Natural ways to induce labor. Signs of labor. New to BabyCenter? Join now. Password Forgot your password? Keep me logged in. Log in. Get the BabyCenter app. Download now. See all in Getting Pregnant. Napping Ages 2 to 3 See all in Child. Registry Builder NEW. The phases of stage 1 are generally defined as follows:. Some doctors and researchers consider the early labor and active phases of stage 1 one and the same.
And since early labor doesn't happen in the hospital in most cases, it is hard for its duration to always be accurately measured. This is likely why it doesn't appear in much of the data that analyzes the length of labor—and why many studies vary in how it is documented.
For this reason, many hospitals record data for active labor only. Women who remain in the first stage of labor for more than 17 hours are more likely to be considered for interventions to move things along. Common options include:. Some doctors are more conservative than others when making these determinations. Doctors will consider multiple factors—including recommended laboring time limits and whether or not the mother and baby appear to be doing well—when deciding how long to let labor continue.
The length and experience of each labor are different for every woman and pregnancy. Though the duration of one's labor can't be guaranteed, there are a variety of factors that can influence it. Some include:. What laboring mothers experience has changed over time with the advent of pain interventions, new offerings at hospitals such as baths for water births , and much more.
Labor time has changed too, mainly due to when women are choosing to have their babies and how doctors are now approaching later-stage deliveries. A study done by the NIH compared data on almost , spontaneous, singleton births from two time periods: and The review showed that the average time spent in active labor was longer for first-time moms in the more recent years than the earlier ones, when most labor patterns began to be recorded 6.
Researchers attributed this to a variety of factors, the first one being that maternal age has increased. At the time of giving birth, the mothers in the early s were, on average, about 4 years older than the women who gave birth in the s. The study researchers cited that older mothers tend to take longer to give birth than younger mothers, as noted above. In s-era deliveries, many doctors used a surgical incision episiotomy to enlarge the vaginal opening during delivery or surgical instruments to extract the baby from the birth canal.
Those interventions may speed delivery but are now less common due to the potential of adverse effects. Today, doctors may intervene when labor fails to progress by administering Pitocin or performing a C-section. In fact, the rate of Cesarean delivery was four times higher in the early s than it was 50 years prior.
These are very different delivery procedures that can have an effect on labor and delivery data. But is that really the case? It was for Laura B. I believe it. When a blizzard blew into town on my due date, my mom came to stay for a few nights while my midwife hunkered down at the hospital, just in case. He came on his own time. The advice for first-time moms is typically to labor at home until contractions are regular and close together, but doctors and midwives often encourage women to get to the hospital much sooner with subsequent pregnancies, since things tend to move more quickly the second time around.
Britni D. Turns out, by the time she got to the hospital she was already 5 centimeters dilated and had her baby less than three hours later. She figured childbirth the second time around would be quick but wound up laboring for 14 difficult hours. Candice Q. Nina P. So lots of second times moms are done pushing within an hour, and often much sooner. In addition to your body being better prepared, you also know how to effectively push this time around, and knowing how to push is half the battle.
There are a lot of activities for mindfulness that can be fun and helpful for kids. Jayme is a single mom of two little girls in Southern California. Because being a single, work-from-home mom isn't stressful enough, she also has two dogs but only one of them is crazy! Jayme has been writing professionally for just over two years, and while she covers a lot of topics, her wheelhouse is parenting and trending news, both of which provide a wealth of material on a daily basis.
She speaks her mind, cusses too much, and always sticks up for what she believes in. Her opinions are always her own, but let's be honest, they're usually always right. You can find more of her work on Mommyish, Care, and Mommy Nearest. Is labor shorter for your second pregnancy?
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