Author: Robert M. Silver
Women who delivered two or three babies through cesarean section were at a substantially higher risk for a subsequent ectopic pregnancy compared with women who gave vaginal birth or had one C-section, University of Utah researchers report in a recent study. Using the Utah Population Database, a unique storehouse of genealogical, health and public records, the researchers evaluated 255,082 women who gave live birth in Utah between 1996 and 2011. They found that those with two of two, two of three, or three of three prior C-sections were 1½ to 3½ times more likely to have ectopic pregnancies than women who’d never had a C-section. Women who had one prior cesarean section delivery faced no greater risk than women who’d given vaginal birth. These findings underscore another downstream risk of the increasing rate of cesarean delivery.