On Matters Ideological

I've spent arguably far too much time on the topic of the gender identity orthodoxy. If there is a justification for that focus over the past few years, it is that it touches me personally as a woman; and, as a socialist feminist, I'd have to be a saint not to be resentful of the ways that some people, purporting to be on the left, have treated women like me for daring to have an opinion which differs from their doctrinally approved viewpoint.

I'm not interested in the political-critical equivalent of duck shooting when it comes to the ways in which the religious and conservative right have co-opted facets of what came to be known as “gender critical feminism.” My focus has always been and remains on those whose interests are being served by it.

My start point is, any theory and praxis deserving of the description of feminist is inevitably critical of gender, in that feminism analyses and seeks to change the sets of historically and culturally specific beliefs which, in order to subjugate women, are wrapped around the biological reality of reproductive sex. 

Gender has its roots deep in the bio-social realities of species reproduction. 

As a species, we are not powerfully instinctually driven in relation to reproduction, which allows us to be highly adaptable. It also makes us highly reliant on learning.

Given how vital learning is to us, and how highly social we are as a species, it may be that the social rites and rituals early humans wrapped around reproduction were an important part of the learning how to be female and male humans which reinforced relatively weak instinctual drives. Not so much straitjackets binding people into a certain role in production and reproduction, but guides to what was of greatest benefit to the survival of the collective.

The nature and purpose of the rites and rituals, and the beliefs which gave rise to them, and which they reinforced and perpetuated, changed profoundly with the emergence of forms of rigid social stratification characterised by the rule of men.  

“Gender” became ideology, patterns of belief that underpinned behaviours which protected the interests of property-owning or property-controlling men – those who became a ruling class.

The ideas of what it means to be female and male, with the latter always occupying the dominant place, were set in stone with the rise to prominence of monotheist patriarchal religion, but they were by no means confined to it. Patterns of male dominance existed in pantheistic societies also. 

The progression from animism to pantheism to patriarchal monotheism were moves from an acceptance of an essential complementarity between the sexes to extreme expressions of male dominance in which women's reproductive and productive capacities became the property of men. 

At its most extreme, even her personhood became an extension of the male – as father or husband or lord, and ultimately, God.

The most binding and enduring chains on a person are the chains of the mind, especially if they are donned willingly or better still, are not even recognised as chains. In that the role of religion in granting divine approval to male temporal rights cannot be over stated, and it is why in the modern world, the resurgence of forms of fundamentalist patriarchal religion is a major threat to women.

It’s stating the feminist obvious that the way gender as ideology and praxis develops and is perpetuated, differs considerably across historical eras, ethnicities, cultures, classes, and ages. 

Failure to account for those differences and how they impact the women most affected by them, invariably weakens feminism, and what weakens feminism, weakens all other progressive movements.

For convenience, I work with a broad distinction in the schools of thought which influence feminist praxis – liberal, radical, and socialist. 

The former confines itself almost exclusively to gaining parity with male peers within the existing social-economic order. It sometimes sees the liberation of women as being the adoption of stereotypically male behaviour and/ or in accepting the extreme gender stereotypes of appearance and behaviour demanded by men. It morphed into choice and corporate feminism which are a product of Neo-liberal capitalism.

Radical feminism overlaps with socialist feminism and differs from it primarily in how it conceptualises the origins of male power, which in turn influences what is seen as the solution to it. 

Radical feminism places the patriarchy front and centre, and at its most extreme, it posits an essential and therefore unresolvable conflict between the sexes. This involves an acceptance of an almost Nietzschean notion of a male “will to power”, a drive to dominate others which was and is enabled by greater average male aggression and strength. 

These views lead to ideas about separatism or at the most extreme, the pipe dream of revenge in the form of a reversal of the subjugation of women by men.

For socialist feminists, especially Marxists, the liberation of women is inextricably tied up with the liberation of all, which necessitates a change, not just in the dominant ideas and the superstructure, but in the economic base of the power which historically has been held by the males of the ruling class. 

