Caesarean Delivery On Maternal Request - Controversy

Controversy

A meeting of experts sponsored by the NIH in March, 2006 attempted to address the medical issues and found "insuffient evidence to evaluate fully the benefits and risks" of CDMR versus vaginal delivery, and thus was not able to come to a consensus about the general advisability of a cesarean delivery by demand. The available evidence suggests certain differences as follows:

Proponents for CDMR will point out that it facilitates the birth process by performing it at a scheduled time under controlled circumstances, with typically less bleeding, and less risk of trauma to the baby. Furthermore, there is some evidence that urinary stress incontinence as a long-term result of damage to the pelvic floor is increased after vaginal birth. Opponents to CS feel that it is not natural, that the costs are higher, infection rates are higher, hospitalization longer, and rates for breastfeeding decrease. Also, once a CS has been done, subsequent deliveries will likely be also by CS, each time at a somewhat higher risk.

Subsequent to the NIH report a large review from the USA of almost 6 million births was published that suggested that neonatal mortality is 184% higher in babies born by cesarean section. This study was harshly criticized for excluding cases where unforeseen complications arose during labor from its cohort of vaginal deliveries, thereby retrospectively removing poor outcomes and artificially lowering the neonatal mortality rate in the vaginal delivery population, and for using birth certificate data instead of more reliable documentation, such as hospital discharge forms, to define cesarean sections with "no indicated risk", and thereby inappropriately including emergent cesarean sections in their "elective cesarean" cohort. In response to this criticism, the authors published a second paper analyzing the same cohort, in which they did not systematically exclude vaginal deliveries in which unexpected complications arose, and concluded that the increased risk of neonatal mortality associated with cesarean section was 69%, rather than 184%. However, they did not address the inadequacies of their data set, and did not attempt to determine the degree of error introduced when identifying elective cesarean sections by birth certificate. A study published in the February 13, 2007 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that between 1991 and 2005, women who had scheduled cesarean sections for breech birth had a 2.7% rate of severe morbidity, compared with 0.9% for women who had planned vaginal deliveries.