A campaign promoting natural birth is making false claims about C-sections. No one has publicly claimed responsibility for it.
It is rare to witness the birth of a conspiracy with the help of unclaimed billboards filling Bucharest, like this week’s anti-C-sections campaign.
I don’t know if those who threw away tens of thousands of euros to tell lies about C-sections in an unclaimed campaign are stupid, incompetent, or malicious. I only know that the claim on the billboard below will be presented as a certainty on the internet in the years to come, even though it wasn’t circulating anywhere until now.
I searched for it specifically because it’s the most outrageous of them all, and I couldn’t find it. Searches older than a year yield 0 (zero) results on the Romanian Google, for instance. To be fair, I haven’t worked up the courage to go on mums’ groups or forums; I imagine someone might have mentioned it over there.
I have found websites that openly promote natural birth, and have done so for years, backed by dedicated NGOs and sponsored by corporations, but which do not spout nonsense such as ‘the lack of dilation and contractions is genetically transmitted from mother to daughter.’
I also found fringe movements promoting unassisted natural birth, but not even they write this rubbish.
There are 0 (zero) studies claiming such a thing. Not even in that realm of pseudo-studies that mimic legitimate ones to promote an agenda (like with 5G or vaccines) have I managed to find anything.
There is, admittedly, a 2016 study conducted by researchers from the University of Vienna, led by Philipp Mitteroecker, which was picked up by the press with exaggerated claims like ‘Caesareans alter human evolution’, but the statement referred to something else.
Namely, that in modern times, women with a very narrow pelvis manage to give birth, via Caesarean, more frequently, and a narrow pelvis is a genetic trait that gets passed down. However, the increase observed by Mitteroecker is minor: the rise is from 30 per thousand in the 1960s to 36 per thousand in the 2010s.
The lack of contractions because a woman has a Caesarean is not a genetic trait; DNA doesn’t suddenly change on the day of birth, and acquired characteristics are not genetically transmitted, as Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck wrongly believed two centuries ago, or Trofim Lysenko in the middle of the last century.
Just as people who have lost a leg in an accident invariably have children with both legs, women born via Caesarean will also have contractions if they give birth naturally.
Now, I suspect that behind this are either ultra-conservative/traditionalist groups, promoters of ‘alternative’ medicine, or some political group testing the waters to spread other bonkers messages through similar methods.
I suppose we’ll find out after Easter, once the authorities with access to information about who paid for the campaign spring into action. But if there’s someone in an outdoor advertising agency who wants to be a whistleblower (or, as we call it here, an integrity warner), they can always write to me or to another journalist they trust.