Within capitalism that is the bourgeoisie which exists in sometimes uneasy alliance with the remnants of the older, feudal ruling class. In the capitalist era, that was and largely still is, European men, although it is shifting. Unfortunately for women, it is just shifting from one set of male hands into another.

Patriarchy, as a matrix of ideas and practices, is an ancient and a formidable opponent which has used every means at its disposal to entrench male power – from overt and brutal coercion, to ideologies which draw a legitimating line from man to god.  

The ideological is always preferred because it is so much more efficient and effective when people don their own chains, or justify the wearing of them as being god’s will or nature’s way, but the brute force is always there in reserve. 

You have only to look at the hordes of misogynists on-line to see how ready and willing large numbers of men are to blame their feelings of powerlessness and all facets of their miserable, abject lives, on women, and who fantasise about the use of force to restore the illusion of power which women's rights appears to erode.

That some women have always colluded with men to gain some measure of power, or sought to appease men by wrapping themselves in patriarchy’s chains was tragic; that women in the era of mass communication actively choose to do so, is closer to farce.

This is apparent in that noisy battleground where the gender identity war is being fought. When new forces entered the fray from both the secular and the religious right to reinforce the Gender Critical Brigades, many of the original GCB withdrew, refusing to be in alliance with the right. 

Those who still remain, seeing the far right now lining up with them, are faced with finding ways to justify being in alliance with forces they must know will turn on them in a political heartbeat.

To do so, they have to cast the transgender enemy into the single biggest threat facing women. 

In the context of Palestinian rights versus Zionist colonialism that means siding with the latter because Islam is seen as the greater threat to women.

It is almost beyond comprehension that these noisy, attention-grabbing, opposing forces remain intent upon the destruction of the other at a point when all sane persons know the natural world is in crisis, and the social world, which has created that crisis, could tip at any point from a precarious state of relative equilibrium, into the chaos of barbarism.

There is no excuse for it in this world of instant information. The blame for the failure to widen our own focal lens lies with each of us. 

It is terrifying that the minds of some people are so fixed on the “enemy of the moment”, their eyes will glide past all the misery and horror and the naked brutality of the wider world, and focus solely on images which fuel their hatred and fear of that single enemy.

They expend all their energy digging their well of rancour and disgust even deeper to justify their promotion of that single enemy to the ranks of the worst ever; to make that single enemy so evil, so destructive, all other battles must be put on hold in order to destroy it…even the battle for the survival of the planet as we know it.

They will ignore or justify wars in which the dead and the permanently scarred are overwhelmingly non-combatants and mainly women and children, and ignore famines in which the victims are overwhelmingly women and children.

These are people in the grip of a Samson-psychosis; they will risk destroying it all in order to defeat the detested "other".

If I was religious, I’d say, God help us. 

A Plague On Both Houses

 A recent conference here in NZ brought the gender critical feminist (GCF) vs trans rights activists (TRA) stuff back to the forefront of my political consciousness. I’d been a tad distracted by such minor issues as Israel's war on Palestine, the implications of the clearest statement yet of a China-Russia axis in opposition to the US, possible global war and definite global warming, species extinctions, mass pollution, etc etc.

Yes, I know, how dare I expand my political focus to include such things?

Also in the NZ news today, a Palestinian family want to bring four orphaned Gazan children here.  Most of the replies under the story were ... well, suffice it say, the wanton, ugly selfishness of some people never fails to amaze. I think I’ve seen the worst and then the fuckers outdo themselves. 

On X-marks-the-plot a young person who has bought into the gender identity orthodoxy posted a rather silly comment and was piled on by anti-trans accounts with a ferocity and illiberality that matches anything TRAs and allies dished out to GCFs before the political tide started to turn.

