Around 218,000 women gave birth by caesarean section in 2023 - meaning that almost one in three births in a hospital in Germany took place by caesarean section.

As the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) announced on Monday, the cesarean section rate nationwide in 2023 was 32.6 percent, surpassing the previous high of 32.2 percent in 2011. Over the past 30 years, the proportion of these surgical procedures has almost doubled: In 1993, 16.9 percent of women gave birth by caesarean section, the medical term for a caesarean section. In addition to cesarean sections, there are other, albeit less frequently used, methods of obstetric care: Vacuum extraction was used in 6.5 percent of deliveries in 2023, and forceps in 0.2 percent. 60.6 percent of women in the hospital gave birth naturally. There are large regional differences in obstetric care in Germany.

The highest proportion of deliveries by caesarean section was in Saarland (36.4 percent). Hamburg followed with a caesarean section rate of 36.2 percent. Saxony (25.6 percent), however, had the lowest caesarean section rate, followed by Brandenburg (29.3 percent). At the international level, comparable data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are available for 29 countries up to 2022. According to these figures, there were 60 caesarean sections per 100 live births in Turkey in 2022, 48 in Romania, and 47 in Bulgaria. The number was comparatively low in Israel and Iceland (15 each) and Norway (16). With 31 caesarean sections per 100 live births in 2022, Germany was in the upper middle range of the 29 OECD countries. In Germany, fewer and fewer hospitals offer obstetric care at all. In 2023, only less than a third (31.4 percent) of the 1,874 hospitals in the country performed deliveries. In 1993, the number was just under half (49.4 percent). At that time, there were a total of 2,354 hospitals. Around 680,000 children, including twins and multiple births, were born in hospitals in 2023. This was 6.4 percent, or around 46,000, fewer than in the previous year. The proportion of live births in 2023 was 99.6 percent, according to statisticians.