Secrets to Shortening Your Labour (BEFORE it Begins!)

What can I say? Nothing motivates me to sit down and blog more than having my kids home for Springbreak 🤪 Interested in potentially shaving some time off your overall birth? There’s not shame in that, sister. Most of us are! Well, here are some proactive steps you can take, before your birth begins, to maybe, just maybe, make that happen!

Red Raspberry Leaf

When taken prenatally, red raspberry leaf has been shown to help strengthen and tone the uterus. It is most commonly consumed via capsule or tea - although capsule is said to be a more potent (read: effective) dosage. You might be thinking “A tea? To shorten my labour? “ Sounds weird, right? Not so weird when you consider that red raspberry leaf works as a uterine toner. In other words, it strengthens your uterus and subsequent contractions. And a strong uterus is an efficient uterus!

Dates

The research on dates to shorten labour is actually pretty impressive. Studies have found that those who ate 6 dates daily from 36 weeks had, pretty significantly, shorter labours than their non-date-eating counterparts. They also had a higher instance of spontaneous labour onset! If you’re like me and can’t stand the taste, you can mask the taste by blending them up in your daily smoothie!

Exercise

As a doula, I always get a little giddy when I work with a client who is committed to exercising both throughout her pregnancy and during the lead up to her birth. I have seen, first-hand, the benefits of women who maintained their fitness during pregnancy and how that positively impacted their births (highly recommend!). And studies have found that women who maintained regular antenatal exercise can shorten their labour by up to one hour. Plus, there are all the other residual benefits of maintaining your exercise program during pregnancy: less likely to be diagnosed with gestational diabetes, more physical comfort during pregnancy, healthy weight gain, better sleep during pregnancy; more stamina for labour, more likely to have a spontaneous onset of labour, less likely to need a cesarean, less likely to use pharmaceuticals - and all the other things that come along with those!

Your Little Passenger’s Position

It’s more than just head down, people. Some birth basics: part of the labour process involves the rotation of the baby to a position that is considered “optimal” for birth (your baby’s head is facing your back, their chin will be tucked). And to be fair, it is this position that nearly all babies end up in order to facilitate their subsequent birth. But… what if babe STARTS labour already in that optimal position? A-ha moment, right? Starting your labour with babe already in that optimal position will mean you don’t have to spend the time labouring while baby rotates. The end result is going to be a shorter, likely easier, labour. Read my post How to Help a Posterior Babe Rotate Before Birth Begins for tips and tricks to get your baby into an optimal position before your birth starts.

Chiro Adjustments

Spend any time reading any of my other birth prep posts and you will notice a recurring theme: regular chiropractic care is a must in the lead up to your delivery. Adjustments, with an experienced chiropractor licensed to work on pregnant bodies, will help with body balancing and creating room in the pelvis to help baby get into that good position pre-birth (if you’re still wondering why that matters, re-read the point above!). For the record, “regular” adjustments equates about 1-2 a week, if you can manage.

Pelvic Floor Therapy

By now you know how significant a role our pelvic floor plays in the birth process. Too tight a pelvic floor and we may baby may have trouble navigating it. So, if t’s a muscle we’re going to depend so heavily on during our births, we really need to A) be familiar with not only its role in the process, where exactly its located within our pelvis and how it functions from a biomechanical standpoint and B) we must be able to connect to it almost as if it’s second-nature. A Pelvic Floor therapist is going to check all these boxes!

Squatting

Ina May Gaskin once said: "squat 300 times a day and you're going to give birth quickly." And while I have questions (Why is 300 the magic number? Does it really have to be 300 squats a day? Where did she get that number from? What happens if it’s only 100 a day?) the fact is that, regardless of the specific number: doing a few sets daily can help lengthen and strengthening your pelvic floor, aligning and opening up your hips AND stretching tight muscles. Plus, there’s a good chance you’ll spend some of your labour in some form of a squat position so, some training beforehand means your muscles are less likely to seize up and fatigue.

