How Your Birth Experience Affects Your Postpartum Experience
Your birth experience affects so much more than just how and when your baby is born. Every procedure and intervention used during your labor, from medications used to start or augment your labor, to pain medication or anesthesia, to fetal monitoring, IVs, and even the position you're in when you push your baby out, can have an effect on how easily and comfortably you recover after your baby is born.
When making a birth plan, you should take into account not only how interventions and drugs can affect your baby and delivery, but also how they might make you feel postpartum. The following sections cover some common interventions and procedures used during labor, and how they might affect your recovery after giving birth.
Induction
When your labor is induced, it can increase the chances that you'll end up with a long, hard labor, and it makes it more likely that you'll need additional interventions like pain medication, epidural anesthesia, or even a cesarean section. Many care providers induce routinely, and not all have sound medical reasons for doing so.
Narcotic Pain Relief
Drugs like Demerol, Stadol, and Nubain can all cause you to feel spacy and out of it in your baby's first minutes, and can make nursing difficult. And once your baby is born, the drugs can take weeks to leave your system.
Epidurals
Epidurals can lead to a host of side effects, including severe headaches, fever, pain and itching at the site of the injection, uneven numbing, and occasionally, even more severe side effects like a sudden drop in blood pressure. Epidurals make it more likely that you'll have a forceps delivery, episiotomy, birth by c-section, and other interventions that can make recovery more difficult.
Antibiotics
The routine use of antibiotics during labor and birth isn't uncommon, but it can cause postpartum problems. You may have an allergic reaction to an antibiotic, which could mar your postpartum experience with side effects. Also, antibiotics can cause yeast infections by wiping out the healthy bacteria in your system that keep fungi in check. Nursing moms can also get yeast infections of the nipples, called thrush, which can be painful for both mom and baby.
Essential
If you know ahead of time that you'll have antibiotics during labor and birth, eat lots of yogurt containing live bacteria cultures or take acidophilus supplements, which you can find in your health-food store or pharmacy. This will help maintain the balance of microorganisms in your body and reduce your risk of yeast infection.
Make sure you know whether your care provider intends to give you antibiotics during your labor and birth, under what circumstances, and what alternatives you may have. You may have to do some research on your own to find out this information.
Fetal Monitoring
Constant external fetal monitoring can limit your movement or even keep you stuck in bed, which can make it more difficult to deal with contractions and respond to your baby's passage through your body, and can increase the chances that you'll have an epidural or other pain medication.
Internal fetal monitoring involves a care provider placing an electrode on your baby's scalp while he is still inside your uterus. Any time hands or objects are in your vagina during labor, you run a higher risk of developing an infection, which can make you very sick postpartum. There's also a risk of infection to your baby's scalp.
Alert
There's no scientific evidence that constant fetal monitoring creates better birth outcomes for low-risk mothers having normal pregnancies, but it may increase the chance of of having a c-section and other interventions. Ask if your provider and birthplace will consider placing you on the monitor only intermittently, or consider using a portable Doppler to check your baby's heartbeat instead of an electronic fetal monitor.
Also, care providers must rupture your bag of waters to place the electrodes on your baby's scalp, which further increases your risk of intervention and infection. Sometimes, however, accurate fetal monitoring will prevent an unnecessary c-section, and internal monitoring is much more reliable than external monitoring.
Forceps or Vacuum Extraction
Using forceps or vacuum extraction during your birth can damage your pelvic floor, cause tearing and trauma, and increase both your pain during and after birth and the amount of time it'll take you to heal postpartum.
Episiotomy
An episiotomy is an incision made through layers of tissue and muscle in the perineum. While an episiotomy is usually unnecessary, many care providers do them routinely. They are painful, can take longer to heal than natural tears, and can increase the risk of infection. Ask your health-care provider about his or her episiotomy rates, and how he or she will work with you to help you avoid episiotomies. Giving birth in an upright position, experiencing perineal massage or support while pushing, and pushing when you have the urge (as opposed to forced or “coached” pushing) can all help your baby emerge more easily without an episiotomy.
C-section
Deliveries by cesarean section can be lifesaving when used appropriately, but most experts agree that there are far too many c-sections performed in the United States. If you have your baby via c-section, you can plan on a longer, more painful recovery, increased risk of infection, and a host of other short- and long-term side effects.
If you hope to have a baby vaginally in the future, you'll want to do all you can to avoid an unnecessary c-section this time around. Because of rising malpractice rates and fears of litigation, it's becoming increasingly more difficult to find care providers and hospitals that will allow mothers with previous c-sections to deliver vaginally.
