What They Don’t Tell You About C-Sections
Many traditions throughout history have come to view one’s birth as one of the most important moments in a human’s life as it sets the stage for all that follows. Unfortunately, much in the same way we desecrate the death process by over-medicalizing it (to the point research has found that doctors are less likely to seek end of life care at a medical facility), the same issue also exists with childbirth. Many physicians I know who are familiar with the hospital birthing process chose to skip it and give birth at home (along with many more doctors featured in a 2016 documentary).
Conversely, a minority of childbirths do need advanced medical care. For those mothers, access to a hospital greatly benefits them, particularly if actions are taken to mitigate the most dangerous aspects of hospital birth. As such, childbirth occupies a similar place as many other medical controversies; neither side of the issue is entirely correct. However, the data clearly shows the risk of routine C-sections outweighs their benefits so this article will attempt to expose what they aren’t tell you about them.
The Business of Being Born
For a long time, doctors had no interest in being delivering babies, but once a leader in the profession realized grateful mothers they delivered the babies of would become their doctor’s lifelong customer, the medical professional gradually displaced midwives and switched birth from being seen as a natural life event to one that required increasing medicalization. While some of those interventions were helpful and saved lives, many were not and put both the mother and child at risk of a variety of immediate and chronic complications.
Since the hospital birthing process does not try to augment the natural birthing process and instead tries to control and manage it, one of the most significant issues with many of its approaches to birth (detailed here) is that they frequently create complications that require more and more invasive methods to be implemented.
In many cases, the end of this pipeline is the mother “having” to bypass the birthing process by cutting open the abdomen and directly extracting the baby (via a costly C-section). While they are sometimes necessary (e.g., the WHO made a good case that in 10% of births, they prevent maternal and infant mortality), they are done far too frequently (e.g., in 2023, 32.3% of all American births were C-sections).
Note: one of my least favorite statistics in medicine is that C-section rates dramatically rise at the times doctors typically want to go home.1,2,3
General Risks of C-Sections
Being an abdominal surgery, C-sections carry a variety of issues commonly seen with those procedures such as:
• The mother typically needs a 4-6 weeks recovery period.
• Post-surgical infection (e.g., globally this happens in 5.63% of C-sections).
• Significant pain (at the most important bonding period of your life).
• Potential reactions to general anesthesia.
• Accidental organ injuries (particularly since some C-sections need to be done very quickly to save the baby’s life).
Additionally, there are some surgical complications more unique to C-sections such as:
• Damage to the lining of the uterus that creates adhesions and scars, which cause the placenta to attach in the wrong place in future pregnancies (e.g., two C-sections make women 13.8 times more likely to have a placenta accreta).
• The weakened uterine scar can rupture during a subsequent delivery (especially if contraction inducing oxytocin is used during delivery), so one C-section can result in patients needing to have all subsequent births to be C-sections as well (particularly if there’s an abnormal placental attachment).
• The infant can accidentally get cut during the C-section (e.g., 1.5-1.9% get facial lacerations).
• C-section incision scars often cause significant issues for years—if not decades (until they are correctly treated), and in many cases these scars are the hidden cause of chronic pain and a variety of ailments as they continually activate and then dysregulate the autonomic nervous system.
• The general anesthetics used for the C-section can increase an infant’s risk of neonatal complications.
Note
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
