Too informed to push: pregnant doctors choose caesareans
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/11/nhs.health1
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While the government promotes "normal" deliveries to the public, its employees are privately planning caesareans, the Guardian reports today.
The government aims to bring down the number of elective caesareans in the UK so that surgical intervention is less common, and fewer women than the 23% who currently have caesareans experience such a radical medical procedure without absolutely needing it.
But significant numbers of women obstetricians, who don't just deliver babies every day like midwives, but who attend worst-case birthing scenarios and operate on women in labour, are choosing caesareans not because they're too posh or too scared to push but because they believe it is the safest method. Their greatest fear is not the pain of a natural labour, but the the trauma of emergency intervention should anything not go according to plan.
"There is nothing wrong with hoping for a natural event," says the anonymous doctor interviewed in the Guardian, "and for everything to happen beautifully. But it just isn't like that for a large proportion of women."
According to the most recent NHS maternity statistics made available (2005-6), just under half (47%) of expectant mothers have a regular, uncomplicated "normal" labour. The rest have interventions ranging from induction, to forceps, to an emergency caesarean.
In other words, when a woman tries for a normal birth and the best, safest kind of delivery, she has only a 50% chance of achieving it. For a significant number of others, the birth will be more complex.
But is that because doctors are too keen to jump in early with surgical intervention to make their lives easier, to reduce the potential of liability should anything go badly wrong, and to get women off labour wards and out of hospital as quickly as possible?
The government aims to bring down the number of elective caesareans in the UK so that surgical intervention is less common, and fewer women than the 23% who currently have caesareans experience such a radical medical procedure without absolutely needing it.
But significant numbers of women obstetricians, who don't just deliver babies every day like midwives, but who attend worst-case birthing scenarios and operate on women in labour, are choosing caesareans not because they're too posh or too scared to push but because they believe it is the safest method. Their greatest fear is not the pain of a natural labour, but the the trauma of emergency intervention should anything not go according to plan.
"There is nothing wrong with hoping for a natural event," says the anonymous doctor interviewed in the Guardian, "and for everything to happen beautifully. But it just isn't like that for a large proportion of women."
According to the most recent NHS maternity statistics made available (2005-6), just under half (47%) of expectant mothers have a regular, uncomplicated "normal" labour. The rest have interventions ranging from induction, to forceps, to an emergency caesarean.
In other words, when a woman tries for a normal birth and the best, safest kind of delivery, she has only a 50% chance of achieving it. For a significant number of others, the birth will be more complex.
But is that because doctors are too keen to jump in early with surgical intervention to make their lives easier, to reduce the potential of liability should anything go badly wrong, and to get women off labour wards and out of hospital as quickly as possible?
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Bashar
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Typical women doctors- one law for them, another law for their patients! They fundamentally don't give a damn about the welfare of other people's children, just as long as their own little brood are alright.
- 3 years ago
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Bashar
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