Pregnant women who are near their due date or have just passed it can have labor induced with drugs or other medical procedures — or they can simply wait for labor to start on its own.

Sometimes, there is a medical reason to induce labor, such as a woman having gestational diabetes, but in other cases, women undergo elective induction, when labor is induced without a medical reason. Now, a new study suggests that women who elect to induce labor are less likely to wind up having a cesarean section (or C-section) compared with women who give labor a longer chance to begin naturally.

Among women in the study who had previously had a baby, the odds of having a C-section for their current pregnancy were cut by about half in those who underwent elective induction. About 3 percent of these women who were induced wound up having a C-section, while about 7 percent of those who waited for labor to start on its own had the surgery, said study researcher Blair G. Darney, an obstetrics and gynecology researcher Oregon Health & Science University.