Know Your Rights and the Routine Hospital Procedures During Labor & Delivery

After having one hospital birth and one homebirth, I have become an advocate for homebirth as I believe it is safer than the hospital and has the most favorable outcomes for mother and baby. Yet, I realize 95-98% of women in the United States choose to give birth in the hospital, and I want nothing less than for these women to have the best labor and birth possible. To do so, I highly recommend educating yourself on standard hospital procedures and recognizing you always have the choice to limit or refuse any procedure regardless of what anybody may tell you. Listed below are the routine hospital interventions and their descriptions. These typically include electronic fetal monitoring, at least a heplock and likely an IV, pain relieving drugs such as the epidural, an episiotomy and often times doses of pitocin to speed up the laboring process.

To sum them up--

Electronic fetal monitoring (EFM) is a way to monitor your baby's heartrate and your contractions while you are in labor. A nurse will strap a belt around your waist, which is connected to a machine, and depending on the hospital, you are required to wear it for 10-20 minutes or more out of every hour. Prior to EFM, a nurse would monitor your baby using a stethoscope as needed, which enabled the woman to choose her laboring position, but as the obstetrician of my first childbirth told me, "Electronic fetal monitoring isn't proven to be necessary, but it is hospital procedure because we just don't have enough nurses to monitor everyone individually." It appears the use of EFM is due to convenience rather than necessity, and there is great proof linking this and other interventions to the incredibly high cesarean rate in the USA (29.1% in 2004 according to Medical News Today, Nov 2005).