“Anytime you allow people to pick and choose, you’re making the [health] care they don’t pick more expensive,” said Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families.

In recognition of National Prematurity Awareness Month, National Partnership president Debra Ness and Dr. Sam Ho, chief medical officer of UnitedHealthcare, give tips on how expectant mothers and their families can increase the likelihood of a safe and healthy pregnancy, delivery and early postnatal period.

In the U.S., more than one in five pregnant women give birth to their first baby by C-section, according to Childbirth Connection, a program of the National Partnership for Women & Families.

“We don’t know the best approaches,” said Carol Sakala, director of Childbirth Connection Programs at the not-for-profit National Partnership for Women & Families. “It’s a time of great innovation and creativity.”

The 2013 Listening to Mothers survey from the National Partnership for Women and Families revealed that almost two-thirds of mothers undergoing their first cesarean indicated the doctor was the decision-maker.

In the last 50 years, the number of cesarean births have multiplied by seven, according to Childbirth Connection. In 1965 the C-section birth rate was 4.5 percent. In 2014, 32.2 percent of births were C-sections, making it one of the most common procedures in American operating rooms, according to Childbirth Connection.

Other benefits include a 9 percent reduction in the use of any pain medications, a 31 percent reduction in the use of synthetic oxytocin to speed up labor, and a 34 percent reduction in reporting a negative birth experience, according to Carol Sakala from the National Partnership for Women and Families.

The study, called Listening to Mothers III, was based on Childbirth Connection’s nationally representative survey of some 1,960 new mothers. It found that four out of five of the mothers who were warned they might have large babies gave birth to infants who were not large, and weighed less than 8 pounds 13 ounces.

“When you don’t wait for labor to begin on its own, you cut short all kinds of physiological changes and preparations for birth that are taking place toward the end of pregnancy,” said Carol Sakala, the director of the nonprofit Childbirth Connection programs at the National Partnership for Women & Families. “What is the effect of cutting off those processes so casually on such a large scale?”

“We could shift this number downward,” said Carol Sakala, director of childbirth connection programs at the National Partnership for Women and Families, by helping women get “fit and ready for the challenges of labor, using a doula, being upright and moving around during labor and periodic listening to the baby’s heart patterns as opposed to continuous electronic fetal monitoring.”

A wide range of health-focused organizations — including Planned Parenthood, Physicians for Reproductive Health, the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, the National Abortion Federation, the National Partnership for Women & Families, and the Center for Reproductive Rights — praised the effort to roll back Hyde, releasing statements on Wednesday pointing out that policy harms some of the most economically vulnerable women in the country.

“Anyone who looked closely at the fiscal 2016 Labor-HHS-Education budget that sailed through the House Appropriations Committee recently was in for a jolt. It may be impossible to overstate the many ways this legislation would take the country backward, said Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families.