Be(a)ware: U.S. C-section Rate Rises for Twelfth Straight Year
Coinciding with the start of Cesarean Awareness Month, the CDC recently released its long-awaited preliminary data on birth statistics from 2008.
Not surprisingly, the cesarean rate rose for the twelfth straight year, from 31.8% in 2007 to 32.3% in 2008.
According to the CDC report, while the pace of the increase in cesarean births has “slowed somewhat in recent years,” the c-section rate itself has increased by 50% since 1996. What’s more, this increase occurred among women “of all age groups, and most race and ethnic groups.”
There are good reasons to find this (preliminary) data alarming.
There are also good reasons to take a long, hard look at reversing the trend in rising cesarean rates.
The VBACtivist in me wants to point immediately toward the ways in which expanding access to and support for vaginal birth after cesarean could help to reverse this trend.
But on a broader (though more-difficult-to-analyze) level, I want to look at the ways in which this trend could be reversed by dismantling a maternity care system that could even allow for a 10-year, 50% increase in cesarean section–one that increases a woman’s risk of birth-related mortality and morbidity in future births, and one that does not seem to be improving the current maternal mortality rate whatsoever.
