Cesarean Section Quotes

The final patient of a comically busy prenatal clinic requests an elective cesarean section because of a previous traumatic vaginal delivery. This is a fairly common request—principally because there’s no such thing as a nontraumatic vaginal delivery.

Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.

Teaching you is like having a cesarean section every day of the week.

We are only beginning to understand the importance and nature of a woman’s vaginal microbiome. Babies born by Cesarean section are robbed of this initial wash. The consequences for the baby can be profound. Various studies have found that people born by C-section have substantially increased risks for type 1 diabetes, asthma, celiac disease, and even obesity and an eightfold greater risk of developing allergies.

I’m so sick of that argument. I’ve been hearing it for centuries. Playing God. Wolfgang, we played God when people believed they could dictate their baby’s gender by having sex in a certain position. We played God when we invented birth control, amniocentesis, cesarean sections, when we developed modern medicine and surgery. Flight is playing God. Fighting cancer is playing God. Contact lenses and glasses are playing God. Anything we do to modify our lives in a way that we were not born into is playing God. In vitro fertilization. Hormone replacement therapy. Gender reassignment surgery. Antibiotics.

Midwives provide all the prenatal care healthy women need. The midwifery ideal is to work with each woman and her family to identify her unique physical, social, and emotional needs. In general, midwifery care is associated with fewer episiotomies, fewer instrumental deliveries, fewer epidurals, and fewer cesarean sections. Midwives are trained to identify the relatively small percentage of births in which complications develop and to refer these to obstetricians.

You leave the womb sterile, or so it is generally thought, but are liberally swabbed with your mother’s personal complement of microbes as you move through the birth canal. We are only beginning to understand the importance and nature of a woman’s vaginal microbiome. Babies born by Cesarean section are robbed of this initial wash. The consequences for the baby can be profound. Various studies have found that people born by C-section have substantially increased risks for type 1 diabetes, asthma, celiac disease, and even obesity and an eightfold greater risk of developing allergies. Cesarean babies eventually acquire the same mix of microbes as those born vaginally—by a year their microbiota are usually indistinguishable—but there is something about those initial exposures that makes a long-term difference. No one has figured out quite why that should be.

Saturday, November 4, 2006 Get bleeped to see a postpartum patient at 1:00 a.m. The OR staff relay to the bleeping midwife that I’m in the middle of a cesarean. I get bleeped again at 1:15 a.m. (still doing the section) and 1:30 a.m. (writing up my operation notes). Eventually, I head off to assess the patient. The big emergency? She’s going home in the morning and wants to have her passport application countersigned by a doctor while she’s still in here.

Except when I was born. My god, I was so fat. I almost killed my mother. And while that’s gross, it’s completely true. If we lived in a time before cesarean sections, she wouldn’t have survived. (I would also like to thank cesarean sections for sparing me the mental anguish of knowing I once passed through my mother’s vaginal canal.)

Babies who are born via Cesarean section have a higher risk of developing ADHD, but why? Understanding the links in the chain give credence to the importance of healthy gut bacteria to sustain intestinal health and overall wellness. When a baby passes through the birth canal naturally, billions of healthy bacteria wash over the child, thereby inoculating the newborn with appropriate probiotics whose pro-health effects remain for life. If a child is born via C-section, however, he or she misses out on this shower of sorts, and this sets the stage for bowel inflammation and, therefore, an increased risk of sensitivity to gluten and ADHD later in life.12

Sex hormones/Reproductive health history. Sex hormone imbalances can be a factor in Hashimoto’s, and here is some of the information I ask for on my health history forms: Do you currently take, or have you taken oral contraceptives or bioidentical hormones? Do you currently take, or have you had an intrauterine device (IUD)? If you answered “yes,” was it a copper or hormonal IUD? How many live births have you had? Were they natural births or Cesarean sections? Is there a history of ovarian cysts? Is there a history of uterine fibroids? Is there a history of endometriosis? Is there a history of fibrocystic breasts?

I was trying to remember how to spell ‘cesarean,’ so I looked it up in the dictionary. I was looking under the letter ‘s,’ but then I remembered it was in the C-section.

lowest concentration of plasma sodium also had prolonged second stage of labour, and were more often delivered instrumentally or by emergency cesarean section for failure to progress.

High anxiety may slow down labor, which may lead to medical interventions such as the use of oxytocin or other drugs, epidural block, or cesarean section. (L.

Barbie is a space-age fertility symbol: a narrow-hipped mother goddess for the epoch of cesarean sections. She is both relentlessly of her time and timeless. To such overripe totems as the Venus of Willendorf, the Venus of Lespugue, and the Venus of Dolni, we must add the Venus of Hawthorne, California.

Backache, edema, heartburn… What else?” She took a sip of her cider. “Something they call ligament pains that feel remarkably like a wide-awake cesarean section.” He winced. “I pee on the half hour.” He laughed. “You think it’s funny? A few more years, when your prostate is a bit larger, you won’t think it’s all that funny.” “I hope it’s more than just a few more years, Ab,” he said. But he smiled. He touched her hand, gave it a little squeeze.

In a medical study, it turned out that obstetricians in areas with declining birth rates are much more likely to perform cesarean-section deliveries than obstetricians in growing areas—suggesting that, when business is tough, doctors try to ring up more expensive procedures.

around abortion instituted by antichoice governors, high rates of cesarean sections and maternal mortality, and prohibitive healthcare costs—doulas are providing crucial support to pregnant clients and medical staff alike.

A woman is four times more likely to die having a cesarean section than a vaginal birth.

Nearly a third of babies born in hospitals in the United States are delivered via cesarean section, often due to the cautionary nature of modern obstetrical practice.2 Among seventeen thousand home births in a recent study conducted by the Midwives Alliance of North America, only 5.2 percent needed to go the hospital for a C-section.

A Louisiana surgeon perfected the cesarean section by experimenting on the enslaved women he had access to in the 1830s.

Meanwhile, some private schools even enroll students at birth. At the Wetherby School in England, a school Princes William and Harry attended, the spaces reserved by newborns fill up early each month, and the school advises women scheduling cesarean sections to have them on the first of the month, if possible, to get a place before all the spots are gone.

out of five scientific studies (randomized controlled trials) of fetal monitors, four showed no differences in outcome for the babies whether the fetal monitor was used or not.5 Only one showed an improved outcome for the babies, and that study has been severely criticized for poor scientific methodology.6 Dr. A. D. Haverkamp of Denver told the Central Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 1975 that research showed no difference in the health or survival rate of babies when internal electronic fetal heart monitoring was used to manage deliveries. But the big difference, he said, was in the cesarean-section rate. It was 16.5 percent in the group of women who underwent electronic fetal monitoring but only 6.8 percent in the group whose births were managed by frequent use of the stethoscope to check the baby’s well-being.7 Clearly, repeated scientific studies show that the baby does not benefit when the mother is electronically monitored. These studies show that the major difference in outcome when the fetal monitor is used is for the mother. The cesarean surgery rate is as much as tripled!

A cesarean section is a wound that impedes normal digestive function, function that must resume following surgery. Breast milk is delayed. Seven layers of tissue and muscle are severed.