Half of births involve medical intervention as caesareans rise

More than half of women giving birth in Britain now do so with the help of medical intervention, an audit of NHS maternity care has revealed.

- Denis Campbell

Of the 592,594 births in 2023, 50.6% involved a caesarean section or the use of instruments such as forceps or a ventouse suction cup.

Experts said the rise in medically assisted deliveries represented a major shift driven by births becoming more complicated in recent years, partly because more older or obese women were having babies.

The increasing regularity of medical intervention is largely down to the sharp rise in caesarean births.

The proportion of babies born via caesarean across England, Scotland and Wales has risen from 25% in 2015/16 to 38.9% in 2023, according to the National Maternity and Perinatal Audit (NMPA), which is a collaboration between doctors, midwives and academics.

The proportion of births that were induced has also gone up, though less dramatically, from 29.3% to 33.9%.