Cash-strapped hospitals are banning hundreds of women from having a caesarean birth, it emerged today.

A number of NHS trusts have said they will only give the go-ahead for a c-section if the woman’s health would be put at risk by a natural birth.

They have launched the crackdown on women who are ‘too posh to push’ – saying it wastes millions of pounds of NHS money every year.

Most hospitals already discourage women from having c-sections by outlining the potential risks to both mother and baby.

But now some trusts are going further by ruling them out on financial rather than medical grounds – meaning it will be even harder for women to get a caesarean on the Health Service.

Some mothers have attacked the restrictions, saying it should be a woman’s right to choose how their baby is born.

One quarter of all births in the UK are now by caesarean section, up from just 9 percent in 1980, despite a campaign by the World Health Organisation which believes there is no justification for any country having a rate exceeding 15 percent.

A planned caesarean costs around ￡2,600 – much more than the ￡1,200 cost of a natural birth without complications; taking money from strained NHS budgets away from other priorities such as heart disease and cancer.

Economists estimate that a drop of 1 percent in the proportion of women having the surgery would save the NHS some ￡5.6million a year.

Dr Michael Dixon, chairman of the NHS Alliance, which represents GPs who run health service budgets, said: ‘We are going to need to balance all sorts of things in future, from cancer to heart disease. When it comes to treatments we may need to spend less on, that [caesareans] may be one.’

The bans only affect planned caesareans, not c-sections which are carried out for emergency reasons. And if a natural birth would pose a health risk for mother or baby, a c-section would be allowed.

Health experts have long argued that women should go for a natural birth because the risks are lower. A birth by c-section increases a baby’s chance of breathing difficulties, and mothers may find it harder to bond with a child while recovering from a major operation. They can also suffer potentially fatal placenta problems.

(Read by Renee Haines. Renee Haines is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)