given the recent news that a mamma gorilla was recently sectioned and her baby taken from her, it seems as if this story needs to be shared right now.
Babe
WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE WE DOING?
We’re part of nature, all right, but that doesn’t mean we should attempt to run it, unless we want to turn this planet into a big zoo instead. Zoos are nice places to visit, but no one wants to live there—including those who do.
A TOUCH OF IVORY
Elephants are gentle, peace-loving mammals. They are the largest living land animals and have been on the Earth for a long, long time. They have life spans that are comparable to ours, although their gestation period is considerably longer: twenty-two months.
Elephants live in small family groups and form deep, lasting bonds. The basic family unit contains a wise, aged matriarch whose wisdom often saves the group from disasters (such as droughts), her female relatives, and immature offspring of both sexes. Elephants unite in rearing their young. Baby elephants are kept protected from predators in the center of the herd. Older males wander alone or join loose groups close by.
Elephants assist family members in many ways, for example, by pulling each other out of mud holes or rescuing those in danger. They lift injured or sick companions using their trunks and tusks and bring the infirm food as well as companionship. When attacked, elephants often run toward one another, not away.
Though separated by miles, elephant families seem to move in the same direction for days at a time, coordinating their travels, possibly using infrasound. They appear to listen to one another, using sounds to space themselves so that all get enough to eat but at the same time keeping the group within earshot so they can respond quickly to danger. They help one another in many ways.
Elephants have strong emotions; they express love, loyalty, compassion and grief. They are very sensitive and are one of the few species besides humans that may actually cry. They have a sense of death. More than one researcher has stressed the emotions of elephants, calling them “human animals.” Experts have determined that elephants are “in the top echelon of animal intelligence.”
IS ANYBODY LISTENING?
There is a language among elephants. Mothers communicate with their newborns in very low- frequency sounds, which humans cannot hear but can perceive vibrationally. Male elephants have a ‘rumble’ and females have a ‘lovesick’ refrain. These large mammals make great mothers and take wonderful care of their infants. Elephant babies often suck their trunks, as human babies do their thumbs. They learn quickly and make strong attachments.
If a baby dies, the mother stays with it a long time until she is sure it is dead. She runs a lot, pulls down things, and breaks things for quite some time after the death. Elephants in zoos have been noted to react to tourists who are wearing ivory jewelry, at times reaching to pull the jewelry off. “This is not remarkable, but typical behavior.” In the wild, they often stand vigil over the dead.
There are two species of elephants – African and Indian: one is endangered and the other is presently considered vulnerable to extinction. The main cause of their demise: human exploitation. Babies often witness as the tusks are hacked out of the faces of those around them – oftentimes their mothers, aunts and siblings. These infants suffer severe emotional trauma: they refuse to eat and they don’t want to live. Daphne Sheldrick, an authority on raising elephant orphans, tells of their inability to cope with the horror of the experience, and that the babies often “die of broken hearts.” At three weeks of age, she says, they understand that they have lost their whole family. She writes about the orphans who are unable to sleep, and who wake up in the middle of the night screaming and weeping. She states that they require round-the-clock love and attention if they are to have any chance at all of survival after experiencing such unspeakable violence.
BABE
Babe, an Asian elephant, became headline news at a zoo in the Northeast when she became pregnant. There was tremendous excitement as the zoo officials and thousands of local residents followed the pregnancy through newspaper articles and television spots. We all waited in eager anticipation for Babe to deliver her little pachyderm.
The first hint that there was something to be concerned about came with the headline, “Zoo’s Elephant Birthing Team Stands Ready to Deliver.” Elephant moms-to-be are always assisted in labor by the other females in the herd. One particular elephant midwife strokes her pregnant friend with her trunk, soothes her, and helps to facilitate the delivery.
Babe’s “birthing team” contained no experienced elephant friend; instead, there were a number of humans, including Babe’s trainer – a man – who was to keep the “7,700-pound bundle of nerves” calm. “It is important to keep strangers away,” we were told. “If she panics, the baby could die.” The trainer remarked that he was confident that he could help to relax Babe during her labor. “I’ll be calm and friendly,” he said. “I’ll say things like, ‘Steady, Babe. Relax, Babe.'”
