Want to know why I think it's horse****? It is because it uses the BMI! The BMI is a flawed measurement of weight and you have 'obese' women who are really probably not obese at all and it skews the results of the study pretty damn quickly.

And this;


Is also making the study flawed because they are creating a situation where the rate of surgical birth outcomes are immediately greater than normal.

And do you know what else makes it a totally ****ed up study? Does anyone know what 'nulliparious' means? It means a woman who has NEVER given birth before. So they have done this study on women who are having their first baby, INDUCED them for the purposes of controlling the outcome of the study and then said 'oh yeah, these fat women having their first births ended up with more surgical births'. Really Einstein? Statisically speaking, premip women who have an induction of labour are more likely to end up with a surgical birth than a woman who is a multipara. OF COURSE their study is going to show that these nulliparious women have a higher c/s rate and because the study is about obese women, then that must be the reason right? Not the fact that they are inducing premips.

Oh and inductions. Biggest mistake right there. If they genuinely wanted to do a study and find out if obese women labour longer than smaller women, then they should NOT have included births that were induced, used any form of analgesia (which would include epidurals). You can only get an accurate result if you are studying completely unhindered births.

Bad studies like this only make it harder for larger women to birth how they want. They are not given the options that other women would have. Assumptions are automatically made just because of studies like those ones.
Which study was this? I agree bad studies suck, but the error usually lies in people interpreting the studies to say things they don't mean, rather than bad design. It was encouraging to read in the conclusions of some of these studies that obesity should be taken into consideration when labour stalls and hence DON'T take further interventions because this particular labour may be usual / within normal for an obese mother.