45% of births in the US are now induced, but evidence supporting this intervention is severely lacking. Case controlled studies show no benefit to inducing for postdates. Routinely inducing for postdates is based on 3 uncontrolled, retrospective studies showing 1/1000 less stillbirths while ignoring possible increases in brain damage to newborns as a result of induction.
It's hard to compete with 20 billion years of evolutionary selection, but the current medical management of the birth of the fetus and the placenta attempts to do just that, albeit rather unsuccessfully. For eons, all animals including humans passed on genes and habits that ensured delivering a live healthy newborn without bleeding excessively or dying of postpartum hemorrhage at birth
Today research wrongly considers hospital birth as the gold standard. Bias towards hospital births causes the majority of researchers to ignore the fact that women could achieve even better outcomes than hospital birth, at planned attended homebirth.
A new study linking birth induction to autism is rippling through the mainstream press, but something vitally important is being lost in the translation; namely, the need to return to natural, ancient birth practices, whenever possible.
A new study in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Gynaecology confirms what many who have undergone a hospital birth already know: the use of the labor-inducing drug pitocin (synthetic oxytocin) leads to great pain and suffering, including serious adverse, unintended health effects to both mother and infant.
Whether she is aware of it or not, the woman decides when, where and how to give birth. Our bodies are under our control whether we have accessed the keys to that control or not. Extreme control has been demonstrated by highly trained martial arts experts who can prevent themselves from ovulating. Mothers at term have put themselves into labor by simply walking up a steep hill for an hour to start contractions.
