The general view of childbirth is that it is pretty random and inconvenient, with babies arriving in the middle of other important events or in the middle of the night. Babies seem to come on their own time schedule and expectant parents often have to accommodate that, no matter how inconvenient it may be. But this general view is somewhat out of step with actual modern birthing practices.
Historically, this view was much more accurate than it is today. When childbirth was a more natural process simply because doctors did not know how to intercede, it did tend to be more out of the hands of the parents. However, these days there are three general birthing methods: natural, induced labor and C-section. The rise of scheduled C-sections accounts for a large part of the high number of morning births.
Although babies tend to generally be born more during the day by all methods, C-sections are often scheduled ahead of time. Thus, they are heavily influenced by factors like hospital staffing. This contributes to the fact that when you break births down by the minute around the clock, you see 3.5 times as many births at 8 a.m. than at 3:09 a.m. These are the two extremes of most popular and least popular minute of the day for being born.
Currently, only half of U.S. births are "natural." This is defined as a vaginal delivery that has not been induced. Another 18 percent of births involve induced labor and the final 32 percent are C-section births. Both induced labor and C-sections are much more likely to happen during the day, with the largest spike occurring in the morning.
In fact, C-sections account for a large proportion of the births between 8 and 9 a.m. That one hour span sees 3.7 times as many C-sections as average. Total births are only up by 1.9 times the average delivery rate per hour and induced births are actually slightly less common at during that time.
Some of the factors influencing these statistics include older mothers having more children and women generally working more. Women with jobs, and especially women with serious careers, are more likely to schedule a delivery than full time homemakers. Many of them feel they simply cannot afford to have their lives so completely disrupted by waiting for the baby to show up on its own schedule.
Older women also may schedule a delivery due to complications that come from being pregnant while older or due to having had intervention from a fertility specialist. If more than one embryo was implanted and more than one took, the resulting twins or triplets are likely to come early and need more help.
So, there is nothing nefarious about the increase in C-sections. It generally grows naturally out of a changing world and changing lifestyles. In some ways, it is an indicator of the more empowered lives of the average American woman compared to how our mothers and grandmothers lived. It wasn't all that many decades ago that some women could not get a job without the permission of her husband.
Due in large part to changing lifestyles, birthing practices have changed substantially. Scheduled C-sections are more common, and this fact largely accounts for the spike in births that occur around 8 a.m.
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