Let us ponder how elephants could possibly have birthed their babies over the millennia without these comforting words being whispered into their ears … and without loaves of white bread and candy bars, which was much of what was fed to her, made available to her, because, after all, she was pregnant and needed extra calories.
Even before Babe’s labor began, even before the chains she was tethered to caused her reaction, the fear on the part of the birth team was apparent. After all, we were told, Babe was a first-time mother-to-be, “She’s inexperienced, and there won’t be anyone in her herd to give her advice. A lot could go wrong.”
In spite of a faint sense of foreboding, many of us tried to remain optimistic. We were encouraged by the veterinarian’s statements that there would be no pain medication, no drugs to make the labor go faster, and no Cesarean section. However, it wasn’t very long before those of us who know about birth began shuddering again at many of the things we were reading in the paper. There seemed to be no trust that Babe would be able to birth this calf at all. Their automatic, technocratic devices were in place. There were ropes and mops and oxygen tanks ready and waiting, in case the baby had to be pulled out, in case the water didn’t break, or in case the labor got tough. If Babe “forgot” to stimulate her calf with her trunk after birth, the humans were ready to “kick and hit it” (they considered this their job if Babe was either neglectful or lax about her responsibilities). Did they know that the stimulation that mother elephants in the wild provide is not violent, but rather life-giving? Can you even begin to imagine what a mother elephant in the wild would do if someone were to kick her newborn?
It wasn’t long before we were chewing our nails. The headline read, “Veterinarians may induce labor.” For goodness sake, why? Elephants are supposed to have long pregnancies; don’t they know that? You don’t grow a trunk overnight.
Babe’s water broke, but she didn’t go into labor right away. We were sure that she was wondering, at least on some level, where her elephant midwife was, and believing, we were equally as certain, that her treasured friend would most assuredly arrive in due time. Her contractions began but then stopped. We then heard that Babe was going to be given induction agents. The birth team had determined that Babe’s labor was taking too much time. For whom? we asked. An elephant with failure to progress. Ah yes, why not just speed things along. It’s been a while, it’s getting late, everyone’s tired—why not get this show on the road?
Everyone was fired up, with a proverbial gun pointing at Babe’s head. The delivery team had seen Babe’s calf moving inside her on videotapes. When they thought they detected a decrease in movement, they wanted to hear a fetal heartbeat—but it was hard to hear through her thick skin. So they poked pipes into her vagina to see if they could hear. They stuck their arms up inside of her, to see how far dilated her cervix was, and to feel the calf. They proceeded to conduct EIGHT HOURS of ultrasounds, rectal exams, and electrocardiograms. They then remarked that the tests revealed nothing.
We wondered how they would have interpreted the results anyhow. After all, it isn’t every day that elephants get tested during labor, and it isn’t as if they had a whole herd with which to compare results.
What an embarrassment to be a member of the human race. They gave you an enema, Babe! and that was just for starters. The delivery crew placed thick chains on your hind legs to keep them from moving. They gave you an enema. They then decided that you were probably too small to birth your calf, and decided to perform a cesarean section, knowing full-well that no elephant calf had ever survived the operation. They believed that this elephant was too small to birth her calf! Babe’s “expert delivery team.” How many elephants do you think each of them had successfully birthed to earn that title?
According to the newspapers, Babe’s trainers ordered her to lie down and roll over onto her side onto a pair of double mattresses. “Bathed in floodlights donated by volunteer fire departments, she was injected with M-99, an anesthetic ninety-nine times as powerful as morphine.” She hesitated but had been trained well. She most likely thought that if she obeyed her trainer, as always, she would be appropriately rewarded.
Instead, Babe was extensively rewired—and unmistakably taken.
After Babe was anesthetized, the doctors cut four inches deep into her skin. They used a scalpel to slice a 24-inch seam along her upper-left side. One reporter shook his head in disbelief: “You can’t be a Monday morning quarterback, there’s no wisdom in that. If you had a doctor who had only done two cesareans in his life, would you have let him operate on your wife?”
After much cutting, the surgeons eventually made their way into the uterus and found Babe’s calf. They attached chains to the baby’s ankles and hoisted the 260-pound calf from her mother’s womb with a block and tackle. Imagine them cramming their necks to watch as the little one, cradled in the arms of the crane, was swiftly brought to their inspection. Imagine then their profound shock when they realized that they were hoisting a lifeless calf. The baby was stillborn.
