Unnecessary Caesarean is the name of the campaign launched on the first week of March in Puerto Rico, aiming to curb the very high percentage of caesarean births in the country: many of them programmed C-sections that don't respond to medical needs.

Image by Eugene Luchinin CCBY

The campaign focuses on a video with a hip-hop song urging mothers to get better informed before accepting C-sections as a necessary procedure. According to the campaign's page, about half of the babies born in Puerto Rico are products of caesarean procedures where the baby is delivered through an incision made in the mothers abdomen and womb instead of a vaginal delivery. While Caesarean procedures are truly life-saving in many cases where there are complications that put the mother or child at risk, performing elective C-sections could put the mother and child at higher risk than if she delivered naturally.

In the campaign's hip-hop video, some doctors are portrayed as being driven by convenience rather than health when deciding to deliver babies through caesarean sections as a way to treat more women faster than if they had to wait for nature to take its course. As a proposed solution[es], they ask for more people to be trained as doulas or midwives to assist in natural births, eliminating the unnecessary medical procedures that turn the expectant mother into a patient.

El compromiso principal de inne-CESÁREA es, promover el apoderamiento de las mujeres puertorriqueñas para atender el serio problema de salud pública que representan la alta tasa de cesáreas y las intervenciones innecesarias durante el parto para la madre y el bebé, a través de una campaña de prevención validada, actualizada y atractiva sobre la humanización del parto.

The making of video shows the process that brought together more than 50 people to record the campaign's video, including pregnant women, mothers, children, parents, students, health practitioners and more.