Medical C-sections increasing, risks involved

[DaveC426913]

Evidently you recognize that prenatal checkups are necessary because mother and baby *are* at risk, right?

What? No. Why would a routine checkup lead you to risk?

There are lots of things that are done in routine checkups that have nothing to do with safety of the baby:
Is the baby nearing full development? is the baby turning the right way?
There are things that will aid in planning when and how the pregnancy will likely proceed.
There is no implication of safety there.
Sure, there's lot of things we want to watch for - but a routine checkup has no risk in-and-of-itself - there's no downside to it. So it's not like the doctor is going to "push" a routine checkup on mother, and she has to weigh the consequences of it.

So I still see this as a false equivalent.

 

[DaveC426913]

You declare childbirth "safe" and have criticized other uses of the word, as if it is binary choice: safe/unsafe.

I'm going to assume you're addressing me.It was not my intention to present a binary choice.It was my intention to refute the idea that childbirth is not safe -which was what I was reading.
Riding the streetcar downtown is safe. That does not mean there are no risks. It is obviously a relative thing.

Given only a binary choice, it is much worse to declare childbirth "safe" than "unsafe", because that implies there is no need for preventative medicine: preventative medicine is for mitigating or preventing unsafe conditions.

Again was not my intention to suggest a binary choice.

Let me rephrase: Safe is the default. It is only unsafe when there is reason to think there is a problem.
The general tenor I've been reading is the opposite: that it is generally considered unsafe, and therefore any intervention are warranted.

The reality is this: a person's lifetime odds of death are 100%. Everything a person does contributes a fraction of that 100%. Giving birth is more dangerous than spending that afternoon on your couch watching TV+.

OK now who's making it a binary choice? :)
You're essentially saying that life itself is not safe. We all die.

It's dangerous enough that parents spend a lot of time, money and effort mitigating that risk by changing their diet and behaviors, getting prenatal checkups and making choices about how to give birth.
[/QUOTE]
How parents act is not a litmus test of the reality of danger.

You apparently know and agree with this and yet you said "[Natural] childbirth is safe"

Mia Culpa. It wasn't until several posts alter that I realized "natural" childbirth to others was not what it means to me.
What I should have said is "vaginal birth is (relatively) safe".

and suggested there was something wrong with going to see a doctor to deal with this "safe" condition: "pregnancy is one of the precious few conditions you go to a hospital for when you aren't sick" [your bold].

No. "Going to a doctor" and "going to a hospital" are two very different things.
One is a checkup; the other is prep for intervention.

Pregnancy and childbirth is "safe" - women aren't sick - so they shouldn't be going to the doctor is what that implies.

No. The implication is not that they shouldn't be going - the implication is that - just because they're going to a hospital (because, in many places it's the law) doesn't mean they are going there to have something fixed that's broken.

There is certainly case to be made that doctors and society are being overly aggressive in promoting c-sections, but you aren't doing the conversation any favors by doing exactly what you are criticizing them for: exaggeration.

It would only be exaggeration if it weren't true - something that has not been established.

+In fact, giving birth is about 37x more dangerous than skydiving, at least in the United States (where it is around 8-10x more than most of the rest of the developed world).

Not even close to equivalent analogy.

1] Did someone say skydiving is not safe?
2] 0.0007% chance of death.
3] Is your 37 times figure counting deaths? Or all complications?
4] 37 times 0.0007% is still a very small number: 0.0259%

And again, remember, those 0.0259% of complications in childbirth are generally identified as in the high-risk category. You don't treat the other 99.974% of cases as if they're the 1-in-5000 case - unless there is cause to. Let me repeat that: unless there is cause. At which point, they get increased attention and monitoring.

 

[DrDu]

I now remembered that when we got our children, there was one book which every mom to be considered a must have: The "mid wife consultory: empathetic and naturalistic accompaniment to pregnancy, childbirth, puerperium and lactation with medicinal herbs, homeopathic remedies and essential oils,

Die Hebammensprechstunde : einfühlsame und naturkundliche Begleitung zu Schwangerschaft, Geburt, Wochenbett und Stillzeit mit Heilkräutern, homöopathischen Arzneien und ätherischen Ölen Taschenbuch – 2005
von Ingeborg Stadelmann (Autor), Torill Glimsdal-Eberspacher (Illustrator)

which shaped forever my impression of midwives...

 

[Laroxe]

I wonder if we have drifted a bit to far from the original issue, this was really about how choices were made about the method of delivery. The starting point is that really childbirth in the west is very safe and this is largely because most risks that can be foreseen are managed effectively. However there are risks and potential problems and these are not uncommon, the discussion really is about the way in which some of these risks are managed. I think everyone would probably agree that c-sections can be a life saving procedure and they have become an increasingly common way of giving birth. While comparisons can be difficult, in itself it seems to add few extra risks and these can be set against the reductions in risks associated with vaginal births. We know that serious adverse outcomes are significantly reduced as the rate of c-sections increase to around 10% of all births after that its difficult, its difficult to know the effects on less serious problems.
I think we are in an area in which the evidence we have provides little clear guidance, the general feeling is that as rates are approaching 25-30% (higher in some areas) this is in some way unjustified and this feeling is based really, in cultural values and we do live in times in which the idea of nature and natural is given a high value. Unfortunately these very common views are based on an experience of nature that has been beaten into submission by humans, again to remove all the dangers and risks and by various vested interests promoting very positive and benign beliefs. My own view is that whether something is natural or not is irrelevant and adds nothing of value to these discussions, if mother nature actually was a mother she would be serving a very long prison sentence for the abuse and neglect of her children. Nature in the raw is horrible and when it informs medical decision making it visits that horror on people, the introduction of asepsis was resisted based on naturalist beliefs, anaesthesia was not introduced and diseases were blamed on the persons own behaviour, a view that's becoming fashionable once again.