Categories: Labor and Birth

Reported in an article by KJ Dell'Antonia in the New York Times on April 2, "births during the last decade take longer than they did in the early 1960s — 2.6 hours longer for women having their first baby, and a little less than two hours longer for women who have given birth before."

"Scientists at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development compared the birth experiences of thousands of women who went into labor without complications from 1959 to 1966 with those of women from 2002 to 2008, and found that women in the latter group labored longer, and were more likely to have had medical interventions, like an epidural or a dose of oxytocin."  The researchers are unsure if interventions such as epidural anesthesia are responsible for the longer labors, or are other variables that were not examined in the study at play?  Are longer labors necessarily a bad thing? To read more, go to the story in "Motherlode" in the Times: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/why-are-women-spending-more-time-in-labor/?scp=1&sq=why%20is%20labor%20longer&st=cse or to the original article in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology entitled "Changes in Labor Patterns Over 50 Years, online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002937812002736?v=s5.