C-Sycerion section surgeries or C-sections to deliver babies are the most common surgical procedures in U.S. hospitals.

Now, a new study of nearly 1 million births from 2008 to 2017 finds that black women are almost 25% more likely than white women to have unnecessary C-sections, needlessly putting them at risk of surgical complications.

The studies from the National Bureau of Economic Research and was done by three economists.

Sarah Cliff is an investigative health care reporter for the New York Times.

Sarah, your story writing about this, you had a wonderful way of describing it.

You had an example of, or a hypothetical, a black mother and a white mother, same medical

history, same doctor, same hospital.

Yeah, so they walk into the same hospital, they have the same doctor.

On paper, their medical records look basically identical.

But the black woman has a 20% higher chance of delivering by C-section,

which really begs a question, you know, why is this happening?

Was there an answer to that in this study?

There's not one answer. There are some theories, and we can't exactly get inside the doctor's

heads. It could be that they are aware that black women have higher rates of maternal mortality,

so they're thinking, I'm going to get this person into surgery faster.

I don't want to risk complications.

It could be that they aren't listening to black mothers as much if they're pushing back against the idea of a C-section.

It's difficult to tell, but we definitely know that something different is happening for these black women. And we should say that there are reasons why, medical reasons, why a doctor would schedule

a C-section, that the benefits outweigh the risks.

But what are the risks of an unscheduled, an emergency C-section on a woman who has no complications?

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much the risk of adding a major surgery onto the delivery.

A C-section is a major abdominal surgery.

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