In the article Neonatal intracranial hemorrhage common after vaginal birth, Radiology 2007; 242: 535-41, more than a quarter of infants delivered vaginally have a small amount of asymptomatic intracranial bleeding compared with none delivered by cesarean section. Results are based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in this study. Keeping in mind this is a very small study,  88 newborns (65 with vaginal delivery and 23 with cesarean delivery) were screened. Altogether, MRI showed that 17 infants suffered intracranial hemorrhages (ICHs), and seven infants had two or more types of hemorrhages.

Now this is the part that I don’t understand, ORGYN.com reported, “Women who gave birth vaginally were therefore significantly more likely to deliver babies with ICH, while those who had a prolonged duration of labor or a traumatic or assisted vaginal birth were not, compared with those who underwent cesarean section.” I immediately assumed it was the assisted vaginal births (induction/augmentation, forceps/vaccum) that would have significantly increased the cranial trauma in the vaginal birth category, but is this saying that is not the case? I will indeed dig further into this.

“Obviously, the vast majority of us who were born vaginally and may have had these types of bleeds are doing just fine,” concludes John Gilmore, from the University of North Caroline School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, ”Humans have been born vaginally for a very long time, and our brains probably evolved to handle vaginal birth without major difficulty.”