United States: Florida has recently been revealed as the first state to allow doctors to perform C-sections outside the hospitals, supporting the private equity-owned physicians group that has claimed that the decision would reduce cost and provide women with the comfortable birth environment they prefer.
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However, currently, the hospital industry and the nation’s leading obstetricians’ association claim that despite some Florida hospitals having shut their maternity wards in the recent past, performing C-sections on premises controlled by doctors will only pose much danger to the lives of women and their newborn babies each time complications occur.
But the hospital industry and the nation’s leading obstetricians’ association say that even though some Florida hospitals have closed their maternity wards in recent years, performing C-sections in doctor-run clinics will increase the risks for women and babies when complications arise.
According to Cole Greves, an Orlando perinatologist who chairs the Florida chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “A pregnant patient that is considered low-risk in one moment can suddenly need lifesaving care in the next,” as NBC News reported.
Greves added that the new birth clinics, “even with increased regulation, cannot guarantee the level of safety patients would receive within a hospital.”
Passage of a new law
Moreover, the Florida legislature passed a law this spring allowing “advanced birth centers,” which would allow physicians to deliver babies via C-section or vaginally to those women who appear to be at lower risk of complications.
However, women should also be able to stay overnight at the clinics following their deliveries.
Women’s Care Enterprises, which is a private equity-owned physicians group with locations in Florida, California, and Kentucky, put pressure on the state legislature to change the previous law.
Stephen Snow, who recently retired as an OB-GYN with Women’s Care and testified before the Florida Legislature advocating for the change in 2018, stated, “We have patients who don’t want to deliver in a hospital, and that breaks our heart,” as NBC News reported.
Moreover, Alice Abernathy, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, said, “What this looks like is a poor substitute for quality obstetrical care effectively being billed as something that gives people more choices.”
“This feels like a bad band-aid on a chronic issue that will make outcomes worse rather than better,” Abernathy added.
Births via C-section in the US
Approximately one in three babies is delivered by this mode of operation, known as the cesarean section, where a baby is surgically removed from the mother’s abdomen and the womb.
In general, doctors use the procedure when it is safer as compared to a normal birth for the parent, the baby, or both. Medical decisions like these can be made months before the birth of the child or during an emergency situation.