It had taken hours to perform the operation, and it took hours to close her up. When Babe awoke, there was no newborn, no midwife, and no herd—only a team of medical poachers, scratching their heads in disbelief, pointing fingers, packing up their trunks.
Postpartum after a cesarean section. Many of us remember it well. Our sympathies were with you, Babe, as you wondered what had happened to your newborn. We cringed with pain as you were pulled to standing—more like wobbling—a few hours after the surgery. We clasped our collective bladders as they administered water retention pills to you and measured your “output” (in what? a paper cup?). We remembered our own gas pains after the surgery and wondered what kind of anti-fart meds they’d cook up for you. When your kidneys began to malfunction and you were hooked to the portable dialysis machine (the first ever to be used on an animal) we could only wonder what you would be subjected to next.
Without her calf, Babe lost the will to live. She stopped eating. She preferred to “play” with her water rather than drink it. She was put on an IV. After a number of days, she could no longer fight. She’d been wiped-out and she was worn out. Her kidneys began to fail. According to one report, Babe kept trying to lie down, but her handlers kept ordering her to stand.
When Joyce Goike of the Humane Society begged the officials to put Babe to sleep to keep her from suffering, she was called a murderer. “Joyce Goike is not the veterinarian working on Babe,” the zoo’s mammal curator was quoted as saying. “We have competent veterinarians telling us that Babe is doing fine.”
When Babe tried to lie down for the third time, the officials finally gave in. “We think basically she has had enough. And she has the right to say it,” they said. [This 18 is a footnote] If she had been saying other things to you, guys, how would you have known? Babe lay down to rest, took three deep breaths, and then let out a long sigh. A few minutes later, at 1:35 p.m. on a beautiful spring afternoon, her heart stopped beating.
We were told that this surprised the officials because they were convinced that she was “happy” and that she didn’t want to die. Face it—they knew peanuts about elephants, babies and birth. Babe left our world with her delivery team/caretakers/butchers around her.
We then read that the exact cause of death would not be known until after the autopsy. Autopsy? Wasn’t one 24-inch-long incision enough? We felt sickened to find out that every part of Babe’s body was going to be examined by a “nationally set procedure, designed to salvage as much biological information” from the death of a rare species as possible. If we could truly have believed that the information would help another animal, we would support this “procedure.” But we had a raw feeling that the information would someday be used against another unsuspecting victim.
Evidently, there was to be no elephant-burial-ground pilgrimage in this case. Babe’s carcass was strapped and then lifted with a crane. It was delivered to a university laboratory for inspection. Later, the cause of death was listed as abdominal inflammation, kidney disease, and liver disease. We later learned that this was most probably the result of the decaying placenta which was left inside of her, causing her kidneys and liver to be overloaded. You do not need to be an expert on elephants to know that the cause of both these deaths was complications due to an unnecessary cesarean section.
PLEASE DON’T SECTION THE ANIMALS
Babe and her baby died because men, who have caused the near extinction of many species of elephants, now think their technology and their zoological (zoo-illogical) jail can save them. “It is the human ego at its worst: We can wipe them out, we can save them. The whole mess is a wild, desperate attempt at convincing ourselves that it is not too late to save the world, particularly the human world. If we can save the elephants from extinction, surely we can save ourselves.”
One of the veterinary students on the birth team remarked that Babe had contributed so much to their understanding of elephants. Another member of the birth team, who has traveled as far as India and Vietnam to care for some of the endangered elephants there, said that he never learned so much from treating one elephant. “This stuff will be taught now in veterinary schools,” he said. It appears, however, that very little has been learned. One has only to see a most recent birth of an elephant in captivity on YouTube to see that there are no elephant aunts/midwives present, to begin with.
Several members of the elephant team decided that the reason that Babe died was the cesarean was not performed early enough, so when another elephant was about to deliver, they were considering sectioning her prior to labor. It appears that they didn’t learn anything at all from their experience.
Perhaps we should add to the “Please don’t feed the animals” sign, “Please don’t section them, either.”
HOW MAMMALS GIVE BIRTH
One of the articles about Babe remarked that, unlike human birth, the mother elephant has control over the timing of her delivery. Evidently, no one reminded the birth team of this fact during Babe’s labor. Most mammals either cannot or will not give birth in hostile, violent, or even unfamiliar environments. If Babe’s birth team understood that the elephant controls her labor, then they should also have understood that her lengthy labor was a result of her own intuition.