And that was on top of the depressing sight of people who claim to be feminists or allies – but whose narrow focus means they never were or are no longer feminist in any politically or critically meaningful sense of the word – lining up to try to give a feminist they disagree with on that one issue, a virtual kicking.

It’s even more depressing because it’s about an alliance with, and in defence of a right wing fundamentalist Christian man who is opposed to pretty much everything feminists ought to stand for. Even on the single issue of gender identity, his start point and what he wants to achieve are radically different from a feminist start point or what any feminist should want to achieve. 

I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything more foolish, this week anyway, than a lesbian defending a patriarchal-family promoting, right wing Christian as being a solid ally to women because he’s nice to her, and they’re in agreement on this one issue – an issue which is so vital we have to put all manner of wider rights at risk by entering into such alliances.

If the religious and secular right wing do gain enough political traction to roll back all those formal rights ... most of which Neo-lib compliant governments doled out as a distraction from their dismantling of working class collectives and hard won rights .. well, she says blithely, we’ll deal with that if it happens.

I want to grab her by the scruff and say, who do you think will be left to deal with it? Exactly how are you going to build a coalition of feminists and allies to defend the rights that you just put in jeopardy because you decided this single issue was so all-important that you allied with the enemies of women’s and gay rights?

Increasingly I can’t stomach those on BOTH extremes of the gender identity divide who :

1. engage in or foment abusive and often ad hominem pile-ons against anyone who disagrees with them; (especially vile are those who do so from behind a veil of anonymity);

2. worry about the ill-effects of puberty blockers on the tiny minority of kids who go on them but who are silent on all other forms of paediatric iatrogenic harm, not to mention the impact on kids of exposure to environmental pollutants etc;

3. obsess about the dangers posed to kids from sexual predators (real and imagined) but have nothing to say about the multiplicity of fatal harms done to millions of small children annually as a direct result of economic exploitation;

4. focus on trans athletes in women’s sports but have never been involved in sport or expressed an opinion about the impact of rampant commercialism on sport generally, or the grossly disproportionate status, funding and remuneration in women’s sport;

5. fret about “trans women “ / “trans identifying males” having access to women-only public facilities but are silent on or even collude with the rise of a religious-secular right that could push women back into the domestic sphere;

6. shout about “trans women “ / “trans identifying males” being incarcerated in women’s prisons but have nothing to say about NZ’s appalling incarceration rate which is second in the OECD to the USA, and which disproportionately impacts Māori & working class people and most especially Māori women. Those who also align with, or who ineffectively oppose political parties with policies that will increase those rates, get bonus points for hypocrisy and opportunism.

If you listen to the “White Left” it’s all the fault of the evil TERFs, that coven of convenient witches who can be dragged to the virtual stake for a now ritual immolation.

If you listen to the “Coalition of the Anti-Woke” or the “Once Were Feminists” brigade, and it’s all the fault of TRAs and the Woke who need to be dragged to the virtual stake for the ritual immolation.

The truth lies somewhere in between these two increasingly noisome extremes and it is the duty of all people of common sense and good judgement to join me in saying, "A plague on both your poxy houses".

The Politics of Peeing

I took issue with a post on X that the reason there are women’s loos, prisons etc is because men pose such a physical threat to them, women demanded and got separate provision. My post was misconstrued, so I will try to explain myself. 

Leaving aside the reductionism and pessimism of the view of men as innately inclined to physical and sexual predation of women, the reality of the emergence of sex segregated public provision is more complex than female activists having forced it.

The following just scratches the surface of a multi-layered and complex issue.

The rise of public sanitation 

In Britain and the empire, before the Victorian era, public health measures such as public loos, were largely non-existent.

Prior to the installation of water closets in the home, the wealthy would use a close-stool, the contents of which would be emptied by a servant, usually female.

If there was no ready access to a close-stool, ladies would pee in a special pot carried by a maidservant. Gentlemen, if in male company only, peed in a container in a corner of the room or out a window.

