Pregnant women dream of the perfect delivery: a short labor, little pain, a few pushes and then a beautiful baby to hold. It's difficult to think of something going wrong during labor, but sometimes physicians need to use an instrument to aid delivery.

For four hours Susan Denning of Portland, Ore., labored to push out her baby. "At that point, my midwife decided to try forceps," she says. "She summoned a doctor to use the forceps because midwives can't do that." After a successful forceps delivery, Denning was thrilled to finally hold her son. "You hear a lot of scary stories about forceps but this was really no big deal."

What can a woman expect when an experienced physician uses forceps, a tong-like instrument, to deliver her baby? "Before forceps are applied, the obstetrician carefully assesses the position and station of the baby's head," says Dr. Kathleen Bowling, an obstetrician/gynecologist associated with Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, R.I. "After anesthesia has been given and the mother's bladder has been emptied, forceps are applied around the baby's head. Gentle traction is used during contractions with the help of the mother's pushing efforts to deliver the baby."

Doctors use forceps to speed up delivery in cases of fetal distress or maternal exhaustion and to avoid C-sections. "I was overmedicated and so out of it I couldn't possibly push," says Tina Warren of Tennessee. "The nurses pushed on my tummy and the doctor ultimately had to use forceps to deliver my baby." Warren didn't experience any negative side effects, and she wasn't more uncomfortable after the forceps delivery than when she delivered her second child without forceps.

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