How Corrupt Doctors Turned Birth Into Surgery

This article is an abridged version of the original that was recently published by The Liberty Outlook. To read the full version, which we highly recommend, see the link below…

The United States spends more money on childbirth than any other nation on Earth – and Canada is not far behind.

The average hospital vaginal delivery in the US runs about $15,700. A C-section costs nearly $29,000, 85% more. American women deliver in the most expensive healthcare system ever built, surrounded by more technology per square foot than most countries have in an entire hospital wing.

And for all that spending, the system is killing more mothers than any comparable country. It’s killing more babies. And it’s doing it while performing surgery on one in three women who walk through the door.

That’s not a paradox. That’s a business model.

The Numbers Nobody Advertises

In 2023, 669 American women died of maternal causes, a rate of 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births. That’s down from a horrifying 32.9 in 2021, but it still ranks the US dead last among comparable developed nations. It ranks thirtieth out of 38 OECD countries (which stands for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). Its members are primarily highly developed, high-income economies that share strong social security systems and account for roughly 40% of global GDP). For Black women, the number is of dead is 50.3 per 100,000, roughly triple the rate for white women and five times Norway’s national average.

On infant mortality, the US posts 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, the highest rate among peer nations. Norway manages 1.6. Finland sits at 2. The US ranked 33rd of 38 OECD countries. Even when researchers control for birth weight, American babies still die at nearly double the rate of Finnish ones.

Meanwhile, the American C-section rate hovers around 32% which means that one out of every three births ends in major abdominal surgery. Population-level data says that figure should be a fraction of what it is. A 2015 ecological study in the Lancet found that once C-section rates reach about 10% at the population level, further increases provide zero additional reduction in maternal or neonatal mortality. A 2014 analysis of 19 developed countries over three decades confirmed the same threshold. The WHO has maintained since 1985 that rates above 10-15% are “hardly justified from a medical perspective.”

But even that range overstates the case. The truly life-saving C-sections, the ones for placenta previa, cord prolapse, transverse lie, uterine rupture, genuine cephalopelvic disproportion, account for a far smaller slice, around 3%. The other 29% of American C-sections aren’t emergencies. They’re the downstream product of a system that profits from intervention.

Before Birth: The Ultrasound Pipeline

Most people assume ultrasounds are perfectly safe. It’s just sound waves, right? The medical establishment has been extraordinarily careful to maintain that assumption while quietly expanding the technology’s power output without matching safety data.

In 1985, when the FDA first set guideline limits for obstetrical ultrasound, the maximum allowable intensity for obstetric ultrasound was 94 mW/cm². In 1992, the agency adopted a new approval pathway that raised the ceiling to 720 mW/cm², a roughly 7.7-fold increase in allowable output for fetal imaging. The reason? Manufacturers wanted sharper pictures.

Here’s the part that matters: no new fetal safety studies accompanied the increase. The American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine acknowledges that epidemiological safety evidence is “based primarily on exposure conditions before 1992.” A 2008 review in Seminars in Ultrasound put it plainly: “There has been little or no subsequent research with the modern obstetrical ultrasound machines to systematically assess potential risks to the fetus.”

The 1955 Curve Running Modern Labour

In 1955, Dr. Emanuel Friedman studied labor progress in approximately 500 women and created what became known as “Friedman’s Curve”: the expected timeline of cervical dilation during labour, pegged at about 1 centimetre per hour once active labor began (defined as 4 cm dilation). Women who don’t dilate on schedule get diagnosed with “failure to progress”, the single most common reason for first-time C-sections. The problem? Friedman’s Curve is badly outdated. A landmark 2010 study by Zhang et al tracked over 62,000 women and found that:

• Active labor doesn’t reliably begin until 6 cm, not 4 cm
• Normal labor can take significantly longer than 1 cm/hour
• Many women diagnosed as “failure to progress” under the old standard were simply progressing normally under a more accurate one

Despite this evidence, many hospitals still use the 1955 curve. The result: women who are labouring normally get labeled as failing and routed to surgery. The outdated standard persists because it moves patients through faster – and more profitably. None of this happened by accident. The medicalization of American birth was a deliberate project, executed over decades by institutions that stood to profit from it.

How Physicians Replaced Midwives

In 1900, midwives attended roughly half of all American births. Physicians handled the other half, but fewer than 5% of births happened in hospitals. Birth was a household event, managed by women who had been doing it for millennia.

That changed fast. The 1910 Flexner Report, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation and endorsed by the American Medical Association, recommended hospital deliveries and called for the abolition of midwifery. The report has since been recognized for its “racist, sexist, and classist approach,” but its impact was permanent.

