The medicalisation of life continues apace with new National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) guidelines proposing caesarean section as, effectively, a lifestyle choice for all mothers, not just those who were only recently scorned as “too posh to push”.

-Team@CMHF

• From the point of view of medicine, the inherent risks of having an elective caesarean are becoming ever less of a concern – as long as you are only going to have two or three children.
• Have a larger family via major abdominal surgery and you risk rupture of the uterus and severe bleeding.
• Then there is the cost: some £800 over that of having your baby naturally, and this at a time when NHS services are being cut back so drastically.
• Caesareans have been theoretically available for centuries but were usually carried out postmortem, after the mother had died and in order to save the child for baptism.
• Caesarean on a living mother, and only in extremis – to save both her and her child – was proposed in the 16th century by the French bishop François Rousset, but few if any survived it.
• A caesarean was a highly controversial procedure, the subject of much religious and ethical debate, never mind the extreme danger to life it presented before anesthesia was introduced in the 1840s.
• Most surgeons and man-midwives thought it a work of cruelty, daringly innovative but horrendously dangerous. The innovative French were praised by one noted Victorian surgeon for their elegant journey to the final frontier of women’s bodies.
• The idea of rendering the life-saving caesarean a “lifestyle choice” and of going under the knife, instead of experiencing a natural birth, when there are no medical problems to be considered, also seems to smack of yet one more form of cosmetic surgery, one that guarantees no abdominal stretch marks.
• It is then, at the very least, the height of absurd vanity and, at most, an example of the ever-present gynophobia that permeates our society.
• The over-zealous medicalisation of normal life events turns risks into diseases and often means stigmatization and an increase in the fear of and disgust with the idea of giving birth naturally.
• Childbirth has been thoroughly medicalised in western culture and this has determined the way we now think of, respond to and feel about it.
• This process began with the earliest medical attitudes to the female body – the principles of Greek and Roman medicine, its preconceptions of the “viler sex” as deformed males, formed the basis of medical knowledge in the west.
• Should women shun medicalisation or should they demand even more medical attention for their particular needs?
• Should women aim to control their own bodies or seize an apparently greater power with the help of surgery – cosmetic or otherwise?
• As the eminent surgeon Sir Spencer Wells remarked in 1891, wonderful indeed is woman’s hydra-like tolerance of sections and mutilations.

For further reading log on to
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/caesarean-sections-lifestyle-choice