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What They Don’t Tell You About C-sections
Many traditions throughout history have come to view one’s birth as one of the most important moments in a human’s life as it sets the stage for all that follows. Unfortunately, much in the same way we desecrate the death process by over-medicalizing it (to the point research has found that doctors are less likely to seek end of life care at a medical facility), the same issue also exists with childbirth. Many physicians I know who are familiar with the hospital birthing process chose to skip it and give birth at home (along with many more doctors featured in a 2016 documentary).
Conversely, a minority of childbirths do need advanced medical care. For those mothers, access to a hospital greatly benefits them, particularly if actions are taken to mitigate the most dangerous aspects of hospital birth. As such, childbirth occupies a similar place as many other medical controversies; neither side of the issue is entirely correct. However, the data clearly shows the risk of routine C-sections outweighs their benefits so this article will attempt to expose what they aren’t tell you about them.
The Business of Being Born
For a long time, doctors had no interest in being delivering babies, but once a leader in the profession realized grateful mothers they delivered the babies of would become their doctor’s lifelong customer, the medical professional gradually displaced midwives and switched birth from being seen as a natural life event to one that required increasing medicalization. While some of those interventions were helpful and saved lives, many were not and put both the mother and child at risk of a variety of immediate and chronic complications.
Since the hospital birthing process does not try to augment the natural birthing process and instead tries to control and manage it, one of the most significant issues with many of its approaches to birth (detailed here) is that they frequently create complications that require more and more invasive methods to be implemented.
In many cases, the end of this pipeline is the mother “having” to bypass the birthing process by cutting open the abdomen and directly extracting the baby (via a costly C-section). While they are sometimes necessary (e.g., the WHO made a good case that in 10% of births, they prevent maternal and infant mortality), they are done far too frequently (e.g., in 2023, 32.3% of all American births were C-sections).
Note: one of my least favorite statistics in medicine is that C-section rates dramatically rise at the times doctors typically want to go home.1,2,3
General Risks of C-Sections
Being an abdominal surgery, C-sections carry a variety of issues commonly seen with those procedures such as:
• The mother typically needs a 4-6 weeks recovery period.
• Post-surgical infection (e.g., globally this happens in 5.63% of C-sections).
• Significant pain (at the most important bonding period of your life).
• Potential reactions to general anesthesia.
• Accidental organ injuries (particularly since some C-sections need to be done very quickly to save the baby’s life).
Additionally, there are some surgical complications more unique to C-sections such as:
• Damage to the lining of the uterus that creates adhesions and scars, which cause the placenta to attach in the wrong place in future pregnancies (e.g., two C-sections make women 13.8 times more likely to have a placenta accreta).
• The weakened uterine scar can rupture during a subsequent delivery (especially if contraction inducing oxytocin is used during delivery), so one C-section can result in patients needing to have all subsequent births to be C-sections as well (particularly if there’s an abnormal placental attachment).
• The infant can accidentally get cut during the C-section (e.g., 1.5-1.9% get facial lacerations).
• C-section incision scars often cause significant issues for years—if not decades (until they are correctly treated), and in many cases these scars are the hidden cause of chronic pain and a variety of ailments as they continually activate and then dysregulate the autonomic nervous system.
• The general anesthetics used for the C-section can increase an infant’s risk of neonatal complications.
Note: C-sections also cause a variety of other issues, such as breastfeeding problems, worsened sleep, and emotional challenges (e.g., PTSD or anxiety).14
However, beyond the surgery itself, simply bypassing the normal birthing process can also cause significant issues for infants. For example, hyaline membrane disease (respiratory distress syndrome—RDS) affects approximately 24,000 infants in the United States annually and is the leading cause of neonatal fatalities.16 The birthing process protects against this (e.g., studies have found premature C-section babies are 2.4-3.92 times more likely to have RDS1,2,3), likely due to its mechanical pressure forcing excessive fluids out of the lungs.
Chronic Risks of C-sections
C-sections have also been linked to a variety of chronic issues, most of which are immunological or neurological in nature.
Immunologic risks include:
• A Kaiser study of 8,953 children found C-sections increased allergic rhinoconjunctivitis (hay fever) by 37% and asthma by 24% (53% in girls and 8% in boys).
• Roughly 2000 studies have assessed the link between C-sections and asthma. From them, a 2020 meta-analysis found C-sections increase asthma by 41%, while a 2019 meta-analysis found a 20% increase.