Massage Therapy

Regular massage therapy with a registered massage therapist, licensed to work on pregnant bodies, will help promote muscle relaxation. You’ll reap the benefits of these sessions during labour as your body and muscles will be able to relax, and loosen, more quickly, in between labour sensations. Loose muscles means easier passage.

Actively Reduce Birth Anxiety

Stress, or anxiety, causes our adrenaline to spike. And in the birth process, adrenaline is not our friend. Is it because we’re mean people? No. It’s because adrenaline slows labour. Spend time intentionally shaping your mindset as your birth approaches. The easiest way to do this is to learn about birth so that it’s not new, scary territory when you find yourself in it.

Hire a Doula

It’s not even a bias, it’s SCIENCE! Research shows that having a doula attend your birth shaves off, on average, 40 minutes from your birth. You might not think 40 minutes is anything to write home about but, hey, when you're in labour, every minute counts!

There you have it. 10 easy steps that can help you shorten your labour. Before signing off, one last thing I want to do is to encourage you to approach the potential length of your labour with a realistic mindset. The reality is, for the large majority of us, especially first-time birthers, birth is long. While these steps are shown to help reduce some of the time we spend in the labour process, we are not talking about shaving days or hours off of our birth. My suggestion? When your labour starts, approach it as you’re playing a “long game.” Try to refrain from putting any expectations on how long you’ll be “here” for. If anything, assume it will be several days and if it’s less than that - whoop, whoop, bonus!

Elective Induction: Things Worth Considering

Once we hit the end of our pregnancies, the thought of being able to be done is an attractive one. We’re swollen. Heavy. Tired. Ready to turn the page and transition into the next phase of our life - with the company of the sweet little baby we’ve been patiently waiting for for the last X number of months (maybe even years!). So, yeah, if you’re thinking about elective induction to gently nudge that process along, you aren’t alone. 1 in 5 births in Canada receive a little “help” via medical induction. My goal, here, isn’t to sway you one way or another. It’s to hopefully provide a foundation of knowledge regarding elective inductions so that you don’t have to look back at your experience and say “I wish I had known.” Keep in mind, there is a lot more information to be learned about induction besides what you read here. The pieces here are just drops in a large bucket. Don’t start and stop here, birth boss. Keep reading. Keep learning. Keep asking questions. With that aside, here are some things worth considering about elective induction.

It’s Not a Quick Fix

Just because you’re being induced, doesn’t mean your labour will be fast. Your cervix has the ultimate say in how the induction process will start for you. Your cervix needs to be "favourable" (ie. has started to thin + efface) before you can receive Pitocin, a synthetic form of the hormone oxytocin, that brings on contractions.

If it hasn't already, prompting your cervix to start thinning + effacing via cervical ripening agent will be the first order of biz. Depending on your cervix, this cervical ripening stage can take a few doses - which can translate over the course of two or three days. We all know how important a strong mental state is for birth. Would two or three "attempts" to induce work against your mental game? Will it psyche you out? Will it frustrate you? Will it introduce self-doubt in your body’s capabilities? Will the process exhaust you before you've even started labour? All things worth considering.

No Hormonal Benefits

It’s important to understand that, despite the terms sometimes being used interchangeably, there’s a big difference Pitocin and oxytocin. In the most basic context, oxytocin is a naturally-occurring hormone (“the love hormone”) that is responsible for bringing on and maintaining the uterine contractions we experience during birth. Pitocin is a synthetic form of oxytocin. That means it’s function is to stimulate uterine contractions but there’s a very important piece of the chain missing: birthers don't reap any of the hormonal benefits we experience from the oxytocin we experience with physiologic birth as Pitocin doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier.

Without the hormonal component that helps us cope with contractions (as found with naturally-occurring oxytocin), Pitocin contractions can feel more intense. We may have a harder time managing. This likely explains why birthers undergoing induction are more likely to receive an epidural (although, by no means, is it impossible to birth without an epidural via induction).

