Kerala has once again registered an increase in the percentage of Caesarian section surgeries for childbirth. While private hospitals play a noticeably higher role in this, government hospitals are not far behind. In statistics gathered by the state government for the year 2016 with the assistance of local bodies, it has emerged that 41.93 per cent of child births in private hospitals, and 39.75 per cent in government hospitals were by Caesarian. Normal delivery was 54.78 and 59.08 percent respectively.
As per WHO targets 85 out of 100 should be normal childbirths. Those working in the health sector admit that the high rate of Caesarian deliveries can be because of fear caused regarding health problems during pregnancy, and sometimes due to the pressure exerted by relatives. Experts are of the opinion that the rate of above 40 percent now prevailing in government hospitals has to be brought down.
It has also been discovered that in private hospitals 3.26 per cent of deliveries are through other techniques of forceps and vacuum extractions. Such methods are used in government hospitals only in 1.8 per cent of cases. The state also has a small per centage of people still resorting to childbirth assistance of conventional midwives. This makes up 3.47 percent in tribal and rural areas, and in suburbs a mere 0.6 per cent.
Mortality of mothers during childbirth in 2016 was 131. A districtwise breakdown of this shows the least in Thiruvananthapuram with 11 and the highest in Malappuram with 21. There is no perentage data against district-wise population given for this part of the figures. It is also noticed that those reported from Malappuram include a large number of mothers hailing from other neighbouring districts too.
The gender ratio of newborns in Kerala during 2016 shows male babies higher than females: 2,53,,962 (51.17 per cent) male babies against 2,42,305 (48.82 per cent), although the current population of Kerala has more of females.
Even earlier studies of childbirths in recent years in Kerala had shown rising resort to Caesarian section.
Caesarian section has also been recorded as going higher worldwide which has recently attracted the attention of WHO. In mid February, this had forced Olufemi Oladapo, a medical officer with the World Health Organization's department of reproductive health go public and comment, "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. 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 woman are getting too many interventions that they do not need".
The quick resort to childbirth interventions of different kinds also had brought adverse comments from WHO. Although the body cautioned against any one-size-fits-all benchmarks, the new WHO guidelines say that for a woman delivering her first child, any labour that does not extend beyond 12 hours should be considered normal.