Doctors Do Not Always Know Best : Cesareans: Too many women are being forced to give birth surgically without cause.

Last Wednesday night, a healthy baby boy came into the world through natural childbirth at Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago. The only thing remarkable about his birth was the controversy that preceded it. Two weeks earlier, the mother’s doctor had sworn in court that the baby would not survive labor and delivery if the mother did not undergo a Cesarean section. The public guardian said the baby was “imprisoned in the womb” by his mother.

The mother refused the surgery on religious grounds, and the Illinois courts upheld her rights.

The case was not unique. In a Georgia case, a doctor claimed that there was a 99% chance the baby would die and a 50% chance that the mother would die if she did not undergo a Cesarean section. The courts ordered the surgery, but the woman escaped the hospital and gave birth naturally, again to a healthy baby.

These cases, and many others with similar results, underscore that doctors do not know best. Yet some courts have been willing to order Cesarean section on women based on a single doctor’s testimony.

A physician I met at a conference said he had gone to court 50 times to get Cesarean section orders against his unwilling patients. Judges had ordered involuntary surgeries in 49 of those cases. Who knows how many of his patients and the patients of other doctors would have had healthy babies if they had been allowed to deliver those children naturally as they wished? In some instances, the women were tied down to the hospital bed with leather bindings, screaming, while they were cut open against their will.

For every woman whose case has gone to court, there are probably dozens of others who have been forced into Cesarean sections because their doctors have threatened them with legal action and they have not had the resources to challenge the doctors.

A study of court orders against unwilling pregnant women found that the procedure also is often discriminatory: 81% of the women were black, according to the report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The doctors in the Illinois case were wrong legally. They were wrong medically. They made the last weeks of a woman’s pregnancy, which should have been one of the happiest, most fulfilling and intimate times of her life, into a living hell. And yet they are getting away scot-free.

Perhaps it is time to hold the doctors responsible for wasting money and terrorizing pregnant women by invoking the massive power of the state.