• A Danish study of 750,000 children aged 0-14 assessed a few autoimmune diseases and found those born by C-sections were roughly 20% more likely to develop Laryngitis, Asthma, Gastroenteritis, Ulcerative colitis, Celiac disease, and Juvenile
Arthritis (along with Pneumonia and other lower respiratory tract infections).
• A later Danish Study of 2,699,479 births found that elective C-sections caused a 14% increase in diabetes, a 14% increase in rheumatoid arthritis, a 4% increase in Crohn’s disease, and a 15% increase in irritable bowel disease. Generally, the risk for these conditions was higher in women and for elective C-sections (with the exception of Crohn’s increasing by 15% after emergency C-sections). Another similar study also found C-sections significantly increased the risk of asthma, systemic connective tissue disorders, juvenile arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, immune deficiencies, and leukemia.
• A study of 7,174,787 births found C-sections made infants (in the first 5 years of life) 10% more likely to be hospitalized for infections (particularly respiratory, gastrointestinal, and viral ones).
•A study of 33,226 adult women found being born by C-section made them 11% more likely to be obese and 46% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes.
Much of this is likely due to C-sections disrupting the microbiome (which can persist into adulthood) as infants depend upon the vaginal flora (and external fecal flora) to initially colonize the gastrointestinal tract (as the microflora of the vagina are predominantly composed of the “good bacteria” our digestion needs and shortly after birth, the stomach starts producing stomach acid so other bacteria can’t easily colonize the GI tract). In turn, many studies have found C-sections significantly disrupt the microbiome, including a prospective trial that demonstrated that the degree of lasting microbiome disruption in an infant directly correlated to their likelihood of developing asthma and allergic sensitizations.
Note: one partial solution to this (which does not address harmful hospital microbes displacing the normal microbiome) is to inoculate the infant with the mother’s vaginal secretions immediately after delivery. However, while compelling evidence has emerged for vaginal seeding in the last decade,1,2 it is not currently endorsed by the medical community, and most hospitals do not offer it.
Neurologic risks include:
• A mouse trial found C-sections led to behavioral changes and increased cell death in certain portions of the brain, while a retrospective MRI study of 306 children found that C-sections significantly reduced brain white matter and functional neural connectivity.
• A large 2017 study found that C-section children (ages 4-9) performed lower on standardized tests than vaginally born children and that this was not due to confounding variables, while a 2024 study found C-sections caused lower motor and language development scores during specific age windows in the first three years of life.
• A 2020 Czech study found 5 year old children born via C-section had poorer performance on cognitive tests than children born via vaginal delivery.
• C-sections have been found to increase the rate of ADHD by 15-16% and autism by 23-26%. At the same time, early onset schizophrenia has also been associated with C-sections (much of which may be due to C-sections changing the dopamine receptors in the brain).
Note: as this study shows, the increase in autism is strongly correlated to mothers receiving general anesthesia during the C-section.
• C-sections have been found to impair a newborn’s ability to recognize familiar scents, make them more averse to being touched or hugged, and have poorer sensory integration, visual memory, and visuospatial perception. In parallel, mothers of C-section babies have been found to have less attachment to and more negative evaluations of their children.
Since neurological development is such a complicated process, it’s difficult to say which factor (e.g., anesthesia, reduced maternal bonding, gut microbiome alterations) is ultimately responsible for these changes. However, many excellent healers I’ve talked to from a variety of traditions (e.g., the New Zealand Maoris) have shared that they noticed there is a loss of vibrancy and vitality in C-section babies which they attribute to them not “getting a spark” the vaginal birthing process facilitates (e.g., because the micro-motion within the skull is catalyzed by the compression experienced during the birthing process).
One of the most interesting conversations I had on this subject was with a doctor who shared that he was taught the vitality of infants directly correlated to how much they cried at birth (which is why, in the older days, doctors would wack a baby’s soles to trigger a vigorous cry). In turn, when he and his colleagues attempted to help struggling infants with birth trauma by gently compressing the tops of their skulls to recreate part of the birthing process, they found that C-section infants would let out a brief but very vigorous cry, whereas children who had been born vaginally typically had a much softer cry—something they attributed to the initial birthing process not having catalyzed the cry they needed then (which is why it was so loud at the subsequent compression).
Note: this is somewhat similar to the observation in homeopathy that patients who can mount fevers tend to have stronger vitalities and better responses to homeopathic remedies, but as the decades have gone by, people have become less able to mount fevers and now have smaller reactions to homeopathic remedies.
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