Cesarean Births

THROUGHOUT her pregnancy, Susana Hellmuth, 35, felt as if she were walking on eggshells. The Culver City woman had had two previous miscarriages, one heartbreakingly late, just as she entered her third trimester. This time, as a precaution, she spent the final six months in bed. Finally, a few weeks before her due date, she asked her doctor to schedule a cesarean section. "After six months of not doing anything, the last thing I wanted was complications at birth," she says. Dr.

More and more women are giving birth by cesarean section, not just in the U.S. but also abroad: In some Brazilian cities, at least half of all deliveries are C-sections. Growing popularity is often a sign of something new. But the C-section is actually one of the oldest surgeries on record. * Elena Conis * References to C-sections go back thousands of years. Early Chinese drawings depict newborns being removed from openings in their mother's abdomens.

The Caesarean delivery rate for U.S. women hit a record high in 2005 while teen births fell to a new low, government health officials said Tuesday. Close to a third of all babies born in the United States -- 30.2% in 2005, up from 29.1% in 2004 -- were delivered surgically in a procedure also commonly called a C-section, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.

Use of fetal oxygen monitors during labor to determine whether a fetus is in distress does not reduce the rate of caesarean deliveries or improve the health of infants, researchers report today. The OxiFirst instruments were introduced six years ago in the hope that, by supplementing information obtained with fetal heart monitors, they would make vaginal deliveries safer and reduce the need for C-sections.

Pregnant women can be given a low-dose epidural early in labor without raising their chances of a caesarean section, according to a study that could change the way obstetricians practice and make childbirth less painful. The finding could lead doctors in the U.S. to consider offering early epidurals to hundreds of thousands more women in first-time labor each year.

With caesarean-section rates on the rise in the U.S. and Britain, some researchers have speculated that one reason for the increase is that more affluent women are choosing C-sections to avoid the inconvenience of natural childbirth. British researchers have published a paper in the British Medical Journal debunking this notion, which has been dubbed "too posh to push."

For more than 30 years, pregnant women with genital herpes routinely have had Caesarean deliveries. But some obstetricians have considered abandoning the practice because they weren't sure it lowered the risk of mother-to-baby transmission. Now they know it does. The first major study putting the practice to the test has found that performing C-sections on women with active herpes reduces the rate of newborns becoming infected during delivery.

An angry Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina scorched county health officials Tuesday for the number of malpractice cases arising from obstetrical care at county hospitals, saying that the problems have continued long after the Health Services Department pledged to correct them.

In a striking departure from prior practice, doctors at Los Angeles County public hospitals have been forbidden to allow women who have had prior caesarean deliveries to undergo a trial of labor unless they sign a consent form. The new policy, which went into effect April 1, contrasts starkly with the county's approach in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when nearly all women giving birth at county hospitals were pushed to deliver vaginally.

In an effort to monitor and avoid injuries to women and babies like those caused by Los Angeles County's recent efforts to cut costs by reducing Caesarean births at public hospitals, an Assembly committee has approved a bill requiring all hospitals to report maternity ward injuries and develop procedures to correct problems.