Perhaps because I’m about to have my first child in a couple weeks, I’m a bit, well, sensitive. I’m sure most every would-be father feels the same way. (And the mothers even worse, I’ve found! ^_^) Everyone keeps talking about Ceasarian sections here in China. My wife told me a couple nights ago she met another Chinese woman in a local market who had just had a little girl. While the woman was in labor at the local maternity hospital the three or four nurses in attendance kept insisting the woman have a C-section. The woman refused. However painful the experience, the doctor had assured her before she had gone into labor that she would not require surgery. So why were the nurses so intent on the mother having an incision in her belly that would forever sever the muscles in her abdomen? “The nurses each get a paid a commission by the doctor who performs the surgery,” the woman in the market told my wife in a whisper. “Whatever you do,” the new mother advised my wife, “however painful it might be, don’t let them do a C-section on you if your doctor already told you you’ll deliver the baby alright without one.”

I told the story to two of my magazine editors in Shanghai, whereupon one of the Americans told me he had read somewhere (China Daily, he thought), that China has an obscene number of C-sections per capita compared to the rest of the world; about one-in-three, he seemed to recall.

So, while eating dinner and watching the local Chinese news just hours later, what report should air but one involving pregnant women who are having C-sections in Suzhou. “Preganancy is so painful,” one of the women exclaimed on-camera. Other women in the report nodded agreement and cackled something in the local dialect. A Chinese doctor thankfully came on and assured the viewing audience that however painful, natural birth was actually a better option for infants, if possible. Of course, the doctor was a guy, and hadn’t to my knowledge been through a pregnancy himself.

Still, this C-section fad reminds me very much of the “sinification” of ultrasound technology: a mis-application of technology in an attempt to trump Mother Nature herself.