Cervical Length Mid-Pregnancy May Predict Caesarean Risk
By Danell Swim
March 27, 2008
The length of a woman’s cervix at mid-pregnancy may indicate her risk of needing a Caesarean birth, a new study suggests.”Women having their first baby who have a long cervix around 23 weeks of pregnancy are more likely to be delivered by emergency Caesarean section during labor at term,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Gordon Smith, head of obstetrics and gynecology at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, said in a prepared statement.
“The nature of this finding is not such that women should now have this measurement performed to predict Caesarean section risk,” he added. “The key issue in this analysis is understanding the processes that lead to normal and abnormal labor.”
Several experts said that doctors won’t be measuring your cervix halfway through your pregnancy to predict whether or not you’ll have a natural birth any time soon.
“If the cervix hasn’t prepped itself for labor, there’s something going on,” said Dr. Miriam Greene, an obstetrician at New York University Medical Center. “The idea that a longer cervix leads to a greater risk of Caesarean makes sense. The question is, if I start checking at 23 weeks and find a longer cervix, what then?”
Oh, I can hear it now… “My cervix wasn’t progressing 4 months before my due date, so we went ahead and scheduled the caesarean. Better to just schedule it than to go through all that pain and end up with one anyway” <giggle>
In all seriousness, I don’t believe that these emergency cesareans would be happening so often if the diagnosis of “failure to wait” weren’t handed out so often. Some women simply need more time, but drugging them (causing fetal distress) isn’t the answer.
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