While modern medical childbirth often involves to speeding up of labor through various methods, there is evidence that prolonged labor may have beneficial effects on the newborn. A recent study found that the umbilical cord blood of newborns whose mothers experienced a prolonged first stage of labor had higher levels of several important substances.
Some of the blood factors found to be more plentiful in the babies born after stressful deliveries were stem cells and granulocytes.
Granulocytes are certain types of white blood cells, including basophils, eosinophils, and neutrophils.
Stem cells are unspecialized cells that are capable of giving rise to differentiated cells.
Researchers note that umbilical cord blood can be used as an excellent source of stem cells, but that large variations in the quantities of such cells exist and they suggest that these variations may be due in part to specific circumstances during labor and delivery.
Researchers conclude that "Longer duration stress during delivery increased the numbers of nucleated cells, granulocytes, CD34+ cells, and hematopoietic progenitor cells, possibly by causing mobilization of various cell populations by endogenous cytokines. As long as umbilical cord blood harvesting does not interfere with the delivery, umbilical cord blood collected after stressful deliveries may provide optimal units for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation."
American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, November, 2000; 183: 1144-51 and Presented at the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, Miami Beach, Florida, January 31-February 5, 2000
It is amazing, but not surprising, that a natural process like labor provides benefit. In a vast majority of situations pertaining to health, it is much better to interfere with these natural processes as little as possible. Of course, some relatively modern practices such as C-sections are life saving in the small % of deliveries that truly require them, estimated by many to be around 5% or even less.
However, very often childbirth practices such as the use of pitocin or an epidural for pain relief are overused, and rather than being saved for instances of real medical necessity, they are often employed simply to make things easier fore the mother, physician, and hospital staff.
However, this study shows a distinct physiological benefit of prolonged labor. This means that labor augmentation with Pitocin could have a negative on the baby. The same holds true for having the water broken (amniotomy) which is also sometimes done to speed labor up.
In addition, to get the full benefit of the increased quantity of stem cells, it would be best to delay clamping the umbilical cord after birth, in order to allow as much of the cord blood to flow into the baby"s circulation.
According to British neonatal hematology experts "Losses of hemopoietic stem cells are reduced, vital for hematologic and immunologic constitution and for response to hemopoietic growth factors." (J Perinat Med 1995;23:139-43)
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