The zoo officials continually acknowledged that it was imperative that there be no strangers around Babe at delivery, since it would impede her progress. What they failed to acknowledge, however, is that no matter how intimate those keepers and trainers may have been with the animal prior to the delivery, all humans are strangers at an elephant birth.
One physician, defending the team’s actions, said that in retrospect, there was nothing he or anyone should have done differently. They told the public that if Babe made any contribution, “it’s that cesarean section as an alternative to death becomes a greater possibility after today.” We were saddened that the “experts” learned so little and that not even a thought was made of natural delivery as an alternative.
BIRTH PROFESSIONALS?
Babe’s death, we are told, left the zoo and the community with heavy hearts. Everyone was convinced that what was done was all that could be done, and that it was right: “Professionals know best,” they said. It appears that the people on the elephant-specialists team really cared about her and certainly didn’t want her to die. But in their total lack of understanding and respect for natural birth, they became killers. In their ignorance and arrogance, and in their insistence to institute “active management of labor” with an elephant, they made mincemeat out of Babe and her infant. Talk about a circus.
The “professionals,” of course, should have been the other elephants. Where were the promised privacy and the reverent patience? Babe had little chance at the hands of high-tech obstetrics. What she endured at the hands of well-meaning but ignorant veterinarians clearly parallels what women are also subjected to at the hands of U.S. obstetricians. In silence, trapped in a room, Babe was prodded, stabbed and humiliated by strange human beings who have no real understanding of birth for their own species, much less that of another. At a time when obstetricians were just beginning to admit that resorting to a cesarean is not always appropriate and that many cesareans are unnecessary, the zoo officials stated that they should have been quicker to intervene with drugs and surgery.
Unable to take any responsibility whatsoever for their gross mistakes and abuse, the zoo-team said that Babe may have had an undiagnosed kidney problem for some time (gee, nobody had ever noticed?). Later, they said that she was too old (36). But you knew how old Babe was when you decided to breed her. A good enough body to conceive, but not to birth? You had had no intention to breed her, you say, but you noticed her menstrual cycles were regular, and predictable, so what the heck. “We were just lucky,” you said of the mating, “It was just her turn to try.” Not her turn, yours. You turn elephants into guinea pigs.
You blamed the baby, too. She didn’t know how to get out. She had “positioned herself” the wrong way and had possibly become “wedged”, making it “impossible” to “squeeze” through her mother’s cervix. Babies only get “wedged” when mothers get “stiffed.” Forcing Babe to lie down to do tricks may very well have caused her baby to get into the wrong position.
You blamed the umbilical cord: it got entwined with the front leg, cutting off fluids. “It [the calf] suffocated. It isn’t unusual—just sad.” Do you honestly think that cord problems are “usual” out there in Africa? If Babe had been back there in her native country, with her elephant friend stroking her, and her herd close by, she would have been fine, and so would her umbilical cord and her cervix and her baby. “The elephant has essentially been the same for the past 20,000 years,” we are told. That’s because “elephant” “works.” Elephant births work.
The Humane Society’s Joyce Goike chastised Babe’s zoo. “If you are going to do breeding,” she said, “it should be done in natural surroundings … they wanted to say, ‘Yes, we’re the ones to have a baby calf’ and the whole thing backfired as far as I’m concerned.” They watched Babe’s every move, waiting for her to go into labor. Any sign would “trigger the birth team into action … Their every movement and most decisions had already been programmed.”
Babe’s trainers had made Babe walk around her barbed-wire pen, pushing a tire, so that she would “get used to having a calf.” One veterinarian said that he himself would lead the calf to its mother after it was born. But if you don’t take the calf away from the mother, you don’t have to “lead it” to her—they find each other very well. Mothers/mammals don’t “examine” their babies after birth, they simply love them.
Joyce Goike recited a prayer for Babe upon her death: “May God grant her the peace that man never did.” True, Man was unable to grant Babe peace and as a result, may be equally unable to bestow it upon, and within, himself. There was a tremendous lack of humility, reverence, and honor for the grace and glory of these magnificent creatures and for the natural processes by which they came to be and continued to thrive. Gary Kowalski, author of Between Species: A Journal of Ethics reminds us that animals are not “inanimate objects, devoid of feeling and intellect, but thinking, sentient individuals with a spiritual life.” So are birthing women. It seems as if many of us forget.
