Recently, during a meeting with the President of a large health insurance company the conversation had turned to the topic of rising c-section rates when he posed the question, “Why aren’t more women up in arms about this?”

Nearly one third of U.S. babies are now delivered by c-section and the rate continues to rise with little sign of slowing. Those of us working in the maternal and child health community have long been concerned about this trend so it’s nice to know that corporate boardrooms are finally starting to sit up and take notice. Our motivations may be different but our goals are finally in sync – to eliminate unnecessary c-sections.

The harder question is “how”. Obviously there are a host of contributing factors, however a common theme is beginning to emerge that, if we are to reverse this trend, the answer lies with better informed health care consumers.

Naturally, this presents it’s own set of challenges. As this decade has progressed there has been an explosion of information about pregnancy and birth, some good, some not so. As more information became available fewer women began signing up for childbirth classes thinking that labor management was as simple as requesting an epidural. “Pain-free” birth is a compelling sales pitch and a pretty easy product to pedal.

We now know that too much information leads to confusion and that “pain free” birth often leads to more medical interventions. For education to succeed it needs to be more than just one more bit of information randomly thrown up on the Internet. It needs context, the kind of context provided by birth classes.

A major focus of what we do at Vida these days is looking for new effective ways help educators deliver the good information we, and they, already have. We need to get women back into childbirth classes and we need to move beyond videos, flipcharts and slide shows to make learning relevant and compelling to this and future generations raised on computers and smart phones.