birthing plan
Special Delivery making hard labor easier
M
y babies were born at home, without medication. My sister had a Cesarean. We became mothers at the turn of the millennium, when one out of four infants in Fairfield and Litchfield counties entered the world surgically. The national C-section rate was below five percent when we were born in the 1960s. Although natural childbirth was popular back then, our Mom received Demerol for pain and laughing gas when our heads crowned. What’s it like to have a baby today? How popular are medications? Are women using any new techniques to avoid drugs but still be relatively comfortable? About a third of 2010 births in Fairfield and Litchfield counties were Cesareans, according to the latest statistics from the Connecticut Department of Public Health. Between 2000 and 2010, the lowest average Cesarean rates were at Danbury Hospital (25 percent) and St. Vincent’s Medical
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healthylife
by laurie lynn fischer
Center (26.6 percent). The highest rates were at Stamford (36.6 percent) and Bridgeport (35.2 percent) hospitals. In between were Greenwich (34 percent), Norwalk (31.2 percent) and New Milford (32.7 percent) hospitals. Bear in mind that some facilities handle more high-risk births than others, notes the health department. The “ultimate pain relief” available for women in labor is the epidural — an analgesic administered through a catheter in the lower back — says William Cusick, who chairs the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at St. Vincent’s Medical Center, home of the only in-hospital midwifery unit in Fairfield County. Between 80 and 90 percent of women at St. Vincent’s have epidurals, he says. “Those numbers are pretty representative of most women in hospitals around here,” Cusick says. “It would be a little unusual to have women not laboring with it.” Spinal blocks — injections that numb the lower body for