Birth Is Not a Curse

• Post by: Rebecca Skabelund
• October 6, 2022

Declining fertility is not a sign of a healthy society. Something is wrong, and people know it. Journalists, scholars, and policymakers alike have scrutinized all sorts of factors and written up plenty of interesting proposals, but have steered clear of one critical component: birth itself. That omission is like ignoring the hole in the bottom of the sinking boat. Research by Lyman Stone examining C-sections makes clear that birth affects fertility rates. Even after controlling for other factors, such as sterilization after a C-section because hormonal birth control is difficult to access, Stone found that C-sections depress fertility.1 Part of this is medical reality: the more C-sections a woman undergoes, the higher her risk of serious complications in the next pregnancy, discouraging her from having more children.2 C-sections can also affect a woman’s ability to get pregnant again.3 But much of this phenomenon is also spiritual: many women feel broken after a C-section and struggle to make sense of what happened to them. They may suffer lingering complications, feel like they’ve failed, and endure insensitive comments from loved ones and strangers alike. It can take years of healing before some women feel like they can brave another pregnancy. Worldwide, about one in five children is surgically born, although in some countries and regions, C-sections reach over 40 percent—or even almost 60 percent—of deliveries.4 Although there are those egregious examples of scheduling a C-section to fall on a lucky day5 or before the end of the year for tax purposes,6 most C-sections are not the result of women pounding down the door, demanding surgery. They are the result of a toxic birth culture. Ross Douthat recently reflected on this. He said his wife “had a C-section because we followed the normal way of doing things in a normal obstetrics practice and a normal D.C. hospital . . . and all that normalcy, as currently constituted, makes caesareans way more l