After a traumatic C-section, journalist takes on the medicalization of birth

[Jilly_in_VA]

When journalist and professor Rachel Somerstein had an emergency C-section with her first child, the anesthesia didn't work. She says she could literally feel the operation as it was happening. Later, after her daughter was born, Somerstein remembers a practitioner blaming her for the ordeal.

"[They] came to my room and told me that my body hadn't processed the anesthesia correctly, that there was something wrong with me," Somerstein says.

Somerstein considered suing the hospital, but since neither she nor her daughter suffered long-term consequences, she was told she didn’t have a case. So instead of pouring her energy into a lawsuit, she decided to write a book. In Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section, she writes about her own experience with childbirth, as well as the broader history of C-sections.

Somerstein notes that the earliest C-sections were performed on women who died in labor or who were expected to die in labor. The intention was to give the baby a chance to live long enough to be baptized by the Catholic priest. It wasn't until the late 1700s or early 1800s that the procedure was seen as a way to potentially save the mother's life.

"One thing that's so interesting about this history, to me, is that it shows that the forces promoting C-sections have always had something to do with an external pressure," she says.

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/28/nx-s1-4977627/rachel-somerstein-invisible-labor-c-section

It's true that C-sections are sometimes necessary, but in the US they are performed far more often than in the rest of the world, probably because of the doctor's fear of litigation. When I was in neonatal/L&D, we used to say, "Failure to progress is whatever your doctor says it is, " and "Inductions are a major cause of C-sections".

[Lonestarblue]

1. I heard her being interviewed today, and she said a lot of C-sections are medically unnecessary.

Some are done for the doctor’s convenience, some for the patient’s convenience. I have often wondered, though, whether the increase in C-sections is simply a way to increase profits for doctors and hospitals with surgery versus vaginal delivery. Our healthcare system needs serious improvement.

She also talked about how doctors experimented with surgery for C-sections on enslaved women. Indeed, the field of gynecology was first developed by experimental surgeries on enslaved women without anesthesia. They were strapped down and forced to undergo surgeries by Doctor James Marion Sims.

“Credited as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims developed pioneering tools and surgical techniques related to women’s reproductive health. In 1876, he was named president of the American Medical Association, and in 1880, he became president of the American Gynecological Society, an organization he helped found. The 19th-century physician has been lionized with a half-dozen statues around the country.

But because Sims’ research was conducted on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, medical ethicists, historians and others say his use of enslaved Black bodies as medical test subjects falls into a long, ethically bereft history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks. Critics say Sims cared more about the experiments than in providing therapeutic treatment, and that he caused untold suffering by operating under the racist notion that Black people did not feel pain.”
https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves

[Jilly_in_VA]

2. I absolutely agree

about a lot of them being medically unnecessary! When I worked in neonatal/L&D, we had one doc whose C-section rate was much higher than any of the others'. Very often, his were done for "failure to progress', but on looking closely, a couple of us noticed that many of those were performed when he was about to go off call. It wasn't anything we could absolutely prove, but it was very suspect. He left several years after I left that hospital, but I don't know why. I know it had something to do with his wife divorcing him.

Also, in this country, OBs are too quick to resort to a C-section if the baby is breech or if it's a twin birth, where they don't in other countries. In this country it's like a reflex, not so in others. When my great-niece was born in Ukraine 4 years ago, she was breech. She was born the old-fashioned way, and with two midwives (although with a doctor on standby, just in case!). No problems. She looked like a little frog for a couple of days, but straightened out quickly. Here it would have been an automatic C-section.

[niyad]

3. I have been reading for years that over half of all c-sections are unnecessary.

Same for hysterectomies. Women are just objects to play with, experiment on, and pay for that condo in Maui.