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Socioeconomic Determinants of Planned and Emergency Cesarean Section Births in Mexico

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Abstract

Mexico’s rapid increase in Cesarean section (C-section) births in the past 20 years parallels a trend occurring in other low- and middle-income countries across the globe, exceeding what is considered medically necessary. Although existing research has highlighted how social forces shape the role of “demand” factors related to women’s preference for C-section births and “supply” factors in health care settings where women give birth, it does not differentiate these births according to whether they were planned earlier in pregnancy or emergency C-sections initiated while a woman was in labor. The objective of this study is to assess the socioeconomic determinants of planned and emergency C-section births. In this study, we use nationally representative data from the 2014 Encuesta Nacional de la Dinámica Demográfica (ENADID) to examine determinants of planned and emergency C-section births for women who experienced their first birth within the past 5 years (N = 8710). Logistic regression analysis is employed to examine predictors of planned and emergency C-section births separately. Of the births in our sample, 49.2% were vaginal, 18.5% were planned C-sections, and 32.4% were emergency C-sections. We find that wealth and birth location are significant predictors of planned, but not emergency C-sections. Socioeconomic factors are important determinants of planned C-section births and represent a pathway through which social influence should be examined in the future when looking at the adaptation of surgical births in populations and health care system efforts to reduce the C-section rate.

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Notes

  1. The analytic sample with emergency C-sections as the dependent variable (n = 7101) includes emergency C-section births (n = 2819) and vaginal births (n = 4282). The analytic sample with planned C-sections as the dependent variable (n = 5891) includes planned C-section births (n = 1609) and vaginal births (n = 4282)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health, West Chester University, 207 Sturzebecker Health Science Center, 855 S. New St., West Chester, PA, 19383, USA

    Heather B. Edelblute

  2. Department of Health Sciences, University of Missouri, 513 Clark Hall, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA

    Claire E. Altman

Authors
  1. Heather B. Edelblute
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Contributions

The first author conceptualized the research project and study design and drafted the “Introduction” and “Discussion” sections. The second author analyzed the data and wrote the “Methods” and “Results” sections. Both authors edited the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Heather B. Edelblute.

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Ethical Approval

This project is a secondary analysis of an existing data set. Since the data for this study are publicly available at https://www.inegi.org.mx/programas/enadid/2014/, no ethics committee approval was required. This project meets the ethical standards the institutional and national research committees and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

The data are deidentified data from a publicly available data set. No informed consent was required to conduct this research project according to the ethical standards the institutional and national research committees of the authors.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Edelblute, H.B., Altman, C.E. Socioeconomic Determinants of Planned and Emergency Cesarean Section Births in Mexico. SN Compr. Clin. Med. 3, 796–804 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42399-021-00784-9

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