Word: c-sections
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What all these women had are C-sections. Not the emergency caesareans that have been performed for hundreds of years to rescue babies from women in medical crisis. (Legend has it that Julius Caesar was born this way.) Rather, they had an increasingly popular modern-day variation: planned, scheduled operations for all sorts of less-than-critical reasons. One young college student arranged her baby's birth to avoid conflict with her final exams. Another woman was convinced a C-section would ensure that her child's head had a nice round shape. Others are terrified of labor pains...
...like Madonna, actress Kate Hudson and Live with Regis & Kelly co-host Kelly Ripa--are taking charge of their childbearing these days and avoiding the vagaries of natural births. Around the world, rates of caesarean sections are soaring, far surpassing the recommendation by the World Health Organization (WHO) that C-sections make up less than 15% of all births and less than 9.5% in wealthy, Westernized nations. In England, 22% of all babies are born by C-section. In Italy, the rate has climbed from 21% a decade ago to 33% today. In some private clinics in Brazil, C-section...
...according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 1 in 4 babies is born by C-section--the highest rate since the government officially began keeping track--up from 10.4% in 1975. According to Dr. Samantha Collier, vice president of medical affairs at HealthGrades, a company that rates the quality of health care in the U.S., about 22% of those C-sections--or 63,000 births per year--are purely by patient choice, a 20% increase since 1999. "In the next couple of years," says Collier, "we're going to see this go through the roof...
...which puts the obstetrics community in an uneasy ethical position. While C-sections are safer than ever--thanks to improvements in anesthetics, antibiotics and operating techniques over the past few decades--they still introduce real risks. In 1% to 2% of cases, C-sections lead to infection, damage to other organs during surgery or severe bleeding in the mother. They can also endanger the baby if the infant's gestational age has been miscalculated and the child is removed from the womb too soon. Risks to the mother increase with each successive C-section, and the procedure isn't recommended...
...Lorne Campbell Sr., an upstate New York family practitioner and clinical professor of family medicine, introduced hypnobirthing to his practice four years ago. Since then, he says, his C-section rate has dropped from 25% to 1%, and none of his more than 200 hypnobirthing patients has ever requested analgesic drugs during labor...