Pregnancy Exercise and Home Birth

The web is abuzz with news of the rising rate of home births. Increasingly women are electing to stay home for three major reasons: perceived safety, a desire to avoid medical interventions, and a previous negative hospital experience. There is also a lot of discussion about the need for more trained midwives, qualified to attend home births in low risk situations, as well as more midwives to attend in-hospital births. Some physicians are even complaining that the current insurance and liability situation forces them to practice defensive medicine, executing procedures and recording them to maintain a legal paper trail rather than care for their patients.

What is at the core of this issue? Several things leap to mind…

Defensive medicine is certainly a major component. Mandated medical procedures and frequent measurements during labor tend to interfere with the natural process. For example, in first stage labor, interruptions force women out of the parasympathetic state (brain alpha rhythm associated with the relaxation response) that helps promote the release of oxytocin and progress in labor.

Allowing the body to work is a very different kind of experience from what many women discover about birth in a hospital setting. In my experience, women who are aerobically fit do well in any labor setting. Women from my fitness classes have a very low rate of cesareans. Having your vitals checked and your contractions and fetal heart beat measured every hour or sometimes continuously cannot promote labor, although fitness seems to protect women to some degree. Of course, the argument for measurement is that if anything goes wrong that could have been detected through measurement, the practitioner will be blamed for malpractice. Thus, if 3 out of 4 cases of late decels leading to cesareans result from false positives in fetal monitoring, that has been seen as an acceptable rate within the medical community.

But, clearly, it is less acceptable to women, fit or not. Attempts are being made to alter the amount of monitoring in hospitals. The fact that it is perceived as an interference speaks to the problems with the method of measuring. In home births and even some midwife-attended hospital births, attendants listen to the fetal heart, a skill that – while it produces more accurate assessment – is rarely taught in medical schools any more.

Additional elements of defensive medicine are suspect, as well:  induction, denial of food and adequate fluid intake, poor communication to patients about the risks of procedures, and a system that views the mother as merely the medium through which the fetus is produced.

Another component is surely the psychological safety that women associate with their home environment over a hospital setting. Hospitals have attempted to circumvent this by creating labor and birth rooms that mimic a home environment and by offering tours of the labor and birth floor to help acclimate parents-to-be. But, it is also factors like not wanting medications that may flatten their emotional response to the birth experience, and the perception that drugs will be pushed on them in a hospital setting, that cause women to simply stay out of the hospital. Obs and midwives will even tell their patients to stay out of the hospital as long as possible if they want to avoid drugs and interventions. Certainly, in my work as a childbirth educator, I see a large part of my task as providing all the information they are requesting to couples in their decision-making process about their approach to the hospital.

One component I find particularly difficult is the standard approach to second stage labor in a hospital setting. To be clear, the notion of using the valsalva maneuver to push out a baby was invented by a man. It speeds up the process (which strikes me as a particularly male goal – apologies to the anti-sexist contingent), but creates more damage than following the body’s urges (reference here). During transition, the body shifts from the parasympathetic state to the sympathetic state. Pushing is aggressive; urges allow a woman to summon strength and direct her efforts. At the end of a long endurance event lasting many hours, a strength test is required. It is very different from the quiet stamina needed during dilation.

As information to this effect gets disseminated, I think women have come to recognize that they have greater trust in a female-based approach. More and more, we are hearing that educated women prefer laboring in water, movement, upright positions, drinking water, eating, gentle monitoring and being around people they trust, to what they have heard about or learned in previous births at the hospital.

Which brings me to a point:  Being present and enjoying birth requires not only a safe setting, but also body trust. Body trust is something one gains by having successful experiences with one’s body. I wonder if women who choose to birth at home tend to have positive self-images? And, most of all, I would be curious to know about the exercise practices of women who choose to birth at home. Any thoughts?