Listening to Mothers III: Informed Consent Failures
Fewer than 20% of laboring women are fully informed about every procedure
Less than 1 in 5 women received informed consent for all practices during labor. 15% felt pressured to accept induction, epidural, or C-section.
Listening to Mothers III, the same 2013 survey of 2,400 US mothers cited in the interventions section, also collected detailed data on informed consent. Fewer than one in five women reported receiving complete informed consent for every procedure performed during labor. Across specific interventions, 15 percent of women reported being pressured into induction, epidural, or cesarean.
The pattern was not concentrated in particular hospitals or regions. It was distributed across the sample, which suggests the consent problem is structural rather than localized to a few bad facilities. The data has not been refreshed by a comparable national survey since, so the 2013 numbers remain the working baseline.
<20%
Fully informed for every procedure
15%
Pressured into intervention
2,400
Women surveyed
2013
Last comparable national survey
Why it matters
If fewer than one in five women are fully informed about every procedure being done to their body during labor, the consent system in US obstetrics is not functioning as a real consent system.
This is one finding from the research library behind How to Birth a Mother. Everything here traces back to a study, a dataset, or a systematic review.