* * *
After Babe’s death, a long debate ensued over several issues: breeding, induction of labor, interventions at birth, animal euthanasia, and cesarean section. The debates have been intense and bitter. We have so much to learn from our animal friends! But the ways in which we obtain that information must be moral and ethical.
Babe, we would have preferred to remain ignorant for all time rather than have you “teach” us what you did from your plight. We are so sorry that we aren’t yet elephant-friendly. But then, we aren’t women-friendly either. It’s a toss-up whether a typical American hospital birth is better or worse than your experience in the zoo. And can you imagine what they would have charged you for the adhesive tape, dissolvable sutures, and chux-pads, had you been in the hospital for delivery or what the weekly infant formula bill would have been when they told you that you probably wouldn’t have enough milk to breastfeed? Imagine this: If your child had been male, they may very well have tethered/immobilized him so that they could remove his foreskin. They hack it off, you know, like they do your tusks in the wild. They tell us that your trunk isn’t too much use at first, it just gets in the way.” But it has a purpose!
And although they think they are baby-friendly in many hospitals, that, too, is a joke. You cannot be baby-friendly without being mother-friendly, but they haven’t yet made that connection or understood that either.
THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS—AND HUNGRY
“l looked at one of the discarded trunks and wondered how many millions of years it must have taken to create such a miracle of evolution, equipped with 50,000 muscles and a brain to match such complexity, it can wrench and push with tons of force; at the same time, it is capable of … such delicate operations, such as picking up a small seed-pod to pop in its mouth.”
This was not the first time that Babe had been stressed. Less than two years old, she was taken from her herd by the president of Pakistan. Four years later, she was given to the American ambassador to Pakistan, as a going-away gift. He shipped her by sea to a port where she could be flown to London. Because of the 100-degree summer heat, the steel plate decks of the ship had to be constantly wetted. Babe’s feet had to be soaked in oil to help the chafing and cracking.
The Ambassador’s son was a young boy when Babe set foot in America. “I remember meeting her at the airport with my father. She wasn’t quite shoulder high. She was still very, very young and very friendly. She took up residence in the family’s garage and lived there for a year. The family decided that she would be better off in a zoo that wanted her. She was trucked to a zoo in Florida. She did not mix well with the herd there, she had a “hard time fitting in.” She spent most of her time alone and stayed there for a number of years. She was then sold to another zoo and “survived another trucking,” this time to Massachusetts. She spent twenty years there as the sole elephant. She became afraid of many of her trainers and lashed out in fear. The director of another zoo, David Raboy, said that he knew she was lashing out in fear and not aggression, because after she lashed out, she would jump back. An aggressive elephant would lash out and then stampede. She became difficult to manage. As a result, “nobody spent much time with her.”
A TOUCH OF IRONY
The zoo officials would not let reporters speak with the veterinarians, saying that the team had requested that they be kept away from all news media. Privacy or physician-elite pomposity? The media were given briefings and allowed to watch two-hour-old videotapes of the procedure. Technical challenges, or just enough time to edit and cover-up in case they screwed up? One of the officials said that the mortality rate for elephants in zoos is very high. It is not uncommon for a calf and cow to die. This is one reason, he said, that they try to keep the news of an impending birth quiet. Or so no one will know how often you all make mistakes?
An elephant-keeper in another town said that the birthing team wasn’t guilty of anything “except incredibly bad luck.” Bad luck? How about stupidity, arrogance, slaughter, murder? We were told only that your undetected kidney problem, not the surgery, was the cause of death, and that it was possibly “aggravated by stillbirth.” Yes, mothers do get “aggravated” when their babies are stillborn, don’t they? They shouldn’t, but after all, they’re women.
Babe is dead and her infant is dead. All the women who have heard this story are “aggravated,” too. Enraged.
During the hours when the birth-team thought that Babe was rallying, and that she might live, they began hugging each other and saying, “Good job. We’ve done it.” You sure did. But when Babe didn’t respond as you wanted her to make you look good and powerful and almighty, you had to decide when to “halt treatment and humanely destroy the animal.”
Finally, finally you get to “humanely?” If this is humane, perhaps what we should be doing is de-humanizing birth. So much of what we humans have done has spoiled the process miserably! Perhaps we should be learning birth from other mammals; perhaps we should be leaving them alone.
