Dr. Wagner-Women will only agree to cesarean section (CS) if they are convinced it is safe for them and their baby. One of the first efforts of obstetricians promoting CS has been to take the scientific evidence on risks of CS and torture the data until it confesses to what they want it to say. One example: Obstetric hype in popular and professional magazines says research shows 60% of women who have vaginal birth have urinary and fecal incontinence. But a careful reading of the research papers they refer to reveals something very different. The hype lumps all women with vaginal birth together instead of doing what the researchers did--dividing them into risk groups. When analysis of risk was done, they found that women at high risk for urinary and fecal incontinence have had large numbers of births; have had babies weighing over ten pounds at birth; and most importantly, have been the victims of unnecessary, aggressive obstetric interventions during their labor and birth.
What are these aggressive, invasive obstetric interventions that have been proven scientifically to cause permanent damage to the pelvic floor and urinary tract and also lead to more otherwise unnecessary CS? One example is the use of powerful and dangerous drugs to start or accelerate labor, a practice that has doubled during the past 10 years. These drugs make labor abnormal with violent contractions that can damage the uterus and pelvic floor. The only reason women agree to such induction is because they are not told the truth about the drugs, for example that Pitocin (oxytocin), a drug used for decades to induce labor, doubles the chance the woman will have urinary incontinence in the future. By withholding such facts, doctors seduce to induce.
