12 Days of Birth: my wishes for your fabulous labor

Books, childbirth classes, labor support, a rocking care-provider: they help immensely in setting the stage for a good outcome. Ultimately though, if your baby happens to be breech and tangled in the umbilical cord, that will be the biggest determinant of the course of your labor (or lack-there-of).

But, in the spirit of the season, I’ve compiled a list of things that I believe can set any mom up for a better birth. I’m calling it:

==The 12 Days of Birth==

#12DaysofBirth

If you live in the US and your water releases before labor, you will need to take a trip to the hospital or care-provider’s office to verify that what you’re leaking is indeed amniotic fluid. If it is, you will most likely will be scheduled for an induction within 24 hours.(1) Left on their own, 95% of all women will start labor within 24 hours of their water breaking (2), but having to take a trip for breakage-verification, and being scheduled for an induction are not conducive to the relaxation and calm that you need to bring on the release of your natural oxytocin.

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1) ACOG. Premature rupture of membranes. Practice Bulletin No 80 2007.

2) Dare MR, Middleton P, Crowther CA, et al. Planned early birth versus expectant management (waiting) for prelabour rupture of membranes at term (37 weeks or more). Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2006 (1):CD005302.

12 Days of Birth: my wishes for your fabulous labor (Day 1) by Adriana Lozada is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA.
Based on a work at https://www.birthful.com/?p=1525.