My sister-in-law just had her first baby, and got very into all of these statistics and the "medical industrial complex take on childbirth"
I believe the WHO recommends around 10-15% of births should be C-Section in a healthy population, but the figures in first world countries are at least 3-5 times that.
There are about 3 million stories of ladies "booking in" their birth a month or three in advance. I.e. I want my baby on the 3rd of May, lets schedule a C-Section now. It's more convenient that way. Also tons of stories of doctors wanting to go home for the weekend or to play golf, so they do a C-Section after only an hour of labor so they can hurry it up.
It's horrifying that hospitals will market a "natural birth" as anything that is vaginal. i.e. it doesn't matter how many drugs they give you, it doesn't matter what drugs they give you to speed up the afterbirth, etc. etc. It's still "natural".
We don’t have a great way of knowing the optimal c-section rate. But plotting national c-section rates against perinatal outcomes (an obviously imperfect approach) shows that increasing c-section rates are associated with significantly better outcomes until about 20% after which there is no real effect one way or another.
I’m not sure why it would be “horrifying” what kind of birth a hospital labels natural. It’s all bullshit anyway. No births in a hospital are like births in nature, which is why so many more babies survive the experience these days.
> It's horrifying that hospitals will market a "natural birth" as anything that is vaginal. i.e. it doesn't matter how many drugs they give you, it doesn't matter what drugs they give you to speed up the afterbirth, etc. etc. It's still "natural
That's definitely not the definition used in the UK. Normal birth in the UK doesn't include epidural but does include some other pain relief. This is controversial because epidural is probably safer.
> Also tons of stories of doctors wanting to go home for the weekend or to play golf, so they do a C-Section after only an hour of labor so they can hurry it up.
There is a world of difference between a doctor pressuring a woman to have a C-section because it's more convenient for them, and a woman freely choosing to have one for her own reasons.
"wanting to go home for the weekend or to play golf"
That is 100% real. A friend got hurt for that purpose. In her case, it was a huge and brutal episiotomy. The moment the kid was out, he ran out to play golf. Another friend got just about exactly the same, but because the doctor's house was flooding.
Doctors are human. Humans are often uncaring or even evil. Customers get dehumanized, like mechanical widgets on an assembly line in a factory.
My wife had a natural child birth with just a shot of pitossin at the end for the afterbirth. At a hospital. No medication at all other than that, not so much as a Tylenol.
Instead of death of baby and mother, babies growth into mothers, with genetic incline toward same problem, so you need to add another 10-15% to account for that.
> I believe the WHO recommends around 10-15% of births should be C-Section in a healthy population, but the figures in first world countries are at least 3-5 times that.
Apparently 45% in China, 25-35% in many Western countries. I had no idea that the numbers in many countries are that high; Northern Europe (where I'm from) is evidently something of an outlier at 15% or so.
There are a whole host of reasons for having a c-section. The risk of having a massive tear (ie vag to arse(4c tear), or literally tearing a new arsehole) is 1 in 4. This has long term life altering consequences.
An "elective" c-section is not the same as "booking in". The less "identity politics" that are wrapped up in this, the better.
> The risk of having a massive tear (ie vag to arse(4c tear), or literally tearing a new arsehole) is 1 in 4.
Yes and it usually heals very well. The tissue there is made to deal with that. My sister had that happen 5 years ago, it even continued into her gut for a few cm. So that was a very bad case, but it still healed perfectly, although it took about 3 month.
... 3 months. Unless she had corrective surgery then she's almost certainly got some level of incontinence.
There will(or should) have been physiotherapy to get some semblance control back.
Look, there is nothing wrong with a c-section or a vaginal delivery. To make women feel that they are somehow inferior for having one is totally unacceptable. Something like 10-20% of births endup in caesarian, otherwise there is a massive chance of a bad outcome for both child and mother.
Source: wife who is a paediatrician and attends lots of births where the child is in distress.
This was me pointing out the word "natural" is loaded BS. Whatever one's view is on whether a baby should be delivered by C-Section or vaginally (which should depend on the circumstances, obvbiously) "natural" as a description is really silly. We aren't cave-people. We are incredibly thankful for it. We don't consider it a good thing to watch our children die and will intervene in all kinds of ways animals can't to avoid it. Anyone touting "natural" for anything, especially childbirth, should be treated with extreme caution.
Look how it's done:
If you're a fit, 19 year old mother with a healthy, correctly oriented fetus vaginal birth may be preferable to c-section.
Take "natural" the hell away from all of it. It's a sign of thinking being replaced by emotion which probably isn't a good idea if you think evidence based medicine is a good idea.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Doing otherwise leads to tedious flamewars.
Do you really think underdeveloped is the same as cave-people? That Africans have no education and expertise to do their absolute best looking after mothers and babies? I have to disagree strongly there...
Is the rate of non-intervention childbirth in pre-history 50% or 1%? This is not really even an interesting question. With absolute certainty you can say it was more than 1%. In modern times we've made that massively lower. /Even/ in very poor parts of Africa interventions of many different kinds happen to get that natural rate down.
It's not "natural" to take antibiotics for infection either. Get natural out of this discussion. Childbirth is dangerous, we have made huge progress as a species so that it really shouldn't be anymore. That progress is not "natural" what it is, is actually morally good.
Prosletysation in evidence based medicine should require peer-reviewed studies with data available cited as evidence. Where is that when all these people say "natural" is better? Evidence would convince me. Really.
I believe the WHO recommends around 10-15% of births should be C-Section in a healthy population, but the figures in first world countries are at least 3-5 times that.
There are about 3 million stories of ladies "booking in" their birth a month or three in advance. I.e. I want my baby on the 3rd of May, lets schedule a C-Section now. It's more convenient that way. Also tons of stories of doctors wanting to go home for the weekend or to play golf, so they do a C-Section after only an hour of labor so they can hurry it up.
It's horrifying that hospitals will market a "natural birth" as anything that is vaginal. i.e. it doesn't matter how many drugs they give you, it doesn't matter what drugs they give you to speed up the afterbirth, etc. etc. It's still "natural".