In 1915, Dr. Joseph B. DeLee, one of the most influential obstetricians of his era, declared childbirth “a destructive pathology” and called midwives “a drag upon the progress of science and art of obstetrics.” In 1920, he published “The Prophylactic Forceps Operation,” arguing that all births needed routine medical intervention: sedation, episiotomy, forceps delivery. His recommendations became standard practice.

The next push was to move birth into hospitals, where midwives were forbidden to practice. Licensing laws gave physicians a monopoly. By the 1920s, up to half of births occurred in hospitals. By 1955, it was 99%.

Here’s the part the profession doesn’t like to discuss: maternal mortality didn’t improve during this transition. It actually plateaued at 600-700 deaths per 100,000 births between 1900 and 1930, during the exact period when physicians were replacing midwives and moving birth to hospitals. The improvements came later, with antibiotics and blood transfusions, not from the shift to physician-led hospital birth itself.

Follow the Money

The financial incentives all point in one direction: A 2021 study in JAMA Network Open analyzed 13.2 million deliveries across US hospitals and found that women delivering at hospitals with the highest profit margins on C-sections had 8% higher odds of receiving one compared to women at low-profit hospitals. C-section rates vary by more than 16-fold across US communities. If the surgery rate were driven purely by medical necessity, the variation would be minimal. It isn’t, because medical necessity isn’t driving it.

The First Hours After Birth: What Happens Before You Can Object

The interventions don’t stop at delivery. Within minutes of birth, a standard hospital initiates a series of procedures on the newborn, most of them presented as non-negotiable, few of them actually justified for every baby.

Eye Antibiotics for Everyone

Erythromycin eye ointment is applied to virtually all newborns, usually within the first hour of birth. It’s mandatory by law in most US states. The rationale: preventing an eye infection caused by gonorrhea or chlamydia contracted during vaginal delivery.

Here’s what the policy actually does: it applies antibiotics to the eyes of every baby, regardless of the mother’s STD status, regardless of whether the baby was even born vaginally. A mother who tested negative for both infections during prenatal care, who delivered via C-section, will still have erythromycin smeared into her baby’s eyes.

The ointment blurs the baby’s vision during the most critical window for bonding and breastfeeding initiation. And erythromycin has failure rates as high as 20% against chlamydial conjunctivitis, so it’s not even reliably effective.

Multiple countries have figured out a better approach. The UK, Australia, and Scandinavian nations don’t do routine prophylaxis at all. They test mothers prenatally and treat only those at risk. It’s targeted, effective, and doesn’t blur every newborn’s first view of the world.

An STD Vaccine at Hours Old

The CDC recommends that all newborns receive the Hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of birth. Hepatitis B is transmitted through blood and sexual contact, a transmission profile similar to HIV. The birth dose exists to prevent vertical transmission from infected mothers.

Except that mothers are already screened for Hepatitis B during prenatal care. Their HBsAg status is known before delivery. For a baby born to a Hep B-negative mother, the newborn has essentially zero risk of Hep B exposure in the first hours, days, or weeks of life, assuming nobody is sharing needles with the infant.

The policy treats all babies identically, regardless of actual risk. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Japan, and the UK don’t give universal Hep B at birth. They vaccinate infants of carrier mothers and wait for the rest.

Vaccinating a newborn, which is a serious shock to the system, against a blood-borne/sexually transmitted virus hours after birth, when the mother is confirmed negative, is a protocol driven by the desire to profit and poison. It has nothing to do with health.


Cutting the Lifeline Early

For decades, standard hospital practice has been to clamp and cut the umbilical cord within 15-30 seconds of birth. This is done for workflow efficiency: it speeds up delivery of the placenta and frees up the delivery team. But the cord is still pulsating. Blood is still flowing. The baby has a significant portion of its blood supply still in the placenta.

Delayed cord clamping (waiting 1-3 minutes, or until the cord stops pulsating) allows transfer of up to 80-100 mL of additional blood, roughly one-third of the baby’s total blood volume. The evidence is overwhelming:

• ACOG recommends delayed clamping for at least 30-60 seconds.
• WHO recommends delayed clamping at 1-3 minutes.
• Benefits include higher hemoglobin levels, improved iron stores for 3-6 months, reduced iron deficiency anemia, better brain myelination, and improved neurodevelopment at 4 years of age.
• Immediate cord clamping means the baby starts life deprived of up to one-third of its blood supply. The iron from that blood supports brain development for months. The practice persists at many hospitals not because of evidence, but because it’s faster.
• In other words, your “doctor”, if you can even call them that at this point, is so impatient they’re fine with your child having neurodevelopment knock-on effects years later – if they cut the cord and save themselves 2 minutes of waiting.

