What Happens in the Delivery Room? Black and White Women’s Experiences of the C-Section Birth

• In Event: 20820 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 3. Reproductive Health

Abstract

In the United States, C-Section deliveries have remained at roughly 32% of all births for the past couple of decades, double the World Health Organization’s recommended rate. Low-risk Black women have an especially high rate of first-birth C-Section deliveries as compared to their White women counterparts. These patterns are alarming because, while lifesaving when necessary, C-sections increase birthing people’s risk of a range of short and long-term complications, including risk of infection and complications in subsequent pregnancies. Despite this national trend, we know little about birthing people’s experience with C-Section deliveries. This paper draws from in-depth interviews with low-risk Black and White mothers about their first C-section birth. I find that while patients describe wanting a vaginal birth going into the labor, the reason they attribute to the resulting C-Section delivery varies along racial lines. Black mothers describe medical procedures happening to them often without verbal consent. By contrast, White mothers explain a cascade of events that led to the C-Section delivery, resulting in a fear for her baby’s life and her consent to the C-Section as the safe way forward. Across birthing women, these explanations uncover racialized feelings of anxiety and violation that surfaced during their birth due in part to a breakdown of communication and trust between providers and birthing women. Alongside these feelings that result from mistreatment, Black and White mothers also noted feelings of joy, often through the connections they made with others around the delivery of their child.

Author

• Mahala Dyer Stewart, Hamilton College