Mothers ‘being rushed into having caesareans’
Women should be given more time to give birth, the World Health Organisation has said.
The new advice rejects previous suggestions about the speed of a normal labour, saying the idea that a cervix should dilate at 1cm per hour was “unrealistic” and led to too many women having needless caesareans.
“It’s not a good benchmark, it’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing,” said Dr Olufemi Oladapo, a medical officer in WHO’S department of reproductive health and research.
“What has been happening over the last two decades is that we are having more and more interventions being applied unnecessarily to women.”