Rachel Bruns is a volunteer advocate for quality maternal health care in Iowa.
I recently recounted how it took the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) 170 days to respond to my request for information on the total births, primary cesareans, total cesareans, and vaginal births after cesareans (VBACs) at Iowa hospitals. I eventually received aggregated five-year totals (2016 through 2020) for each birthing hospital in Iowa.
The International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN) of Central Iowa, where I serve as a volunteer chapter leader, has made the data available on our website. You can see it in table form below as Appendix 1.
While I would have preferred for IDPH to provide the figures for a single year, as I requested, the compiled data still tells us a lot about the overuse of cesareans at several Iowa hospitals and the lack of VBAC access across much of the state.
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