According to a post at Science and Sensibility, a blog that's new to me, Canada's Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada — like ACOG, but up north — no longer recommends routine cesarean when the baby is presenting breech at term.
Automatic cesarean for breech has been the international standard of care since the results of the Term Breech Trial (TBT), a multicenter, randomized controlled trial of over 2,000 women that was designed to “give the option of vaginal breech delivery its best, and perhaps last, chance to be proven a reasonable method of delivery.” That chance appeared to be dashed with the release of the trial’s findings, which seemed to suggest that vaginal breech birth posed unacceptable risks to the baby.
…Then, after two years, the TBT research team tracked down the trial participants and reported long-term health outcomes. This new data revealed that almost all of the babies with severe morbidity after birth in both trial groups survived without any long-term neurological compromise, and differences in combined mortality and morbidity between the cesarean and vaginal groups had disappeared.
…Meanwhile, several large non-randomized studies were released, consistently reporting excellent outcomes of planned vaginal breech birth.
bearing blog 