They Told You That You Needed a C-section. They Lied

During the thirty minutes it took to drive by herself to the hospital, Amber Rosato remembers feeling numb.

Amber glanced in the rearview mirror of her dark blue Toyota Corolla at the two empty infant car seats in the back.

She knew two babies would be coming home with her. She was carrying twins, conceived after five years of infertility and pregnancy loss.

But it just seemed so surreal.

“…almost like they were a stranger’s babies”

Amber’s husband wasn’t allowed in the room with her while her medical team gave her spinal anesthesia and placed a catheter up her urethra.

Prepping her for surgery, the doctors exchanged banter about the price of vacation rentals.

This is just another surgery for them, Amber remembered thinking. But this is the beginning of my family.

Though she somehow managed to give Baby A a kiss on the cheek, Amber didn’t get to hold or touch her twins. She was shaking uncontrollably—a bad reaction to the anesthesia.

When she was finally able to cuddle the babies, she felt disconnected from her daughters.

“It was almost like they were a stranger’s babies,” she recalled sadly. “I didn’t really realize they were mine.”

Baby A could not suck and Baby B had trouble sucking, swallowing, and breathing.

Both newborns had digestive problems.

The birth took place at 37 weeks’ gestation. In retrospect, Amber wishes her daughters had had more time to mature in utero.

Six years later, when I interviewed her, she told me she still had numb areas around the C-section scar, nerve damage caused by the operation.

600,000 unnecessary surgeries?

When first measured in 1965 the C-section rate in the United States was only 4.5 percent. At that time, America had good overall birth outcomes, both for moms and their babies.

Today the C-section rate is over 32 percent, according to the CDC.

At the same time, America has the highest maternal death rate of any country in the industrialized world.

Our infant mortality rate is so much higher than so many other developed countries that an article in the Washington Post once described it as a “national embarrassment.”

“The C-section rate should be 10 or 15 percent,” my friend and colleague Stuart Fischbein, M.D., an obstetrician who specializes in home birth, insists.

Fischbein got that number from the World Health Organization’s longstanding statement on optimal Cesarean rates.

According to the WHO: “When the rate goes above 10%, there is no evidence that [maternal] mortality rates improve.”

Now, however, our c-section rate is just shy of 33 percent, which means that at least half of the cesarean sections being performed today are unnecessary.

About 3,600,000 babies are born in the United States each year. According to the numbers, doctors in America are performing at least 600,000 unnecessary surgeries a year on women.

“…one of the greatest innovations in modern medicine”

“Cesareans are one of the greatest innovations in modern medicine,” Elliot Berlin, a prenatal chiropractor and the executive producer of a 2015 documentary film called Heads Up: The Disappearing Art of Vaginal Breech Delivery, told me.

“But just like any medical technique, if you use the right technique on the wrong person you can do more harm than good,” Berlin said.

“If I perform CPR on someone who’s not breathing and has no pulse, I’m a hero. But if I do it on someone who has a pulse, I’m going to go to jail for assault and battery.”

Deadly delivery?

Cesarean birth has become so common that most people don’t realize that it involves both short and long-term risks to both the mother and the baby.

Instead, expectant parents are often wrongly told that having a C-section is “the safest thing to do.”

“Blood loss, hemorrhage, bowel problems, chronic pain, scarring, infection, bladder injury, problems with the placenta adhering to the scar tissue in subsequent pregnancies—these are all fairly common,” Fischbein said.

Then there’s the disappointment. “C-section for many women has a strong psychological backlash,” Fischbein added. “There’s an emotional component for a woman who wanted a vaginal birth who may consider herself to be cheated from the birth she deserved, which can affect her for a lifetime.”

This is not a hippie homebirth doctor badmouthing a “safe” surgery. It is well documented in the scientific literature that cesarean birth can cause injury to mom’s internal organs, lead to emergency hysterectomy from uncontrolled bleeding, and have devastating complications from anesthesia.

Other surprisingly common side effects include:

Chronic and sometimes intractable postpartum pain
Endometriosis
Placenta accreta
Severe infection

A study of over 97,000 women in Latin America found that women who delivered via C-section had twice the risk of a prolonged hospital stay, four times the risk of hysterectomy, and were five times more likely to need postpartum antibiotic treatment than women who delivered vaginally.

Another study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology of pregnancy-related deaths over a 7-year period revealed that nearly 36 women in every 100,000 died giving birth by Cesarean, versus approximately nine women birthing vaginally.

In other words, a woman in America is as much as four times more likely to die if she gives birth via C-section than if she gives birth vaginally.

In case that’s not enough research to convince you that cesarean delivery should not be promoted by doctors, required by hospital policy, or done—ever—in the absence of genuine medical need, data compiled from more than two million births in the United Kingdom in the 1990s showed that a woman was six times more likely to die from a C-section than a vaginal birth.

While other countries are successfully lowering their maternal mortality rates, in 2014 research published in The Lancet found that the United States is one of only eight countries in the world where childbirth-related deaths are on the rise.

Sadly, that upward trend in maternal mortality in the United States has yet to abate.