Thank goodness Babe died “on her own.” We’d have hated to see how you “helped” her to her final resting place. This was all about you. “A successful birth would not only be an accomplishment for the zoo, but it would also prove to other zoos across the country that old elephants shouldn’t be written off as nonproductive,” you said. Nonproductive? You’d bought Babe for a prayer; since her purchase, you told us, the price of elephants “has shot up into the tens of thousands of dollars.” How can anyone put a price on an elephant? How can anyone “own” one? Babe had drawn thousands of people over the years to your zoo; you “produced” a lot of money out of her. You just couldn’t get a baby out of her, not the way that you insisted on doing it. Too bad, that would have “produced” even more money for you, now wouldn’t it?
Only Joyce Goike understood and spoke the truth. Tearfully, she wrote, “We exploited her, by God … and all for the sake of an experiment.”
Babe, you rest in many of our hearts. We make so many mistakes, those of us who are human, but what can you expect from a bunch of Dumbos?
NANCY’S ADDENDUM
I told the story of Babe to a large group of women at a conference a few years ago. When I tell this story out loud, as I have on numerous occasions, many are moved to tears. However, one woman, sitting right in the front row, was especially emotional. She let out a sob and then a gasp and continued to cry audibly throughout my telling of the story. After I had finished my lecture, she raised her hand and asked if she could say a few words. She rummaged through her purse—I thought she was looking for a tissue—and came out with an old, faded, black and white, dog-eared photograph, which she handed to me. It was a picture of a young girl standing next to an elephant.
Through her sobs, Susan told us that when she was a teenager, she lived near the zoo. Her afterschool and weekend job was as caretaker of the elephant and her enclosure at the zoo. She became quite close to that elephant and was devastated when the decision was made to transfer the elephant to another zoo for mating, but glad that her ward would not be so lonely. She had heard years later, via the grapevine, that this elephant she had cared for so lovingly for four years had conceived … but lost touch and simply assumed that she had given birth. Susan was studying to be a breastfeeding counselor and a home birth midwife which was what had brought her to the conference.
The young girl in the picture was Susan, and the elephant she had her arm around, and whose trunk was on her shoulder, was Babe. Susan was inconsolable as she realized that the elephant that I had been talking about was her Babe. Susan and I lived fairly close to one another. She told me the name of the zoo where she had worked. My mind started thinking about the zoo where I had taken my children when they were very young—it was the same one!
I remembered taking my children to that zoo when they were little. Yes, I remembered seeing an elephant. She was at the far side of the pen and her back was turned, and after a few minutes at the fence, the children became impatient. “Why won’t she turn around?” they asked. While they had gone to see other animals with their dad, I had lingered outside the chain-link fence. I remembered walking around to the other side of the enclosure. She looked so sad and lonely, and I couldn’t tear myself away from her. I gently started talking to her. We made eye contact. My kids kept saying, “Mom, enough of the elephant!” I remember leaving the zoo and lecturing my children all the way home about animal rights and natural habitats. I never took my children to the zoo again and was happy to learn that it had closed a few years later.
As I was typing this chapter, I closed my eyes and concentrated. It was a long time ago, but I remember the walkway to the elephant’s “quarters.” I actually remember overhearing someone say that the elephant at this zoo was not friendly. I strain my heart’s eyes to see the sign on the wire, telling us the kind of elephant this was, where she came from and what her name was. Yes, it said “Babe.” I remember now because when I saw it, I felt annoyed: I wanted her to have a real name. The elephant that I saw all those years ago at the zoo was Babe. My whole body knew it. I saw Babe. All these years that I have been reading, crying her story, I did not consciously remember it at all.
You are mourned, Babe, and you are remembered. They didn’t take your tusks this time, they took your calf. Neither of those are ours to take. Your African name was Katub –un- Nisa meaning “loveliest of ladies.” Wherever you are now, may you have a calf of your own, may you have your herd around you, and may you know that your story is being told.
Nancy Wainer began the Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC) movement. She coined the term VBAC, and she was the first on record in the United States to experience a planned VBAC. Nancy has been a midwife, fierce birth advocate, author, mentor, and teacher to thousands and thousands of women, mothers, and birth professionals over the last forty-plus years.
