My wife and I had planned to have our twin boys delivered vaginally, but twin B was positioned breach and could not be repositioned. The C-section caused no real difficulties for my wife. For what its worth, my wife is a family practice MD who delivered many babies during training, and she did not want a C-section.
700 years probably isn’t enough for evolutionary effects on kid size. Nutrition has improved quite a bit over that timeframe, though.
Only if you leave more children behind. It’s not clear that Bill Gates is likely to have more children than Bill the Plumber. There’s only selection pressure if you leave more offspring - just having offspring that are themselves wealthy does nothing to make your genes more prevalent. In fact, cultural pressures seem to make more affluent people have fewer children, so that sets up selection pressure in the opposite direction.
FWIW, we haven’t noticed a particular difference pre- and post- pregnancy. Of course, I do have preternaturally large genitalia, so perhaps that’s skewing my perceptions.
Of much greater concern to me is the effect of pregnancy and breastfeeding on the perkiness of Teh Boobage, but that’s pretty much unavoidable anyway.
A good friend of mine did scheduled C-sections for both her babies, no medical necessity at all. In my personal opinion its because she is a bit of an organisational/control freak type, who likes to have some semblance of control over an inherently scary and uncontrolled process.
I had a c-section for my little guy due to medical issues, and in retrospect (hah, could be the rose-tinted glasses here) the recovery isn’t really so terrible. You swap the hours of labor for a few days of being essential immobile, and a few weeks of being delicate. I was up and about when i left hospital on the fourth day, off the painkillers by 10 days, and getting irritated by the “no heavy lifting/no bending over” restrictions after about 6 days.
I don’t understand the idea of scheduling it either, but i don’t think its as terrible as you assume, and I do also think its increasingly popular.
1/6 of all births are C-sections, in Sweden.
No word on how many of those are of medical necessity.
“Too proud to push” is the gutter rag’s favourite term for those who schedule C-sections because having that baby just gets in the way of stuff.
There’s some daft figure, that I can’t be arsed to google and verify, like about 75% of C-sections in the UK are medically un-necessary and normally requested by the mother.
Sure, in a limited population with high pressure that doesn’t wipe out the species and the attribute in question heavily influences reproductive success. So, in extremely range-limited animals and insects, yes, although you’ll probably get 99.9% extinction-to-speciation ratios.
In this case, that’s not the way it works. Phenotype expression and success in the overall gene pool among a species also requires phenotype Suppression, so there would need to be a pressure that was killing off or making reproductively inviable those babies that are born with normal-sized heads. As it is, you have a negative phenotype (birth-negative head size) competing with neutral or positive phenotypes that is not associated with any reproductive advantage; big-headed people aren’t going to have a significantly larger amount of children. So it’s a fringe gene that won’t go away, because we’ve removed a lot of the negative selection pressure, but it also won’t succeed, evolutionarily speaking.
H.
This is the very definition of TMI.
I was born cesarean, as were my twin brothers.
There is nothing abnormal about it. Some people don’t like pain. Its as simple as that.
C-Sections are so commonplace and routine these days, it’s nothing to be alarmed about, neither is it particularly surprising that people would seek to have a C-Section. The baby is just coming out of a whole man makes, as opposed to the one God made, big deal. Recovery is a few weeks as opposed to a few days, and it’s worth it for some for the reasons mentioned. You end up with a small thin scar along the bikini line is all (hopefully - I saw some terrible C-Section scars during my OB-GYN rotation, from Mexican immigrants. Fucking Mexican doctors, worthless.).
I was taken out by C-section about a month early because my mother had pregnancy diabetes. It would have been fine, except they gave her a medication that inhibited the anesthetic. How fun! Still, I’m sure it normally turns out fine.
Recent studies comparing voluntary c-sections against vaginal births have shown that (a) there is a much higher incidence of infant or neonatal mortality associated with voluntary c-sections than vaginal birth; (b) the likelihood of severe complications for the mother significantly increases; © the likelihood that there will be complications with subsequent pregnancies also increases; (d) babies born by c-section are more likely to have difficulties breathing initially due to fluid remaining in the lungs, and (e) the procedure can sometimes make breastfeeding difficult which, in turn, means that the newborn may not get colostrum from the mother.
Why anyone would risk any of this for the sake of convenience is beyond me.
For the same reason people choose to not even try to breastfeed, or leave their kids in daycare/with a nanny 20 hours a day, or give their 18 month old diet coke in their bottles. Or, leave their kids in their SUV on a hot July day while they go to work/the store/the movies.
People are selfish, lazy, stupid, or some combination of the three.
Exactly.
The number of medical personnel involved in a C-section as opposed to “natural” birth shows that while it may be routine and a smaller operation, it’s still a major operation and like all surgical procedures there’s risks involved.
My wife nearly bled out when she had her second (medical) C-section.
Of course there’s risk involved in every childbirth, but it’s greater during C-sections, so for me they should only be performed only when medical necessity calls for it.
Of course a woman truly scared of the pain will have problems giving vaginal birth, so even though it’s psychological that can still be reason enough to go that way. But even in a system like yours where you and not society pays it shouldn’t just be a case of ticking a box.