Napsac Foundation Mn

Let the Baby Decide: The Case against Inducing Labor By Nancy ...

It was a sunny Friday afternoon, and Tracy was three days past the due date for her first baby. After finishing up the tenth call of the day from well-meaning but anxious friends and relatives, she headed out the door for her weekly checkup with her obstetrician. “If you don’t go into labor by your next appointment, we may have to induce you,” her doctor had advised. Tracy wondered if the slight menstrual-like cramps she’d had the past few days meant that something was happening at last.

At the doctor’s office, a vaginal examination revealed that Tracy was 2 centimeters dilated, her cervix 80 percent effaced, with the baby at minus one station. According to an ultrasound scan, her amniotic fluid levels seemed borderline low, and because she was having mild contractions, the doctor suggested that she “go on over to the hospital and have a baby today!”

Excited, Tracy called her husband at work. He rushed to meet her at the hospital, where she was admitted and hooked up to an IV. Eight hours later, with no further progress, Tracy received an epidural, and labor was induced by the intravenous administration of the commonly used drug Pitocin. A few hours later, her bag of waters was broken artificially; 36 hours later, Tracy was recovering from a C-section after delivering a healthy, 7-pound baby girl. Why did Tracy have to undergo a C-section? What, if anything, had gone wrong?

Nearly two decades ago, Roberto Caldreyo-Barcia, MD, former president of the International Federation of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and an eminent researcher into the effects of obstetrical interventions, made the stunning statement that “Pitocin is the most abused drug in the world today.”1 According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 16 percent of expectant mothers are induced in the US; another 16 percent go into labor spontaneously but are helped along (“augmented”) by Pitocin or a variety of other labor-stimulating interventions.2 Other estimates range from 12 to 60 percent of mothers, depending on whether the numbers refer to type of induction or augmentation, the population sample, or the mother’s socioeconomic background.