04/11/2021
American figures but Australia has the same issues. Words from
One-third of babies in the United States these days are born via surgical birth. And for that one-third of births, the biggest factor that influenced the mode of birth was *where* the birth happened.
Not anything about the birth itself. Not anything about the birthing person. Not anything about the baby. Not anything clinical. Simply what hospital the person birthed in.
The cesarean rate has soared in the last 4 decades - from 5% in 1970 to 31.8% in 2019 - and the maternal mortality rate has increased along with it, without the expected decrease in neonatal mortality. The number one reason cited for surgical birth is "labor dystocia" (aka "failure to progress"). The number two reason is "non-reassuring fetal heart rate." These two reasons alone account for half of all primary (first time) c-births in this country. These two reasons also happen to lack clear definitions and are subject to a good deal of personal interpretation.
Hospitals serving the same communities can have differences of up to 30% in their c-section rate. This is because the factors that influence the decision to perform a surgical birth are often cultural, not clinical.
Study after study show that most birthing people vastly prefer vaginal births over surgical births, and would not choose to give birth via surgery. C-birth is not benign; people undergoing it are 3x more likely to die or suffer complications like blood clots, heart attacks, infection, and hemorrhage, and there are significant short-term and long-term risks to babies born this way. It's not about philosophy or aesthetics. There are real consequences to major surgery.
As much as industrialized birth providers love to talk about birth being "unpredictable," that rhetoric is a form of gaslighting (more on this soon!): in fact, it seems your chances of a surgical birth can be reasonably predicted at the outset by which doors you decide to walk through when you seek out care.
Were you aware of this when you chose where to give birth? What questions do you have about it?’
