Tag: duration

Giving Birth Takes Twice As Long It As It Did 50 Years Ago

Giving birth today takes twice as long as it did 50 years ago, and this can affect your chances of a c-section.

My first labor was long. Really long. It lasted from Friday night to Sunday evening. Pain I had anticipated, prepared for, given myself multiple pep talks for, but the duration… It undid me.

As I recently watched a good friend go through a similar labor, some old nagging questions resurfaced: How uncommon is it for women to labor for days? What is a “normal” length of labor, if such a thing exists?

Oddly enough, the medical answers to these questions have just changed dramatically. This is because of a recently completed landmark study of nearly 100,000 labors. The study, which used medical record data collected between 2002 and 2008 from hospitalsm across the U.S., showed unequivocally that we labor much more slowly than we used to. Much, much more slowly.

In fact, our labors have slowed down so much that in 2014 the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) revised its definitions of normal and overly slow labor. Until then, the definitions were based on data from the 1950s and 1960s. These data were used to define a “normal” labor duration, how long it takes most women in active labor to reach a full 10 cm of dilation and then to push the baby out. By the same token, these data were used to defined abnormal labor: labors that lasted longer than 19 out of 20 of these labors (the 95th percentile for duration) were considered overly slow or stalled.

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Let’s Face It: Formula-Fed Babies Sleep Better

Breastfed babies tend to arouse from sleep more easily and sleep for shorter periods of time. Nearly all babies who sleep through the night by 3 months are formula-fed.

Breastfeeding is a major battleground of the modern mommy wars. In her widely discussed piece in The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin called breastfeeding the “new sucking sound”–replacing vacuuming as the task that shackles women to the house, promotes the unequal distribution of childcare and household duties, and prevents women from reaching the upper echelons of professional success. The benefits of breastfeeding have been oversold, she claims, and–just as significantly–the costs to women’s sleep, time, and career progress have been downplayed.

On the other side of the debate, the American Academy of Pediatrics states that the benefits for the infant in terms of reduced risk of infection, adult obesity, allergies, and asthma are so great that breastfeeding must be viewed as an “investment in your child’s future” rather than a “lifestyle choice.” Some lactation consultants fall into this camp too, needing to be reminded to suppress their impulse to sigh when yet another mother complains of exhaustion and lack of sleep, for fear they alienate her–and thus fail to convince her to keep breastfeeding.

On both sides, well-intentioned but overzealous advocates twist the evidence on breastfeeding, cherry-picking among studies to support their preexisting views.

This is especially true when it comes to one of breastfeeding’s major downsides: Disrupted sleep.

Consider the post, 5 Cool Things No One Ever Told You About Nighttime Breastfeeding, which claims that the number 1 coolest thing about nighttime breastfeeding is “breastfeeding moms actually get MORE sleep than their formula-feeding counterparts,” and concludes with the rhetorical question: “Did you ever think, when you hear your baby rouse at 2:00am, that they are actually giving you the gift of MORE sleep…?”

To which I would like to respond: No, never, not only because it does not square with my own experience, but also because the research on this topic is clear: breastfeeding moms, on average, get less sleep, not more.

Almost without exception, studies on formula feeding, breastfeeding, and sleep find that breastfed babies wake up more often than formula fed ones at night, and breastfeeding mothers therefore get LESS uninterrupted nighttime sleep.

Nighttime Wakings in Formula-Fed Versus Breastfed Babies

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