Female surgeons are more likely to delay pregnancy, have nonelective C-sections and experience pregnancy loss than women who aren't surgeons, according to a paper published July 28 in JAMA Surgery.
Researchers surveyed 692 female surgeons from November 2020 to January 2021. They found the median age for female surgeons to give birth was 33, compared to a median of 30 for U.S. women with advanced education degrees.
Forty-two percent of survey respondents reported a pregnancy loss, more than twice the rate of the average U.S. woman. Nearly half of the surgeons surveyed reported major pregnancy complications.
A quarter of female surgeons said they had used assisted reproductive technology, which comes at a significant financial cost and can be tied to physical risks, the study authors told The New York Times.
Female surgeons at the highest risk for pregnancy complications were those who performed surgeries for 12 or more hours a week through their final trimester. More than half of surgeons surveyed worked over 60 hours per week during pregnancy and only 16 percent reduced working hours.
"There's a bravado that goes along with the surgical personality," Erika Rangel, MD, a surgeon at Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital and one of the paper's co-authors, told the Times. "There's a culture of not asking for help, but this tells us there's a health risk in it."
The authors outline multiple hospital policy changes that would enable female surgeons to ask for help, but note that the change requires a shift in broad-scale policy as well.