Kate Mara is refreshingly honest about her emergency C-section

Kate Mara is refreshingly honest about her misscarriage

Mara explains that she first told her husband, fellow actor Jamie Bell, about her pregnancy when they were stopped at a red light. “I turned to him and I was like, ‘Is now a bad time to show you this?’ ” she tells Berlin. “I showed him the [test] stick. He was at a stop light, and he just burst out laughing and was like, ‘Oh, my God. How is that possible?'”

“It was the first time I’ve ever been pregnant, and I’ve never had that excitement and shock of being an almost mom,” says Mara.

She continues: “That just was such a special sort of reveal.”

Unfortunately, about eight weeks into her pregnancy Mara learned something was wrong. Eventually, she was diagnosed with a blighted ovum, a type of early miscarriage where a fertilized egg doesn’t continue to develop into an embryo.
Weeks later, the pregnancy officially ended with a miscarriage. “Everything just took so much time, by the time it was all over. It just dragged out forever,” Mara explains.

Kate Mara’s birth story didn’t go as planned (but she wouldn’t change it)

After her first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, Mara did get pregnant again but was diagnosed with obstetric cholestasis, a liver condition that can make mothers extremely itchy in late pregnancy and can result in complications as serious as stillbirth.

Mara’s medical team determined the safest thing to do was induce her a month early, dashing her dreams of an unmedicated home birth. Instead, she spent several days laboring at the hospital and did get an epidural. Eventually, though, things took a serious turn as her temperature spiked to unmanageable levels and she needed to be rushed to the OR for a C-section.

“Right before I went in for the C-section, that’s when I sort of [felt] the devastation of it and the disappointment of not being able to experience a birth any way that I had hoped,” Mara tells Berlin.

She goes on: “I was so scared to have the C-section, to have this surgery. I was genuinely terrified of what that meant and what could happen and all of these things, and then of course just being tired made me that much more scared, I think.”

Once her baby girl was born and safe, it became clear that Mara was not. She’d needed a blood transfusion during the operation and was experiencing something a lot of C-section mamas know all too well—the post-surgery shakes. These tremors kept her from holding her baby.

“My husband brought her over to me and he kind of held her on my chest and it was amazing, but it was not at all what I imagined it would be. I could barely keep my eyes open to look at her.”

Mara was sad that day because her birth experience didn’t go as she’d hoped, but she also says that looking back, she wouldn’t do a thing differently. Everything that was done was done for really serious medical reasons and her baby girl ended up with the best outcome.

It’s okay to feel either sad, happy (or both) when your birth plans change

Kate Mara’s C-section story is like a lot of moms’, and her feelings are totally valid, say experts.

According to the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , C-sections are super common, representing about 32% of all births in the United States, but emergency cesareans can be so stressful. “The emergency nature of C-sections leads [some mothers] to feel out of control, as well as fear that there will be harm to the baby or themselves,” Dr. Sarah Allen, a Chicago psychologist and director of the Postpartum Depression Alliance of Illinois, told the Chicago Tribune.

Mara’s worst fears did not come true that day, but her dream of motherhood did. And that is why she doesn’t look back on her birth and regret the interventions. She was scared, but she was so strong and she’s telling her story in the hopes of lending some strength to other mamas.