Breastfeeding

There’s also another important facet that might be affected by the lack of oxytocin we experience when going the induction route: breastfeeding. Oxytocin plays a major role in breastfeeding and, without it, birthers who have been induced are more likely to experience initial breastfeeding challenges and should be prepared to seek the advice and support of a qualified lactation consultant.

Continuous Fetal Monitoring

The reality is, as soon as that Pitocin starts dripping through your IV, your birth becomes much more medical and managed, in order to monitor the well-being of you and your baby. Continuous Fetal Monitoring is one of the measures that goes hand-in-hand with medical induction. Depending on your care facility, you’ll have two disks strapped to your upper and lower abdomen so that your care team can monitor your baby’s heartbeat as well as the contractions. If movement during labour is important to you, this will be a noticeable shift in your care as you will be, more or less, relegated to your hospital bed in order to prevent the monitoring disks from shifting.

Increased Chance of Baby Distress

There’s an increased chance of baby going into distress, or not managing contractions well, with an induction. Why, we can’t say for sure but it’s suspected that it’s a response to the fact that contractions brought on with Pitocin can be stronger, happen more frequently, and potentially last longer than natural contractions. Obviously, this is a chain reaction because, once baby is showing signs of distress, care providers start looking to alternative measures - which leads me to my next point.

Increased Chance of Further Interventions

Commonly referred to as the “cascade of interventions,” meaning the introduction of one intervention (in this case, induction) is the just the starting point for more to follow as a response to the challenges caused by the initial intervention. In the case of induction, the interventions you’re more likely to experience are: epidural, medically-assisted delivery (forceps or vacuum) and c-section.

Ulterior Motives

If you care provider makes an offer, or suggestion, of inducing you not due to medical reasons, it’s time to put on your thinking cap and think critically. Is there a weekend coming up? Could your care provider not wanting to be on call for an upcoming holiday be the real reason behind their offer? This is a really good time to sit back, do some research and decide if an induction is truly in your best interest… or someone else’s.

The Due Date Issue

Your due date is not an exact science. It’s an educated guess, at best. What do I mean by this? I mean, your care provider might be making a decision based purely on your timeline… a timeline that is, more likely than not, inaccurate and not a true reflection of how far along you are. If that timeline is off, your baby may be born too early and miss out on the benefits of remaining in utero.

Convenience Factor

With that said - what if the convenience pendulum swings in your favour? Maybe an induction is an attractive option for you because you have a partner who works out of town and may potentially miss the birth of your baby unless it’s scheduled. Maybe you have an older child and the thought of having to leave him/her at a moment’s notice in the middle of the night to go to the hospital is causing you a significant amount of stress. Maybe you live far away from your hospital or birthing centre and being able to control when your labour starts relieves you of the building anxiety about “making it in tiime.” Or, y’know what, maybe you’re just done being pregnant and the thought of being pregnant, even for one more week, is enough to send you into panic mode. All of these scenarios are legitimate and make sense. If you weigh them against the potential “cons” and feel the benefit outweighs them? Then it sounds like you have your decision.

Takeaways

• There are true, health reasons that may necessitate a medical induction. This post focuses only on elective inductions - inductions performed for non-medical reasons.

• The World Health Organization currently recommends avoiding elective inductions until 41 weeks gestation. This is a bit of discrepancy with current common practice typically seeing the idea of induction introduced by care providers at around the 39 week mark.

• Be prepared for this conversation. Expect that your care provider will broach induction with you, at some point. Don’t feel like you need to make a decision immediately when offered. Tell your care provider you will think about it - leave their office and return to your space before discussing it with your partner (if applicable) any further. Let this conversation unfold without curious ears, in the safety net of being on your own territory without any immediate pressures to make a decision. Do your research. Learn about the induction process and what it looks like. Familiarize yourself with the pros and cons. Be objective. You can always, always refuse an offer of elective induction