Inducing birth doesn’t mean a C-section must follow, analysis finds

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With more pregnant women choosing to induce the birth of their child, researchers decided to analyze whether the practice actually does lead to more delivery complications and, thus, increased costs. Many suspected this to be the case. Many appear to have been wrong.

Researchers at UC San Francisco and Stanford University took issue with the comparison of earlier studies -- induced-labor deliveries and spontanteous-labor deliveries of the same gestational age. They said it ignored the true decision that must be made by women and their doctors -- whether to induce or whether to wait.

So in reviewing various studies in which women chose to have labor induced, the researchers focused much of their attention on women in late pregnancy, when the risks of staying pregnant increase.

It’s important to point out that most of those women were about one week past their due date; results vary for those women induced before 41 weeks.

They wrote: ‘We found that overall elective induction of labor as compared with expectant management of the pregnancy was associated with an approximately 20% reduction in the rate of cesarean delivery and a 50% reduction in the presence of meconium in the amniotic fluid.’

The study was published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Here’s the Stanford press release (which helpfully translates ‘expectantly managed’ as ‘waiting’), complete with one of the authors discussing the findings.

And here’s more from Medline Plus on meconium (early feces) and what can happen if it gets into the amniotic fluid and then the baby’s lungs, a condition called meconium aspiration.

-- Tami Dennis