On Women

Focusing on someone's race or ethnicity, whether in politics or social settings, is widely frowned upon these days—a very good thing. In medicine, though, your ethnic background can play a crucial role in determining certain health risks. Because of my and my husband's eastern European-Jewish background, for instance, I was warned that we had an increased likelihood of giving birth to a baby with the deadly Tay-Sachs disease, which led us to get genetic screening. (Luckily, we weren't carriers.)

Sometimes, ethnic differences can pose risks for a couple. I was quite surprised by a new finding showing that Asian women married to white men had a 30 percent higher rate of cesarean sections compared with Asian or white couples and white women married to Asian men. The researchers gave a plausible reason why: Previous studies have shown that the average Asian woman's pelvis is smaller than the average white woman's and thus less able to accommodate babies of a certain size. "We're certainly not concluding that these women always need C-sections," says study coauthor Yasser El-Sayed, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Stanford University Medical Center. But he would be less likely to allow a prolonged labor to continue for hours in such women because a vaginal delivery would be very unlikely.

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