This is obviously a good news, bad news report. The good news is that the preterm birth rate dropped for the fifth straight year to 11.72%. This follows many advocacy efforts from organizations like the March of Dimes and AWHONN. These efforts have caused many hospitals to rethink their policies regarding elective deliveries prior to 39 weeks and more.
The bad news is that despite advocacy efforts to reduce the cesarean rate, the rate remains unchanged at 32.8% of all births in this preliminary 2011 birth data. While we'd love to see this number drop and had hopes after a miniscule drop from the previous year of 0.1%, this is also not an increase as in many years past.
There are also other numbers from the data including a drop in teen pregnancy rates and the birth to unmarried mothers. You can read this and more from the CDC.
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Source:
Hamilton BE, Martin JA, Ventura SJ. Births: Preliminary data for 2011. National vital statistics reports web release; vol 61 no 5. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2012.
So is it me or does this show that targets aimed purely at reducing the caesarean rates is only a fraction of the story and missing the point of where we should be expending our campaigning effort?
Clearly people are still wanting /needing caesareans and this suggests that care is being taken to ensure where possible the baby is 39wks+.
Should we be spending more time ensuring that those caesarean births that need to happen are positive ones see Caesarean Birth: A positive approach to preparation and recovery
There are a couple of initiatives at work here, ones aimed at reducing the preterm birth rates, no matter how the baby is born and ones aimed at lowering the rate of unnecessary cesareans.