Hospitals turn to emergency C-sections to save mums and babies from Covid

Pregnant women are opting for emergency C-sections to keep themselves and their babies safe from Covid, as experts urge mums-to-be to get vaccinated to reduce the risk of stillbirth.

Pregnant women are increasingly turning to emer­gency Caesareans to save their babies and themselves from the ravages of Covid.

The rise in interventions comes as The Saturday Telegraph can reveal the case of a young unvaccinated woman whose baby had to be delivered 10 weeks early by emergency caesarean in the intensive care unit at Nepean Hospital last August to save her life.

Ultrasound Examination In Doctors Office. Woman and her man in doctors office doing ultrasound examination Picture: iStock

The 28-year-old woman was around 30 weeks pregnant and developed pulmonary ­embolisms, a serious side-­effect of Covid in pregnant women, and had to be intuba­ted. As her oxygen saturations dropped, the baby was delivered by emergency caesarean.

She was then transferred to Royal Prince Alfred where she was put on a heart-lung bypass machine.

The case highlights the seriousness of Covid in pregnant women.

A source at a tertiary hospital said if pregnant patients came in with Covid symptoms, the hospital would perform a caesarean “within a day or two as we know mums will deteriorate by day five to seven and many of them are unvaccinated”.

A new study of 79,148 pregnant women in Scotland, collated between March 2020 and October 2021, found that pregnant women with Covid were four times more likely to lose their foetuses and babies, and twice as likely to give birth preterm. The risk is highest among women who deliver within four weeks of the onset of Covid.

The Covid in Pregnancy Study (Cops) found there were 22.6 deaths for every 1000 births in Covid-positive mothers. All the deaths occurred in the pregnancies of unvaccinated women.

Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists President Dr Benjamin Bopp said vaccination in pregnant women was much lower than other demographics.

Dr Benjamin Bopp has a stark message for pregnant women: ‘Get vaccinated.’

“The pregnant population are well under-vaccinated compared to the population at large. Covid infection in pregnancy is worse for a woman who is not vaccinated,” he said.

“We know vaccination in pregnancy is greatly protective.

“If a woman is in a severe state with Covid from a respiratory point of view and we feel she might have a better chance by having the baby delivered — and remember having a baby in there reduces your lung capacity as you can’t breathe as deeply — that has been put forward as a reason to do an early delivery,” he said.

“As a general principle we keep the baby in as long as possible, but the critical thing is to try and keep them off a ventilator.

“It all goes back to vaccination. The Scottish study shows of those women who get Covid in pregnancy, eight out of nine were unvaccinated — and those who were unvaccinated were four times more likely to be hospitalised and have severe infection and also four times more likely to have a stillbirth than the background rate. Not one of the stillbirths was in vaccinated women.

“Get vaccinated.”

Last year another pregnant woman at Campbelltown lost her baby in the second tri­mester after being admitted to ICU with Covid.

Associate Professor Margie Danchin is a paediatrician and vaccine expert at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and said the study backed up what was known about Covid in pregnancy.

“It is mirroring what we ­already know. There is a five times increased risk of being admitted to hospital and two to three times risk of being admitted to ICU and requiring ventilation,” she said.

“There is also double the risk of miscarriage, so it is critical we prioritise vaccination in pregnant women.

“There is a lot of hesitancy and reluctance of midwives to recommend vaccination for pregnant women, so it is an urgent priority to support providers and pregnant women to make a decision to vaccinate.

“Like influenza, in pregnancy you have a relative ­degree of immunosuppression. The impact of the pregnancy affects the immune response, so you are more vulnerable to getting sick.”

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