SÃO PAULO, Brazil — It takes determination to have a normal childbirth in Brazil, and I’m not talking about just getting through labor.

My country has one of the highest rates of cesarean sections in the world: In 2015, they accounted for 55 percent of all births. (By comparison, that same year, the United States had a C-section rate of 32 percent, while in Sweden, they accounted for just 17.4 percent of births.) Sure, C-sections are necessary and lifesaving in certain situations, like cord prolapses or placental abruptions. But according to the World Health Organization, once C-section rates climb higher than 10 percent, there is no evidence that they help reduce maternal and newborn mortality; on the contrary, the surgery can lead to significant complications, which is why the W.H.O. recommends it only be undertaken when medically necessary.

That’s definitely not the case here. In Brazilian private facilities, C-section rates are even higher than in public hospitals, reaching 84.6 percent. The procedure is more profitable for these institutions, which must think about money, and more convenient for doctors, who don’t have to wait hours for the natural processes of labor to unfold. And so, C-sections are routinely prescribed under an endless number of pretexts, many of them as implausible as: placental allergies, asthma, scoliosis, gingivitis, an excessively hairy baby, a soccer match between Atlético and Cruzeiro, and — most creative of all — the assumption that evolution made the female body incompatible with labor.

Surgery is the rule; vaginal childbirth is the exception.

So when I expressed my desire to let nature take its course ahead of the birth of my daughter two months ago, my ob-gyn told me she would assent “only if everything goes perfectly until the due date.” She didn’t seem to notice that her logic was inverted — natural labor should be the default unless something goes wrong — but perhaps that was to be expected from a physician who, according to insurance records, has an 80 percent C-section rate. When I asked why she hadn’t overseen more vaginal births, she said that nowadays, most of her patients face complications in their pregnancies. Brazil, it seems, is the land of statistical anomalies.