Our C-Section Rate Won't Budge -- Is It Because We Don't Trust Women's Hormones?

[Panich52]

Our C-Section Rate Won't Budge -- Is It Because We Don't Trust Women's Hormones?, Pacific Standard, March 3, 2015

An unprecedented new report looking at the biochemical mechanisms linked to birth and breastfeeding suggests that over-treatment in the delivery room is having lasting, harmful effects on both mothers and children.
JENNIFER BLOCK MAR 3, 2015

For the third year in a row, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the number of women who give birth by Caesarean section in the United States is hovering at around one-third of births. That's a 60 percent increase in 15 years, and a public health crisis. Why hasn't the number budged? Last year, it seemed that every professional organization publicly agreed (the obstetricians here, the nurses here, and the nurse-midwives here) that this is a problem and took responsibility for their part. They blamed, in a word, over-treatment.

“If overtreatment is defined as instances in which an individual may have fared as well or better with less or perhaps no intervention, then modern obstetric care has landed in a deep quagmire,” write the authors of a forward to a new and unprecedented report, Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing: Evidence and Implications for Women, Babies, and Maternity Care. “Navigating out of that territory will be challenging.”

In practice, this over-treatment looks like maternity wards where most women are being induced into labor or given synthetic oxytocin to speed up labor, where even women who plan on having a “natural” birth are told that they aren't “allowed” to walk around or eat, and who often turn to an epidural for relief (from the labor or the hospital protocols, it's difficult to say), which necessitates more interventions. These don't always work; after hours of this and that, many women wind up in the operating room.

More
http://www.psmag.com/#!/health-and-behavior/our-c-section-rate-wont-budge-is-it-because-we-dont-trust-womens-hormones

[niyad]

1. disgusted k and r

[HockeyMom]

2. Pitocin after 7 hours of Labor for first birth

They call that today "Failutre to Progress by the BOOK". A woman has to dilated certain cenetimers by the hour. What? This happened to my daughter in the hospital. No, baby was not in distress. They told her they had to speed up her labor. Get them in, get them out?

I was given pitocin 30 years ago after THIRTY HOURS of labor. THAT is prolonged labor, not 7 hours. Does not surprise me that C-Sections have not gone down. My older daughter was breach. I had to fight back then for a vaginal birth. Fortunately, I had an older doctor then who supported my decision. Today? Never happen.

BTW, my daughter, and all of us, was so furious with that hospital. She says her next baby will not be born in a hospital.

[Stargazer09]

3. Yes, but...

...I do know quite a few women who did not want to have any labor pain at all. They simply wanted to schedule a cesarean and get it over with. Risk of complications during surgery? Possible uterine rupture with future pregnancies? All the negatives in the world did not matter to them.

I had doctors and nurses tell me that wanting a VBAC was foolhardy, that "All the female OB's opt for cesareans, so you should, too."

There's definitely a problem with the culture within the obstetrics community, but I do not believe that the problem lies entirely within the medical field.

Women need to take some responsibility for their choices, too, but the medical providers can help by not strapping women into machines the entire length of labor.

[Demeter]

4. The only way a woman has any choice is by not getting "standard medical care"

By not buying into the system, a woman can avoid over-treatment. Of course, they will try to claim abuse...and deny anything less than the full schedule of care....

Once the mother-to-be in the system, the hospitals, staff and insurance companies and the state legislatures have so many protocols and laws and threats to report you for child abuse, that your best luck is that the operating room isn't set up before you get sufficiently dilated to deliver....which is what happened for my first-born, 32 years ago next Tuesday.

This is not a new phenomenon. And it's only getting worse. I was trying for a home birth, but the midwife had her protocols...baby was born in hospital, but I avoided the C-section by literally minutes.