Today’s typical mother spends about two hours longer in labor than a woman who gave birth in the 1960s, a national study has found.
Modern moms are also older, heavier and more likely to encounter epidurals and cesarean sections than pregnant women of 50 years ago, according to researchers at the National Institutes of Health.
Patients and their babies have changed over the decades, but researchers said obstetricians’ approaches are driving longer labors.
Today’s mothers linger in the initial stage of labor for 2.6 hours longer with their first child and two hours longer for subsequent births, according to the study.
The analysis compared nearly 40,000 women who gave birth between 1959 and 1966 to about 100,000 women who delivered between 2002 and 2008.
Dr. Paul Smith, a Bangor obstetrician and gynecologist, said the study didn’t address the health implications of longer childbirth.
Women today tend to be much more active in delivery decisions than mothers of the 1960s, he said. That engagement results in healthier infants, making additional hours in the delivery room well worth it, he said.
“When you have dialogue between the doctor and his patient, that can add time but it can lead to better outcomes,” Smith said.
The study, published online in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, doesn’t identify all the reasons that labors are getting longer. Differences in modern moms and their newborns compared to the 1960s may play a role.
Today’s first-time mothers have higher body mass indexes and are on average four years older when they give birth, the study found. Modern babies also are bigger and tend to arrive five days earlier.
Delivery practices also have changed. Cesarean deliveries have shot up, quadrupling since the 1960s to 12 percent of all births, according to the study.
Epidural injections that blunt the pain of labor were used in more than half of recent deliveries, compared with just 4 percent of births in the 1960s. Epidurals are known to prolong labor, but researchers said their rising prevalence doesn’t account fully for the findings.
Obstetricians also are administering oxytocin, a hormone that speeds labor, much more frequently than they did 50 years ago, which should have shortened overall labor times.
“Without it, labor might even be longer in current obstetrics than what we found,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Katherine Laughon of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said in a release.
Geri Tamborelli, nursing director at the Family Birth Center at Maine Medical Center in Portland, noted that oxytocin also is used to induce labor, whether by the mother’s choice or medical necessity.
“What we’ve seen is a huge increase in inductions … When your body doesn’t put you into labor naturally, it takes longer,” Tamborelli said.
The center also is witnessing more obesity and Type 2 diabetes, which can lead to bigger babies, among its patients, she said.
Smith said his patients tend to be much heavier than the average body mass index of 25 cited in the study.
As for increasing use of epidurals, “I don’t know that women would want to suffer to go two hours faster,” he said.
The study’s authors called for further research into whether modern delivery practices are contributing to longer labors.
Rather alarming that obesity is up that much, though it’s probably up that much across the board for Americans. One can only hope that we’re getting better at providing women with the information and encouragement they need to be healthy while pregnant.
It wasn’t that long ago that doctors didn’t even tell women not to smoke when pregnant.
I disagree with your comment about it being “not that long ago” that doctors didn’t tell women not to smoke while pregnant. My oldest is almost 30 years old and I was told about the problems that could arise from smoking…….even tho I didn’t smoke. It’s one of the routine things that doctors advise against……..now, if only they could get the mothers to stop doing drugs, that would be awhole lot better.
And why do you think doctors aren’t providing women with information and encouragement to be healthy while pregnant?
Thanks for making me feel old! :) I guess I say that because they didn’t really tell my mom to quit. But that WAS a while ago now!
LOL Sorry! :P
The article compares the present to 1960’s.
Why can’t others do the same, Ms. Old ?
Good point, smoking and drink, just like crack use, causes premature birth
and lower birth weight, so, naturally (snicker) , faster labor, right ?
What ever happened to to the good old days when women would take a few minutes to drop the kid and then get back to work? Things are just too easy today!
LOL Yah, people treat childbirth too much like some medical procedure and pregnancy like a condition. Women were meant to have babies, it’s natural, it’s what our bodies were meant to do. I think more women need to embrace it rather that fight it and let nature take over!
”
I think more women need to embrace it rather that fight it and let nature take over! ”
THAT is exactly what I was talking about, above, Nurse.
And you are so wrong !!!!
That is not the corporate way.
There no profit in that.
Workers must fight, fight, fight, for more corporate profit though ever greater personal efficiency.
All you lower end workers must produce more at less cost in both time and labor,
at all times, or, remember, the task will be moved offshore to where labor can be more easily controlled.
;-}
We could all just deliver in China?
Just the boys, and then only one per customer.
Nature also meant for some women to die in labor. I doubt too many women would care to embrace that.
Not exactly what the point was. No one’s suggesting we leave women to die at the hands of nature. The thought was let nature do what it intended with minimal intervention. Mother’s do better. Babies do better. We’re obviously at a place where we wouldn’t allow a woman to die if we didn’t have to, but treating a woman like she’s sick or something….well, I say give us women more credit then that.
I don’t know where you got that info from, “drop the kid and go back to work.” One of the reasons it’s not is because of lawsuits. If the mother and baby don’t get proper medical care, it could come back to bite the butts of the hospital. Another reason is, mothers who do work are given maternity leave……to give mother and baby time to bond. Also, alot of mothers don’t just “drop the kid”, they have C-sections which take longer to heal from than a natural birth……..and it takes awhile to heal from that also.
