After a traumatic C-section, journalist takes on the medicalization of birth

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1. I heard her being interviewed today, and she said a lot of C-sections are medically unnecessary.

Some are done for the doctor’s convenience, some for the patient’s convenience. I have often wondered, though, whether the increase in C-sections is simply a way to increase profits for doctors and hospitals with surgery versus vaginal delivery. Our healthcare system needs serious improvement.

She also talked about how doctors experimented with surgery for C-sections on enslaved women. Indeed, the field of gynecology was first developed by experimental surgeries on enslaved women without anesthesia. They were strapped down and forced to undergo surgeries by Doctor James Marion Sims.

“Credited as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims developed pioneering tools and surgical techniques related to women’s reproductive health. In 1876, he was named president of the American Medical Association, and in 1880, he became president of the American Gynecological Society, an organization he helped found. The 19th-century physician has been lionized with a half-dozen statues around the country.

But because Sims’ research was conducted on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, medical ethicists, historians and others say his use of enslaved Black bodies as medical test subjects falls into a long, ethically bereft history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks. Critics say Sims cared more about the experiments than in providing therapeutic treatment, and that he caused untold suffering by operating under the racist notion that Black people did not feel pain.”
https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves