Let’s Have a Due Month!
It just happened again – a client told me that the ultrasound showed that she had a healthy baby, but that because she was past her due date, if she didn’t soon go into labor, she would be induced.
My client was distressed about this. She wanted to have what she called a “natural birth.” But she had been given no option.
I said, “It’s your decision.” She said, “Really?”
It is an odd thing, that this extraordinarily intimate bond between mother and unborn child is so routinely ignored. One would think that a mother’s intuition would be the first place to go for information. After all, the mother is the one who experiencing the hormonal changes of pregnancy, the way the baby moves and feels. She is literally attached to the baby’s body, mind and heart.
Encouraging mothers to pay attention to their instincts, and listening to their insights, might radically reduce the amount of medical intervention in the average U.S. hospital birth. And that, according to some new research cited in news release from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, might be a good thing:
Induction and augmentation of labor with the hormone oxytocin may not be as safe for full-term newborns as previously believed, according to research presented today at the Annual Clinical Meeting of The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Researchers say this is the first study of its kind to present data on the adverse effects of Pitocin use on newborns.
Given intravenously, Pitocin (a brand of oxytocin), is often used to start labor when a pregnant woman is overdue. It is also used to keep a lagging labor going by increasing the frequency, duration, and intensity of uterine contractions. . .
Researchers found that induction and augmentation of labor with oxytocin was an independent risk factor for unexpected admission to the NICU lasting more than 24 hours for full-term infants. Augmentation also correlated with Apgar scores of fewer than seven at five minutes. . .
I decided to see if there was any research on the accuracy of these “overdue” dates – the due dates that are used as a benchmark for inducing labor during an otherwise normal pregnancy. I got lucky - a new study has just been released. The results suggest that a due month would be more accurate - because, according to this article by Sheila Eldred in Discovery News, normal pregnancies can vary by as much as five weeks in duration.
The study published today [August 6, 2013] in the journal Human Reproduction suggests that even with incredibly accurate information, choosing a due date is largely a guessing game - something that surprised the researchers. . .
Dr. Anne Marie Jukic of the National Institutes for Health, said in a press release, “Even after we had excluded six pre-term births, we found that the length of the pregnancies varied by as much as 37 days.”
Pregnant women usually get a due date that’s 280 days after the first day of their most recent menstrual period. Using that method,4 percent of women deliver on their due dates.
To get more accurate information, the researchers looked at the results of urine samples collected in the North Carolina Early Pregnancy Study. . .
“Since the embryo secretes hCG, and mothers generally have little to no hCG in their urine when they are not pregnant, we used the earliest increase in hCG to indicate implantation,” Dr. Jukic said.
Researchers also found that the length of pregnancy seemed to be affected by things that occur early on in pregnancy: embryos that took longer to implant, for example, tended to take longer from implantation to delivery. And pregnancies that showed a late progesterone rise were significantly shorter.
They also identified other factors: maternal age, birth weight of the mother, and the length of previous pregnancies all appear to factor into the length of pregnancy.
Let’s hope that the medical community takes this new research to heart. So much is at stake. From my own experience working with reflex integration, most issues – immune system, digestive, gross and fine motor, emotional, academic, social and behavior, etc. - leave a trail of unintegrated reflexes in their wake. Many active reflexes are due to trauma that happens during what Dr. Michael Odent calls “the primal period.” That period - prenatal, birth, and the first year of life - is the time “when the basic adaptive systems—those involved in what we commonly call health—reach their maturity.” (from Pitocin’s Untold Impact, Birthfaith, July 2010)
Problematical births are often at least the partial cause of suffering - separation in the NICU, digestive and nursing problems, motor coordination issues, sensory processing disorders, and the emotional, physical, and financial drain that impacts an entire family. It is wonderful to know that some of these complications may be avoided, during normal pregnancies, simply by factoring in that extra time that research now tells us is normal. Parents can release themselves from the tyranny of the due date, and relax into the latitude of a due month.
My client got off the phone to take a lovely warm bath with Epsom salts and lavender, because when she checked in with her baby, she got two messages. One was “patience.” The other was “peace.”
Movement Matters Aug 21, 2013
I just got word that the mom went into labor naturally and delivered her baby the day after she would have been induced! She now has a happy 8 lb. 14 oz baby boy, who elected to arrive 10 days after the “due date.” Considering the five week window that the study found to be normal, that’s spot on the “due month!”
I love happy endings. And I can’t wait to meet the baby!