If they weren’t near a chamber pot or privy, poor women and men pretty much peed and pooed wherever they could, and their privies would be shared by the occupants of several dwellings.

The Victorian era saw an increase in wider public sanitation measures in cities to stop the spread of diseases like cholera. Epidemics are not only bad for business, they can also kill the rich.

The provision of public loos was heavily influenced by both concerns about public health, and concerns over the “immorality” of people exposing themselves in public. The latter was far more focussed on women than men.

Closed crotch knickers

Prior to the development of closed crotch knickers in the late regency era, it was easier for all women to pee in public, and with the influence of the French Revolution, wealthy women’s dress, outside of formal court dress, was much less restricting. 

Working women were always forced by finances and the physical demands of their lives to dress more simply.

Men didn’t wear knickers either but pulled their long shirt tail between their legs. NB. Men’s shirts still had a tail long after underpants became a thing.

Interestingly, closed crotch knickers for women were initially regarded as immoral. The rise of bourgeois Victorian morality saw them become de rigeur, and the absence of knickers or wearing of open crotch knickers were seen as immoral.

The impact of closed crotch knickers on the politics of peeing and pooing was that they necessitated increasingly voluminous skirts and petticoats to be lifted and the knickers to be lowered. Prior to the invention of elastic, knickers were held up by tapes around the waist which had to be untied and retied.Women of all classes no longer had the ability to spread their legs or squat and have a discreet pee.

Female sequestration

The wives and daughters of wealthy/powerful men were sequestered in the home for the most part, and were the main focus of patriarchal modesty and chastity standards aimed at the guarantee of paternity and the transmission of title and/or property.

However, the domestic sphere for wealthy women was a world away from the lives of the masses.

What a lot of middle class, white feminists forget or choose to ignore, is that many working class women were not sequestered in the home in the same way.

There was a “trickle down” of upper class and bourgeois morality, but it was often over-ridden by the need to exploit the labour of working class women. (1)

The first people to be drafted into factories were pauper women and children. Women worked on the land, and in workshops, in mills and mines, and in the houses of those whose exploitation of the working class enabled them to employ an army of servants to empty their piss pots and middens, and wash the cloths used to wipe arses. 

Even middle class people employed a maid of all work.

There was a vast army of women who carried the dual burdens of their own domestic chores plus low paid/low status employment, and were held to bourgeois standards of decorum while being forced to live in ways that made maintaining them impossible. 

The late Victorian/Edwardian era saw the entry of large numbers of middle class women into the public sphere, and with that the need for both public loos, and the provision of them in commercial and educational buildings etc.

Many men resented the intrusion of women into male areas of employment and blocked or did not support such provision – the so-called "urinary leash." (2)

Due to prevailing modesty standards, it was unthinkable for a “respectable” woman to lift her skirts and drop her knickers in the vicinity of a man, or even to do so within hearing distance, so it was inevitable that all public loos were strictly sex segregated. The clothes women had to wear also made the process of using a loo both time consuming and difficult.

Most women were influenced to some degree by the modesty standards that were a cornerstone of patriarchal religion, and those standards were in play in movements agitating for an increase in provision of women’s loos.

Women did not need to demand sex segregation, it was a given.

The penal reform work of the remarkable Elizabeth Fry is a case in point. She was a member of a wealthy Quaker banking family and very devout. As such, although her penal reform mission became wider than sex segregation, her concerns included the “low and deplorable state of morals” of both female and male prisoners in the prisons of the regency era when the infamous Bloody Code was still in force. 

The movement she ignited, to segregate prisons by sex, was as motivated by questions of sexual morality as it was by a concern for the safety of the mainly poor women who were incarcerated in the brutal prisons of the day. 

It was the wider acceptance of those concerns which resulted in sex segregation being readily agreed and quickly implemented, while other, equally important, penal reforms were not. 

