In 1980 the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) released a report titled, “National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference Statement September 22–24, 1980.” The report lists recommendations for birth delivery through cesarean sections, a surgical procedure used to deliver the fetus via the pregnant woman’s abdomen. The recommendations arose from the 1980 Consensus Development Conference on Cesarean Childbirth in Bethesda, Maryland. Medical professionals, consumers, and biomedical research scientists attended the conference, and the NIH’s taskforce on the subject helped facilitate discussions regarding the safety of cesarean sections. The NIH taskforce concluded that cesarean section rates can be decreased and possibly reversed in addition to improving maternal and fetal outcomes and provided recommendations for future research on cesarean sections.

In 2004 Mark Landon and his colleagues in the United States published “Maternal and Perinatal Outcomes Associated with a Trial of Labor after Prior Cesarean Delivery,” which compared the risks of vaginal delivery and cesarean section for delivery of a fetus after a previous cesarean delivery. During a cesarean section, a physician surgically removes a fetus from a pregnant woman through an incision in her abdomen. By the late 1900s, most clinical guidelines viewed attempting a vaginal birth after a previous cesarean delivery as a reasonable option for most women. Yet, physicians often noticed an increased risk of uterine ruptures as more patients underwent vaginal deliveries following previous cesarean sections. As such, many physicians continued to recommend cesarean deliveries for women who had a past cesarean section. Landon and his team evaluated the risks of both delivery methods and published their results in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004. In “Maternal and Perinatal Outcomes,” the authors found that there was no significant difference between the risks of vaginal birth after cesarean and repeat cesarean sections, providing more evidence for clinical guidelines recommending vaginal births after cesarean sections.

In 1916 Edwin B. Cragin in the United States published Conservatism in Obstetrics in which he discussed medical practices and techniques to preserve the vitality of pregnant women and their fetuses. Cragin argued that women who give birth via cesarean section, the surgical act of making an incision through both the abdomen and uterus to remove the fetus from a pregnant woman's womb, must rely on that method for future births. That claim was later coined the Dictum of Cragin. In Conservatism in Obstetrics, Cragin described obstetric techniques to maintain healthy births for women and fetuses. Cragin's article outlined the best practices for obstetricians in the early twentieth century, and publicized the claim that if a woman delivers a newborn via cesarean section, she should deliver any future newborn via the same method, a theory that persisted throughout the century.