728x90
my iParenting
From Our Sponsors
e-newsletters
Sign up to receive our free weekly e-newsletters

new terms of use
new privacy policy
award-winning products
The iParenting Media Awards program helps parents find the best products for their families.
Home › Articles › Labor Preparation › Labor Patterns

Labor Patterns

Will Your Labor Be Like Your Mom's?

By Teri Brown

Pages:  1  2  3  

Is labor hereditary? This sounds like a lead into a joke rather than the topic of a recent iParenting chat, but many women take this question very seriously, especially if their mother or grandmother had a particularly hard labor or complications.

Shannon Boehmer, a media relations manager from Philadelphia, Pa., finds the question intriguing. "My mom, born in 1950, had two [breech] births in the '70s," she says. "In those days they actually let them go vaginally. Many years later my sister and I both also had [breech] babies. However, we opted to go C-section with ours. I never thought there was a connection, but am now thinking there may be."

Is There a Connection?
While experts disagree on whether the difficulty or ease of labor can be passed down from generation to generation, they are certainly open to the idea of it. Dr. John AL-Jamal, an OB/GYN at Caritas Norwood Hospital in Norwood, Mass., is one of those doctors.

"After reviewing the literature, there is no evidence-based medicine suggesting that there are some patterns of labor from mothers to daughters or familial occurrence of pre-eclampsia," Dr. AL-Jamal says. "Having said that, there are few reports that suggest a genetic influence on labor and pre-eclampsia. Detection of genes related to labor might lead to better pathophysiological understanding of parturition and the possibility of detecting mothers who will have difficulties during labor."

Dr. Susan Klugman, an assistant professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women's Health in the Division of Reproductive Genetics at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y., says that while it is more difficult to judge if normal labor patterns run in families, it is clear that preterm patterns can run in families.

"There are preterm labor patterns that can run in families," Dr. Klugman says. "It would be difficult to study normal labor patterns for several reasons. One, the estimated date of delivery is dependent on the patient's report of her last menstrual period. That is not always 100 percent accurate. In addition, how could you quantify minor differences in the normal range? Also, one patient's perception of a fast labor may be different from another patient's. That being said, clearly very fast labors, called precipitous labors (under four hours) may run in families."


Pages:  1  2  3  

Want to see more?

Comments

There are no comments for this article yet.Be the first to add a comment.

Post As:
Enter your comment below:
Title
Comment Text
CAPTCHA
Please note that any comments submitted become the property of Disney Family / iParenting and can be edited and posted at our discrection.