Projecting a 21^st century liberal or radical feminist analysis of sex segregated provision back two centuries onto the likes of Elizabeth Fry risks taking presentism into the realms of caricature.

The Social Compact

Sex segregation of public loos, changing rooms, etc was and remains a powerful social norm which can be backed up by the law if there is criminal action or intent.

So powerful was the normative acceptance of sex segregation, when sex discrimination laws were drafted in the 1970s, no one questioned the exceptions written into them to make provision of women-only spaces and services lawful. It continued to be seen widely as natural and desirable.

 

 Notes:

(1) In the US, the role of slavery, Jim Crow, and the post-slavery hyper-exploitation of African American women, was a gaping hole in much of early white American feminism. In the UK and associated countries, there was a similar gap of the situation of working class women and women of colour.

(2) I worked in the Fire Service in London in the 1990s and saw first-hand how resentful many men still were about women's intrusion into what they saw a male preserve.

Open Letter to Judge Kevin Glubb

Dear Judge Glubb,

Let me say at the outset that I am against sending people to prison unless there are compelling reasons for doing so. I would much rather New Zealand's judges did not use remand and custodial sentences for young offenders as often as you all do. 

I know that people, and especially young people, can behave in uncharacteristic ways when under the influence of alcohol or drugs and/or hormones, and/or due to peer pressure or mob mentality. 

Given a criminal record can have profound implications for a person's future, I accept that in some instances a discharge without conviction, and granting of permanent name suppression are warranted.

All of this is why, in principle, I approve of your ruling in the case of the young man who, at the age of twenty, punched a woman who is old enough to be his grandmother, in the face, causing her bodily and psychological harm.

According to the reports I've read, you described the offending in question as "moderately serious" given the blows were to the head. 

The outcome for the victim was a fairly minor physical injury; the psychological harm is much harder to assess but importantly, the assault had the very real potential to cause serious, possibly fatal injuries. 

That fact should have featured in your sentencing, if only to use the opportunity to send a message to all men who punch women, and to young men who punch anyone in the head but especially old women, that it is an extremely dangerous act.

You may not be aware of it but men on average punch 160% harder than women. A man punching a woman is seldom an even contest; a young man punching an old woman is about as uneven as it gets.

That aside, women's ability to withstand the force of a blow to the head is significantly less than men on average because of sex-based differences in the musculature of the male and the female posterior cervical spine.

Add to that, the probability of age-related osteoporosis in a 70-year-old woman, and any blow from a man, especially one in the grip of adrenaline and testosterone disinhibition, is likely to result in fractures. A blow to the head could result in a catastrophic cervical fracture.

The young man's defence was that he is "neurodiverse", ie he has ADHD and mild autism, which make him more prone to acting impulsively. 

However, despite his reduced impulse control, he had got to the the age of twenty without any prior arrests or convictions which suggests either he must have had a sequestered life, or controlled himself pretty well, or there was a trigger in that situation, i.e. the anger he felt on behalf of trans people who he thought were being attacked by the mainly older, female rally attendees.

Whatever one's opinion of the victim vis-à-vis her reasons for being at the rally, her actions in challenging a person who was removing lines placed to delineate the rally and the protesters, her refusal to engage in restorative justice, or the use of the case in the on-going arguments about trans and women's rights, nothing can reasonably be said to mitigate such an assault.

It's as reasonable to argue that the young man's action, far from being impulsive, was somewhat calculated in that it is highly unlikely he would have lost control of his fists if the person he was confronting had been a large, muscly man.

It is noteworthy that in 2014, you were faced with another twenty-year-old man who was charged with a similar assault. 

In the grip of extreme alcohol and adrenaline/testosterone disinhibition, and after a domestic dispute, three police officers attempted to arrest him. In the course of the arrest he punched a detective in the face causing a small cut and a black eye.

The two defendants were the same sex and age; they both suffered a serious loss of impulse control, and there were analogous injuries caused to their victims.

