About 20 minutes after I woke from surgery, still shaking and out of it, I got to hold my son. He was alert and impossibly beautiful, with a single dimple and eyes open wide as satellite dishes, receiving everything.

Later, when I sat him up on my lap, his head dropped somnolently forward and he curled into a ball. It was the position he held inside my body and, still narcotized and sluiced with postpartum hormones, I cried in recognition and sorrow. We had grown together over 10 months, continuously shifting shape in response to each other, sharing every flight of stairs, dance party, bad mood. Having him cut out of my body felt like a rupture, and now I was too physically wrecked to even lift him from his bassinet.

My diagnosis — arrested dilation or “failure to progress” — is estimated to account for approximately 60 percent of American C-sections. In Gaskin’s practice, the failure-to-progress diagnosis doesn’t exist. When we discussed my birth story, months later on the phone, she told me she thought a bath, a nap, a snack, some encouraging words — or just a chance to labor without the threat of various catastrophes hanging over my head — might have kick-started my labor. Who knows if any of that would have worked, but I wish alternatives had been offered to me before surgery, because neither my son nor I were in any immediate danger. The most important thing to me is that my son emerged healthy. Still, I would like to have been more present for his arrival and in better shape during his first weeks, when just rolling over or sitting up hurt, and I worry about the risk for serious complications — uterine rupture, hysterectomy, endometriosis — I now face in any future pregnancies.

Yet I would still not choose to go to rural Tennessee — more than an hour from a top-level N.I.C.U. ward in Nashville — to be able to have more of a say in how I give birth. I wouldn’t even choose to have a do-over in my apartment, 10 minutes from a hospital. And although I like aspects of the home-birth experience, I’m put off by some of the dogma that can accompany the movement. In their rush to defend unmedicated births, natural-birth advocates sometimes fetishize them, saying for instance that the first moments after birth present a unique opportunity to bond that is forever lost when the mother’s and baby’s systems are flooded by anesthesia or other drugs. “The Business of Being Born” shows an image of a baby screaming alone in a hospital bassinet as a narrator intones: “When chimpanzees give birth by C-section, they don’t take care of their babies. It’s that simple.”

It’s not that simple, of course, and it is unfortunate that the choices and the rhetoric around birth — like many of the choices and rhetoric around motherhood in general — are so polarized. It should be possible both to have a baby in a place that doesn’t have financial and legal incentives to medicalize a low-risk pregnancy and to still have immediate access to top-level care if it’s needed. It shouldn’t be necessary to leave the medical establishment entirely to give birth vaginally to a breech baby or after a previous Caesarean. It should be possible both to acknowledge that something real was lost in the way my baby was born and to know that this loss is finite; there is not one pure route to authentic motherhood. Eight months with my son have offered ample evidence that there is not only one opportunity for joy.