WHO revises childbirth guidelines to curb surge in caesarean delivery

GENEVA: The UN health agency said Thursday it has revised a benchmark used by health professionals worldwide in caring for women during childbirth because it has caused a surge in interventions like caesarean sections that could be unnecessary. Since the 1950s, a woman progressing through labour at a rate slower than one centimetre of cervical dilation per hour has been considered “abnormal”, said Olufemi Oladapo, a medical officer with the World Health Organization´s department of reproductive health. When doctors and other care providers confront labour moving slower than that rate, “the tendency is to act”, either with a caesarean section or with the use of drugs like oxytocin that speed up labour, leading to the “increased medicalisation” of childbirth, he said. In new guidelines unveiled Thursday, the WHO called for the elimination of the one centimetre per hour benchmark. “Recent research has show that that line does not apply to all women and every birth is unique,” Oladapo told reporters in Geneva. “The recommendation that we are making now is that that line should not be used to identify women at risk of adverse outcome,” he added.