Induction and Cesarean in the US
I recently created some videos for my Tiktok account on rates of Induction of Labor and Cesarean birth in the United States in recent years, and I am in the process of researching and writing both a class all about birth interventions (Navigating Your Birth: Interventions coming soon!) and a follow-up Tiktok series digging into the reasons birthing people reported their labors were induced in recent US research. Currently, the Tiktok app only allows me up to 60 second long videos, and both video descriptions and comments are limited to just a couple sentences, so I can’t really get into the nuance of topics in that platform to my satisfaction. Other creators typically send their followers to their YouTube channels, Instagram pages, and websites for more info on complex topics, and since I’m not a YouTuber kind of doula/childbirth educator, I have decided to expand on the topics I share about on social media with longer blog posts here! Now that I’ve also figured out how to post my Tiktok videos here on my blog, enjoy the super flattering screenshots below, give the videos a watch, and below the embedded videos I’ll include links and more information on the number of births in the US that began with induction of labor, Cesarean section, or included both.
I used the CDC’s Wonder database to find the number of births in the US in the most recent year of available data (2019 when I accessed the database in February 2021), and found the number of births that began with induction of labor. Then I used the search function again to find the number of births that were by Cesarean. Since a birth can begin with induction of labor and end by either vaginal birth or Cesarean birth, I wanted to remove all the births that included both induction and Cesarean so I was not counting those births twice. Once I found the number of births that included both, I added the number of inductions to the number of Cesarean births, subtracted the number of births that included both, and that gave me the number of births in the year 2019 in the US that were induced, completed by Cesarean, or both, which was 2,074,531 births out of 3,747,540 total births, which comes out to about 55% of all births that year.
Now that you know you have about a 1 in 2 chance of having your labor medically induced, giving birth by Cesarean section, or having both, it’s important that you learn about your options. The things I think are important to learn more about are true medical indications for induction and Cesarean, the risks and benefits of the different medications, tools, and procedures that can be used for induction of labor, risks and benefits of Cesarean birth, the risks of prior Cesarean birth on future pregnancies and births, local options for birth after prior Cesarean in your area, the interventions that are necessary or more likely to be needed due to induction and Cesarean, and the risks and benefits of continuing the pregnancy.
As I mentioned above, stay tuned here or on my Tiktok (@doulajoyce), Instagram (@doulajoyce), and Facebook (@doulajoyceLNK) to learn more about the reasons birthing people in the US reported they had their labors medically induced, and the evidence on those reasons. I hope to have those videos and blogs out over the rest of the spring and summer 2021.
I’m also in the final stages of getting Navigating Your Birth: Interventions classes out to expecting families, watch my newsletter for an opportunity to take my first class at a steep discount in exchange for your written feedback to make the class the best that it can be! Hopefully coming late summer!