Proportion of women giving birth by caesarian section in New Zealand

Birth procedure type codes are only available for people giving birth at a maternity facility.
People giving birth at home are assumed to have a spontaneous vertex (normal) delivery.
Individuals may have more than one birth procedure for each pregnancy so a priority system is used to allocate one procedure type per pregnancy.

Deprivation quintiles are based on the area of residence for the woman or baby. They range from 1 (least deprived) to 5 (most deprived), according to the 2006 New Zealand Deprivation Index. Approximately equal numbers of the population reside in areas associated with each of the five deprivation quintile areas.

This publication uses prioritised ethnicity, whereby each person represented in the data is allocated to a single ethnic group using the priority system Māori > Pacific peoples > Asian > European > Other. The aim of prioritisation is to ensure that where it is necessary to assign people to a single ethnic group, ethnic groups that are small or important in terms of policy are not swamped by the European ethnic group.

While the data is collected for 'women' it is important to note that it actually includes all people who have given birth and that the data may include some transgender people.

At URL provided, select 'Report on Maternity 2017 - tables (XLSX, 347 KB)' file.

To provide annual health statistics about women giving birth, their pregnancy and childbirth experience and the characteristics of live-born babies in New Zealand.

Population data for rate calculations was provided by Stats NZ