The World Health Organisation has revealed on Thursday that in a bid to curtail the unnecessary surge of caesarean sections during childbirth, it has revised a benchmark used by health professionals worldwide in caring for women.
According to Olufemi Oladapo, a medical officer with the World Health Organization’s department of reproductive health, since the 1950s, a woman progressing through labour at a rate slower than one centimetre of cervical dilation per hour has been considered “abnormal”.
"When doctors and other care givers 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 speeds up labour, leading to the increased medicalisation of childbirth," Oladapo added.
In the new uncovered guidelines, WHO called for the abolition of the one centimetre per hour benchmark.
While rates of interventions like c-sections vary among regions, WHO has seen what it regard as an upsetting growth in such practices worldwide.
WHO went ahead to warn that interventions that were once used to manage complicated childbirths have become commonplace.
“Pregnancy is not a disease and child birth is a normal phenomenon, where you expect the woman to be able to accomplish that on her own without interventions,” Oladapo said.
“However, what has been happening over the last two decades is we have been having more and more medical interventions being applied unnecessarily to women and we have situations where several women are getting too many interventions that they do not need.”
While cautioning against any one-size-fits-all benchmarks, the new WHO guidelines suggest that for a woman delivering her first child, any labour that does not extend beyond 12 hours should be considered normal.
For a subsequent pregnancy, the figure drops to less than 10 hours.
