Background: Mortality and disability rates were reported to be respectively 2-3 and 5-10 times higher in C-sections compared to Vaginal delivery.
Objectives: This study was aimed to explore the factors involved in selecting the birth type among primiparous women.
Methods: The present cross-sectional research was conducted on 220 primiparous women, who visited the health-care centers of Bandar Abbas. They were recruited in their first trimester of pregnancy with a simple randomized clustering method. Data were collected in a researcher-designed questionnaire. Its validity was confirmed by a panel of experts and reliability was tested and approved through the test-retest method. Mean, standard deviation, independent sample t-test, and Chi-squared tests for data analysis were done by SPSS 16. P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Results: The mean age of the participants was 27.40 ± 6.07 years. The main barriers to the choice of vaginal delivery were the fear of pain and fear of vaginal area tears and ruptures, fear of injury to fetus, and doctor's recommendation. A statistically significant correlation was observed between the age, education, employment, income, awareness, and the reasons for preferring surgical childbirth.
Conclusions: To reduce the rate of unnecessary cesarean sections (C-section), the following recommendations are suggested: Reducing fear of pain in expectant mothers, modifying wrong beliefs about the culture of natural childbirth, increasing awareness of fewer adverse effects of vaginal delivery including the vaginal tears if the mother abides by all midwife(s) instructions during the delivery procedure, providing educational courses for the necessary movements during the delivery, decreasing surgeons' payment for C-section, and increasing payment for natural childbirth and implementing barriers for optional delivery to reduce the C-section.
Keywords: Birth type; Iran; cesarean section; primiparous women; vaginal delivery.