So, what was so different that the young man in 2014 deserved to be sent to prison for thirteen months, with no reporting restrictions, while the young man in 2024 got discharged without conviction and was granted permanent name suppression?

Was it being drunk as opposed to being neurodiverse?

Was it resisting arrest by three police officers and in the process punching one of them in the eye, as opposed to launching an unprovoked attack on a 70-year-old woman?

Was it being working class and brown skinned as opposed to middle class and white skinned?

Or was it having prior convictions – which of course may well have been connected to being working class and brown skinned?

Ten Annoying Things

Someone asked me what ten things annoy me most about the current centring of gender identity, and the demand for the codification of gender self-identification, (GSI) which has proved to be the catalyst for a multi-faceted and growing opposition. 

Initially, it was socialist and radical feminists who asked that consideration be given to the implications – for women’s sex-based rights and expectations – of codified gender self-identification, i.e., the legal right to change the sex marker on all official records simply by statutory declaration. 

They were immediately attacked by liberals and some on the left, labelled as TERFs, and deemed to be “Nazi-adjacent”, among a plethora of other insults and threats. 

The later coat-tailing of the issues by ultra-conservatives and the political far right was an outcome that could and should have been predicted had the pro-GSI factions not been so busy congratulating themselves on how progressive and on the right side of history they were. 

 So, here’s my list, written in no particular order of importance, given it’s all inter-connected.

The DISTRACTION away from objectively far more important domestic and global issues arising from current states of natural and social disequilibrium, which have the capacity to tip into multi-system chaos far more rapidly than anyone can predict, let alone prevent. 

The DIVERSION of political energy, and the investment of the left’s dwindling supply of political capital in support for an essentially individualistic, and individualising ideology.

The FAILURE to contextualise that essential individualism in corporate capitalism’s on-going aim of neutralising any and all forms of collectivism that might hinder its pursuit of profit at any cost.

The SCHISMS that were opened in an already fragmented and weakened “left” within the old empires that created the shit in which the entire planet is suffocating, and whose populations are best placed to stop more from being produced, and to clean up what’s already here.

The STUPIDITY of the left in not anticipating the backlash to the attempt to privilege a subjective, often shifting, and individual sense of gendered identity over the material reality of dimorphic biological sex which is cemented into the very foundations of the belief systems and sense of self of most people, across cultures, and all of human social history.

The CUPIDITY of the various commercial promoters of gender identity ideology and praxis, most especially those in the medical-industrial complex’s burgeoning realm of medicine for profit, with its absolute subservience to symptomatic and pharmacological/surgical paradigms. 

The CYNICISM of the various strata of system managers and coordinators, from politicians to pundits, in promoting an ideology which, if the ultra-conservative and far-right backlash really takes off, will leave swathes of vulnerable people directly in the firing line.

The IRRESPONSIBILITY of promoting a movement that claims to be in support of the most at-risk, marginalised, vulnerable of people, but which has the effect of making that population among the most surveilled and medically dependent sector of all.

The COWARDICE of all those who had concerns but who sat and watched as principled people, mainly feminists, were subjected to witch-hunts in an attempt to silence them and close down any debate.

The OPPORTUNISM, retributiveness, and win at any cost mindset of the various right wing coat-tailers of the original gender critical movement.

 

More On Matters Maternal

I read what used to be called a tweet on the platform that used to be called Twitter, in which someone argued that scheduled elective caesarian section deliveries are a part of a woman’s right to choose.

I wrote a number of linked tweets about it because it got me thinking about the importance of labour and vaginal delivery in preparing the newborn for entry into the world. Typically for my threads on the spot marked X, it sank without a trace. Hence this post.

 

I had been doing some research into foals born with neonatal maladjustment syndrome.

 

As a prey and flight species, foals need to be up and about quickly, and the mare wouldn’t do well if the long legged, hoofed foetus was trying to gallop whilst in the womb or birth canal.

