Iran’s Caesarean Section Craze
Sep 20th, 2006 by azadeh
As my pregnancy more visibly progresses, the question I’m asked most frequently by relatives and total strangers is not whether I’m having a girl or a boy, but whether I’m having a C-section. Vaginal childbirth is very out these days in Tehran. The procedure is quickly edging out the nose job as the dominant medical trend among Iranians, a people very fond of surgery. No longer the provenance of last-minute complications or doctors’ liability fears, Caesarean delivery is viewed here as the modern woman’s choice. An Iranian politician I interviewed recently even worked the normalcy of a C-section into a metaphor describing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “Nuclear capacity is like a knife,” he told me. “It can be used in a standard operation, say a C-section for you. Or it can be used to kill someone.”