It is very painful giving birth and it’s not something a woman just bounces back from immediately. Giving birth is NOT “too easy”!
I think his point was that childbirth is natural and has been made complicated by all the medical interventions. I believe that if the majority of women were left to give birth naturally (yes, there’s always the exception) and were given proper prenatal education/childbirth education, there would be far fewer c-sections and inductions. My childbirth educator told a story of a women she was coaching who’s prolonged labor had prompted the physician to book an OR for a c-section. The CE knew the woman wanted a natural birth so she suggested she change positions, in which the baby came about 3 minutes later. Perhaps it was coincidence, but I tend to think not. If a woman needs to stand on her head to give birth, let her. The docs want us women to give birth in a way that is convenient for THEM.
You bring up some excellent points but honestly I was just being funny. Over the years I’ve learned that nothing pisses a mother off more than saying childbirth is easy, which of course it is not. I thought people would understand that I was just yanking the chain a little bit for laughs.
” I don’t know where you got that info from, “drop the kid and go back to work.”
It is a meme in the extremist conservative’s war on women.
American women are the new “THEM”, because, by an unacceptable majority, you woman have voted for and, according to the polls, will vote for President Obama, again.
Just look at the INTRUSIVE , but only to woman, laws the GOTea controlled State Governments have been supporting lately:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/03/15/yes-there-is-republican-war-on-women-voters/
Even Fox News admits it.
Disgusting, I know, but don’t ask unless you want the sick partisan political answer,
because everything with the new right, is about them, and their sick, extremist, “no compromise” conservative partisan politics .
It is just how they have been conditioned.
So, I say it is not only best to go with it, but to encourage it, and wind them up to their unbalanced, no compromise, maximum spin, between now and next November.
Let physics deal the final blow to those who would deny science.
Their owns words are the best way to show how foolish and unprepared to lead America the no room for moderates, GOTea, no compromise, conservatives really are.
: )
hey george your to funny. giving birth is not easy. its not like coming out of a fire ya know, drop, roll, and right back at ya. there is needed a little time to recoup. next time you have a chance to drop the kid let us know how long your recoup was. ya still funny george.
I think that is the point of this article.
Woman need to more efficient, like the rest of American workers.
“Productivity has surged, but income and wages have stagnated for most Americans. If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.”
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-americans-working-harder-charts
The graph entitled “Labor Pains” is especially telling
You are not producing tomorrow’s corporate persons with enough regard for the corporate bottom line.
The way things are going today -some poor kid born today is going to miss out on Social Security by 2 hours.
”
The way things are going today -some poor kid born today is going to miss out on Social Security by 2 hours. ”
So ?
As it is now going, accepting to the conservative, Congressional, do nothing, no compromise, plan, only the haves will have medical coverage and live long enough for that to matter.NEW IDEA * :
Who else would trade SS for universal health care coverage in America ?
It would profit everyone, and at same time doing much of SS does.
It supports family values ( a compromise to conservative values) by allowing families to accept the responsibility of taking care of the elderly, who do NOT ruin you financially because you keep them fed, warm and safe, rather that is a result of them inevitability getting sick, unto death, in our current mixed economic system.
The downside of it is that the Greatest Generation and the Civil Rights/Counter Culture survivors , who fight for their own freedom, might explain what it means to those that are supposed to be dumbed down for sake of the corporatist One World Economy* *.
* How radically liberal of me is it to speak of a new idea?
Have you ever heard of a conservative one ?
** which is what was El Duce’s dream, because Corporatism is what the man credited with naming Fascism says it should have been called.
No inductions or epidurals and labors less than 3 hours for all my kids. I let Mother Nature do what was intended. Stop rushing labor or timing it for mother/doctor convenience and for goodness sakes, doctors stop giving women c-sections because ‘ooooh, I don’t want to be in pain’! If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Childbirth is supposed to hurt.
At 10 lb 6 oz, I’m fairly certain I would have killed my mother without modern medicine. Despite the longer labors, mortality is way down. I think that’s the real stat that matters.
Never mind the fact that the population’s hips are getting narrower while our craniums grow. The curse of bipedalism.
I think you may have that slightly backwards Erix, the hips are getting wider and the minds more narrow. :)
Well you’re obviously the exception, Erix! That’s a big baby! (though there have been women who’ve successfully done it, God love em!)
I was 1.5 hours for all of my kids and natural…top that :)
Aw man….you beat me! :)
I changed my own diaper before my mom pushed me out. Bravo for me.
So is a bad tooth. But you don’t have to take the pain just because you have it.
Well if novacaine caused a tooth extraction to cause more manipulation and potential side effects with extraction, or if the tooth was lethargic and didn’t eat as well after it came out, or if the patient had to be confined to bed for hours during extraction because the process was actually slowed due to the novacaine, your point would merit equal argument.
Money money money…hospitals main focus than its the patient.
That is why they should Nationalized, like in civilized Nations, like the EU, Mexico and China , where it makes them more competitive in the worldwide labor market, I must guess.
PUSH, ladies, push. I read some of you aren’t pulling your weight……or pushing it.