 

In utero, the production of a neurosteroid acts as a sedative on the foal, making it largely quiescent. 

 

Production of that neurosteroid is switched off during the twenty to forty minutes of the second stage of labour, which prepares the foal for almost immediate standing, suckling and maternal bonding, and movement.

 

If delivery is too quick, or via caesarian section, the foal can remain in a sedated, dissociated state. 

 

Vets found that mimicking the constriction of the birth canal for twenty minutes had the effect of reviving the foal, presumably by stopping the production of the neurosteroid.

 

Human infants are very different obviously but there’s a mass of evidence that delivery via caesarian section is associated with a range of neonatal health issues including respiratory morbidities, asthma, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, and neuro-developmental impairments. 

 

Add in the increased maternal risks, and some researchers and health professionals are now arguing that the trend to elective, scheduled caesarian section must be reversed.

 

A caesarian section may be as the result of an emergency, or scheduled when natural delivery is contraindicated for reasons of maternal or foetal health.

 

It is elective when there’s no physical danger but a woman, for whatever reason, elects to undergo surgery to deliver her baby.

 

Caesarian sections are now performed in more than 1 in 5 births globally and the rate has risen steadily in all regions since 1990 –correlating with the global rise of the neo-liberal Medical-Industrial Complex. (MIC)

 

I don’t have data on how many of those caesarian sections are performed because of a proven health risk to mother and/or foetus, but the fact that the increase is at a time of claimed improvements in wider maternal / foetal health parameters suggests it is a combination of: women being talked into it by private medical providers; overstretched and underfunded public health services trying to improve efficiency, eg predicting demand and reducing the hours/days pregnant women spend in the care of medical staff; and/or because of the fear of labour and the effects of vaginal delivery.

 

Regionally, the lowest rate of caesarean section is in sub Saharan Africa at 5%.

 

The highest is in Latin America and the Caribbean, at 43%.

 

At current rates of increase, by 2030, 28.5% of women world-wide will have a CS and the projected rise in east Asia is from a current rate of 45% to 63.4%.

 

The rate in the United States for all hospitals is 32.9%; and in 2005-2015 the rate rose by 50%.

 

Elective caesarian section rates are higher among people of colour: 36% of Black, 33% Native American, and 31%of Asian and Pacific Islander babies. (2018-20)

 

Brazil has a rate of 55.5% overall but 84% in private hospitals which cater to the rich. 

 

In NZ, in 2020, it was 31%; in Australia - 38%.

 

The lowest rates in countries in the affluent global north are in Iceland, Israel and Norway.

 

All surgery carries risks which have to be balanced against the benefits. Surgery, in effect, inflicts degrees and types of harm in order to save lives, cure or slow diseases etc.

 

Caesarian section is known to involve an increased risk for mothers of haemorrhage, infections and blood clots.

 

90% of women who have a caesarian section for the first delivery will have one for all subsequent deliveries and each one increases risk of uterine rupture – scar tissue is never as strong.

 

Caesarian section has long been statistically associated with a range of neonatal health issues including respiratory morbidities, asthma, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, and neurodevelopmental impairments.

 

The latter is thought variously to be caused by exposure to toxins from general anaesthesia, the acquisition and composition of microbiota in neonates which occurs in passage through the birth canal, and oxytocin levels.

 

Given the increase in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) globally since 1990, and the rise in deliveries via caesarian sections, there has been research into possible links, some of which have concluded that the correlation is compelling enough to avoid unnecessary caesarian sections.

 

With the rise of the medical-industrial complex which now dominates medicine, studies that might bring the MIC’s profit-centred and ethically dodgy practices under scrutiny, struggle to get funding and/or the findings are suppressed in various ways.

 

Thus possible links between ASD and birth via caesarian section are dismissed as being statistically insignificant, and researchers and health professionals calling for a reversal of the trend to more and more elective caesarian sections are not listened to.