Risks of caesarean section

Well said n2l...it is the transformation a d metamorphosis of one into two, and the changing of woman into mother. Truly magical and a journey that requires lots of courage!

Ok maybe I am stating the obvious bit you can't measure risk using just maternal risk can you? My dd's very emergency csection started out as a textbook labour but at the end required intervention due to foetal distress. She would have lived but I would have died and been childless forever.
In antenatal classes I remember them quoting stats on the number of us that would end up having csections. It did not even enter my mind that I would have one. In an emergency situation you are not given any chance to understand the risk but you don't care. I agree birth is a risky business. However i believe pregnancy and birth is overmedicalised in our country. I don't know what the right percentage is but has to be less than what it is now.

I saw a statistic yesterday on the internet from amnesty which said that states with a CS rate higher than 33% had a maternal mortality rate 21% higher than those with a CS rate below 33%. The full report those numbers are taken from is here http://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/defa...lydelivery.pdf but I haven't read it so am making no suggestions as to it's validity, just repeating what I heard.

i had a c section but mine was medically necessary. if i didnt have it, either myself and/or my son would have died.

having said that, if and when we decide to have another baby, yes i will be having another c section. i have been called selfish, stupid, uniformed (yes i know the risks), and many other names but i feel its my choice, a personal one at that, and no one has the right to judge me otherwise. sorry but i really feel strongly about this topic!

:D

I believe in choice. If you want a natural birth, a induced vaginal birth, a c-sec, whatever, who am I to tell you what you should have? But as much as I shouldn't be telling you, neither should a medical professional.

This is a purely anecdotal example but when I went to a public hospital antenatal classes with my first three kids, nearly no one talked about having a c-sec. But at my antenatal class at a private hospital for my youngest son, where everyone spent the first 10 mins of the class comparing which ob they had, 9 of the 10 women there were going to have c-secs (guess who the 1 who wasn't was. :p ). Only one of the them said it was elective for no medical reason. The rest were told their hips were too small, or their babies were in the wrong position, or they had GD so their baby would be too big, or they had a c-sec previously so they had to have one now. Why were these women apparently more at risk than a woman who was going to a public hospital?

Making the risks of c-secs known is not the same as the pitchfork brigade that seem to go after homebirth advocates every time a home birth goes wrong. It's about telling women that they need to take those risks into account when deciding if their hips are in fact too small (I mean, seriously?). Similarly I remember saying in my antenatal class that the pressure of going through the birth canal helps push fluid out of the baby's lungs, and that seemed to be news to 3/4 of the women there. Why isn't this stuff told to us more?

If you are informed, you make your choices knowing all the risks and accepting them, be it for home birth or c-sec or anything in between. That's all I would like for women, to know what they're going into.