What They Don’t Tell You

The conversation about C-sections usually focuses on the immediate: recovery time, surgical risk, scarring. What gets far less attention is what C-sections do to the baby’s biology.

The Missing Microbiome

During vaginal birth, a baby passes through the birth canal and is colonized by the mother’s vaginal and intestinal microbiome. These bacteria are the foundation of the infant’s immune system. They colonize the gut, train immune cells, and establish the microbial ecosystem the child will carry for life.

C-section babies skip this process entirely. Instead, they’re colonized by whatever bacteria are in the operating room: skin microbes, hospital-associated organisms, and environmental bacteria that have nothing to do with the mother’s microbiome.

A 2021 review in Frontiers in Microbiology found that C-section birth is “closely related to an increased risk of food allergy, asthma, diabetes, obesity and other autoimmune and metabolic diseases in children.” A separate review in Frontiers in Immunology described a threefold risk of developing childhood asthma associated with C-section-disrupted immune development.

This isn’t fringe science. It’s published in mainstream medical journals. The gut microbiome’s role in immune system development is one of the most active areas of research in medicine. And the single biggest factor disrupting that microbiome at the population level is the rate at which we’re surgically delivering babies.

The Recovery Myth

C-sections are often presented as a reasonable alternative, almost equivalent to vaginal birth. They’re not. A C-section is major abdominal surgery: the surgeon cuts through skin, fascia, muscle, and the uterus itself. Recovery takes a minimum of 6-8 weeks, compared to days for a typical vaginal birth. Risks include infection, hemorrhage, blood clots, adhesions, and damage to surrounding organs.

Each subsequent C-section compounds the risk. Scar tissue from previous surgeries increases the likelihood of placenta accreta (where the placenta grows into the uterine wall), placenta previa (where the placenta covers the cervix), and uterine rupture. A first C-section often means every subsequent birth will also be a C-section, because most hospitals won’t allow vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) despite evidence that it’s safe for most women. Yet another way for them to make more money regardless of what the scientific evidence shows.

Most Doctors Don’t Care About You, They Care About Dinner

The official “due date” is not the point at which a pregnancy becomes high-risk. It is simply the 50th percentile – the average day first-time mothers give birth. By definition, half of all women will naturally give birth after their due date. This statistical reality is routinely weaponized. Once a woman crosses 40 weeks (or even 39), many providers begin applying heavy pressure for induction, treating a normal pregnancy as if it has suddenly become dangerous. The cascade is predictable: induction with Pitocin, stronger contractions, epidural, reduced mobility, “failure to progress,” and ultimately a C-section.

The fact that due dates are weaponized is bad enough. But wait till you hear this statistic…

Multiple studies have shown that unscheduled C-sections and other interventions increase significantly during evening hours and shift change periods. When the clock approaches 5 pm, suddenly doctors decide this labor needs to end now. A scheduled C-section that gets the team home for dinner is logistically preferable to staying late for an unpredictable vaginal birth. The fact that they’re literally cutting through your abdominal wall and hurting both maternal and fetal outcomes? They don’t care. They want to go eat dinner.

All of this sounds bleak. It’s supposed to, because the system is bleak. But the good news is that you don’t have to accept the default. There are better options, and they have better outcomes.

EDITORS NOTE: If you are pregnant, or know someone who is, and are worried about how things might go in the conventional system, you are not alone — and you don’t have to navigate it in isolation. The Reclaiming Birth Gathering (September 10–12, 2026, at the Mount Alverno Luxury Resort, Caledon, Ontario) is a family gathering built for women and families ready to trust physiological birth and God’s design again. It’s not a conference — it’s a community, and one that families return to year after year. Learn more about it and reserve your spot at https://reclaimingbirthconference.com

The Reclaiming Birth conference was the brainchild of former CHA-Director and co-founder of Canadian Frontline Nurses, Kristen Nagle.

We are very pleased to announce that Kristen will be one of our featured presenters at the 2027 CHA SelfCare is Healthcare Retreat Conference that will be held in April next year. If you would like to meet Kristin and spend a few days with her and our other incredible guests and speakers at the retreat conference, get ready to book your ‘Early Bird’ tickets as soon as they become available at the beginning of September.

The bulk of this article was originally published by The Liberty Outlook, as Part 11 of their ‘Biology & Survival Series – The Baby Business.’ You can read the full article (which is significantly longer and more detailed than the above highly abridged version) at: https://thelibertylookout.com/p/part-11-how-corrupt-doctors-turned
We would also recommend subscribing to The Liberty Outlook at: https://thelibertylookout.com/