News articles across the country put faces to these numbers.

In 2017 38-year-old Connecticut resident Maura Gallagher went to the hospital for a “routine C-section” to deliver twins. Four hours later she was dead.

Eight years later a jury awarded her family $22 million in a wrongful death suit, finding that her death was due to doctor error.

No amount of money will bring Thomas and Lyla’s mom back.

On February 4, 2025, two weeks and one day after giving birth to twins by C-section, Tenisha Evans, who was only 24 years old, was found unresponsive in her bed.

She was rushed to St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Queens, New York, where she died.

Her family still doesn’t know why.

Abirami Goyal, “Abi,” was 31. She died in March of 2024 after delivering her baby via C-section.

According to The News Tribune, a lawsuit brought against Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon, alleges that the healthy young mom went into cardiac arrest and bled to death about six hours after her daughter was born.

“Abi’s death was entirely preventable,” the lawsuit insists.

Bad for babies

About 800 women die in childbirth in America every year. While that might sound like a lot, given how big our country is, the absolute risk of dying in childbirth is low.

Still, there are many, many other reasons to avoid an unnecessary cesarean birth.

Studies, including this one, show that cesareans make it much harder for the mom and baby to successfully breastfeed.

About 11,000 babies born via C-section in America each year will suffer a cut—sometimes a serious one—at the hands of the doctor’s scalpel. These sometimes disfiguring fetal lacerations occur in over 1 percent of Cesarean births.

C-section birth also deprives the newborn of the mother’s beneficial vaginal bacteria, which disrupts the baby’s immune system.

“If you’ve ever seen a birth, it’s messy,” Andy Kuzmitz, M.D., a family physician based in southern Oregon, told me.

“The baby’s head pushes on the bladder, releases urine, and makes stool come out. The baby is washed in these fecal organisms. [People don’t realize that] the messy birth with a lot of fluids is all a good thing. That’s where the baby’s going to be introduced to the microorganisms they’ll have for the rest of their life.”

Kuzmitz explained that the human body contains an intricate microbial ecosystem of trillions of microorganisms that inhabit our skin, genitals, mouth, nose, and intestines.

These “good” bacteria not only aid in digestion; they directly contribute to a healthy immune system by crowding out harmful bacteria. They also synthesize compounds that aren’t present in our bodies at birth (like vitamin K, which is necessary for proper blood clotting). In addition, these beneficial bacteria play an important role in keeping our bodies from attacking themselves, thus diminishing the likelihood of autoimmune disease.

Colonized by bad bacteria

Babies born via C-section are colonized by different bacteria than babies born vaginally.

One 2015 study done by scientists in New York and Puerto Rico found that C-section babies were colonized by sometimes deadly hospital bacteria, including staphylococcus, corynebacterium, and propionibacterium.

Another study showed that the microbial make-up in the digestive tracts of infants born via C-section have been found to be disrupted for months after birth.

“It’s not unusual for babies born by C-section to have trouble with their GI system for their first few months or even the first few years of life, because they don’t have those bacteria,” Kuzmitz said.

Interestingly, when I described Amber Rosato’s situation, Fischbein also told me that a twin pregnancy with a footling breech, like Amber’s, may be a valid reason for a cesarean birth.

He explained that footling presentation carries a risk of the foot slipping through before the cervix is fully dilated, which can cause the baby’s body to only partly deliver, leaving the head to become dangerously entrapped above the cervix.

There may also be a slightly higher chance of the umbilical cord being born before the baby, which can sometimes cut off the baby’s oxygen supply, especially if the birth attendants aren’t experienced with cord prolapse.

Forbidden from having a vaginal birth

Amber Rosato had wanted a vaginal birth. But Baby A was breech. So even though Kaiser Permanente Baldwin Park Medical Center gave lip service to supporting vaginal birth, Amber’s doctor said they “could not allow it.”

So what that a scientific study by an international team of medical doctors found that vaginal birth was just as safe as Cesarean birth for breech-presenting first twins, as long as they weighed at least 3.3 pounds?

Amber wasn’t given a choice.

Doing things differently

When she got pregnant again, she resolved to do things differently.

This time Amber told her doctors she was having a vaginal birth. She categorically refused their recommendation to induce the labor early. She knew it would be better for the baby to let nature decide.

“Holy cheeks!” Amber’s doctor exclaimed when the baby’s head appeared after nearly 24 hours of labor.

This time she watched her baby emerge and knew that her daughter was born from her body. She insisted they give her the baby right away and wait to clamp the cord.

Holding her baby, skin-to-skin, on her chest, Amber and her husband watched the sunrise out the hospital window.

“From that moment we had such a bond,” she said. “It was very healing for me.”

Related articles:

They Said This Vaccine Would Protect Against Cancer. They Lied
Everyone I Know Had a C-section. What’s the big deal?
I Just Hope I Don’t Poop!

About the author:

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning medical researcher, Fulbright scholar, and author of Your Baby Your Way: Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Parenting Decisions for a Happier, Healthier Family. A different version of this article first appeared on the now defunct website Reset.Me.

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