Cesarean advocates claim that cesareans improve perinatal outcomes and prevent pelvic floor dysfunction. Is this true?… Read More
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Walking and Position Changes in Labor
No study has ever compared a policy of unrestricted mobility and support of spontaneous behavior with a policy of restricted and directed behavior… Read More
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Episiotomy
Forty years of research fails to support any of the claims made for episiotomy… Read More
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Cord Clamping
Those who defend early clamping also claim that clamping the umbilical cord helps stimulate the baby’s first breath, and therefore eases newborn transition. But is sooner necessarily better?…Read More
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The Second Stage of Labor
Trials isolating a single intervention also prevent us from determining if elements of physiologic care work synergistically to produce better outcomes…. Read More
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Eating and Drinking in Labor
The concern with oral intake in labor is that it risks death from aspiration should general anesthesia be required. We quantified that risk using cesarean data from U.S. studies….Read More
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Home Birth
The extreme polarity in positions on home birth makes discourse on risk difficult. More than half the women reported avoiding talking to others about the risks of home birth. Women particularly avoided health care professionals, citing or anticipating judgmental responses….Read More
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Birth Centers
When we pull back from the setting to the system, we can begin to envision freestanding birth centers as a point of entry into an integrated maternity care system that efficiently and safely serves the majority of childbearing women within their communities….Read More
