WHO: Unnecessary C-Sections Can Lead to Long-Term Complications
LatestIn a statement released today, the World Health Organization warned that medically unnecessary Caesarean sections can endanger women and infants, saying they’re associated with both “short and long term risk which can extend many years beyond the current delivery and affect the health of the woman, her child, and future pregnancies.”
In the WHO’s statement, which we saw via TIME, the organization says that the preferred rate of C-sections in both developing and developed nations is around 10 to 15 percent of all births. As TIME points out, C-section rates vary sharply across countries: 33 percent of births in the U.S., 52 percent in Brazil, and just seven percent in Indonesia. But they’re becoming increasingly common across the world, for a variety of reasons, and the WHO is particularly worried about places where they’re performed in facilities that aren’t fully equipped to do so: