Too Particular to Push?

When I was younger, elective c-sections were unheard of. Women actually wanted to avoid a c-section. It was more recovery time and they really didn’t want the scar. Of course, that was back when recovery from a vaginal birth got you a week or two of rest time in the hospital; and that was with no complications.


This trend of elective c-sections for convenience bothers me. I’m old fashioned I guess, but I feel like convenience goes out the door when you have children and you might as well get used to that from the beginning. If you can’t even be inconvenienced to have the baby naturally, how are you going to deal with the day to day of a child?

I have a friend that’s “going there”. She’s due in late November but has insisted they wait until Dec 1 because….get this… she doesn’t like the birthstone for November.

Now some facts; elective c-sections have been on the rise steadily for at least 15 yrs. Some critics even question how many elective c-sections the patients truly choose and how many are surgeries pushed by medical professionals who don’t want their weekend or vacations interrupted by a spontaneous delivery.

Researchers say that elective c-sections are safest for the baby when done between 39 to 41 weeks of gestation. Some experts also believe that elective c-sections can lead to premature births due to inaccurate dating and these preterm babies can face a host of health problems.

Women who have a first baby by cesarean are also at increased risk of complications during their second delivery, regardless of how they birth, according to statistics.

At any rate, if this is a purely convenience decision for the mother, I hope she’s not shocked when she finds out that the baby won’t be checking her daytimer before needing feeding, burping, changing, sleeping, crying, changing, bathing, dressing, changing, etc. I ask you, do we really need to be scheduling something as important as the birth of our babies like hair appointments?