Jenny Brown wrote:
> It was unclear that malpractice fears affected individual physicians'
> c-section rates, but certain hospitals seemed to encourage c-sections
> for insurance reasons (perhaps affected by local experience of being
> sued). But the study also found rising c-sections in countries where
> malpractice was not as much of an issue (India and Brazil). So then we
> return to the explanation of convenience and control by the medical
> staff--you can schedule a c-section, but not a normal birth. And it's
> something the doctor does, rather than the woman doing it. Those are
> powerful factors for the insurance companies to battle. I think they'd
> just rather work on kicking patients out of the hospital sooner.
>
> Jenny Brown
I remember my mother telling me she had to fight the doctors to get them to let her breastfeed. And I remember reading, later, that hospitals like formula feeding because they could control feeding schedules.
When I taught sociology of work, it was for a lot of pre-med and nursing students. Part of the trend toward c-sections, in the mid-nineties was, on their view, motivated by scheduling concerns. if you do c-sections, you don't have to rely on the inconvenience of birth happening when it happens and can, instead, time it. It isn't just physicians who push this but also women, themselves, who also want to have a reliable birth time to count on.
When that sculpture came out of Britney Spears giving birth, a list member here, Deb Rogers, noted that a lot of celebrities and wealthy women schedule early c-sections in order to give birth before the worst of the stretch marks happen and also so that they can schedule plastic surgery right afterward. That way, they come out 6 weeks or so after the birth date should have been, with a baby actually born earlier, and a body thinned and toned by the wonder of surgery.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)