Curbing the surge in caesarean delivery : WHO revises childbirth guidelines to

"The recommendation that we are making now is that that line should not be used to identify women at risk of adverse outcome," he added.

While rates of interventions like c-sections vary among regions, WHO has seen what it considers a worrying rise in such practices worldwide.

Interventions that were once used to manage complicated childbirths have become commonplace, the agency warned.

"Pregnancy is not a disease and childbirth is a normal phenomenon, where you expect the woman to be able to accomplish that on her own without interventions," Oladapo said.

"However, what has been happening over the last two decades is we have been having more and more medical interventions being applied unnecessarily to women and we have situations where several women are getting too many interventions that they do not need."

While cautioning against any one-size-fits-all benchmarks, the new WHO guidelines say that for a woman delivering her first child, any labour that does not extend beyond 12 hours should be considered normal.

For a subsequent pregnancy, the figure drops to less than 10 hours.