Vaginal Birth after Cesarean Revisited

Abstract

The U.S. total cesarean delivery rate has risen from 4 percent of deliveries in 1950 to 26 percent in 2002.¹ Concerned about the rising rate of cesarean deliveries, and noting that 98 percent of women with a prior cesarean section delivered by repeated cesarean section, a National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Task Force in 1980 recommended that “properly selected” women should be encouraged to labor and deliver vaginally after a prior cesarean delivery.² U.S. obstetricians and their patients were slow to respond to this call, but by the end of the 1980s, the rate of vaginal birth after prior . . .