Kathy Fray is an award-winning best-selling parenting author, passionate promoter of mothers-to-be accessing empowering maternity education, holistically-minded Midwife, and thought-leader of Integrative Maternity Healthcare information.
Hi everybody! It's Kathy Fray here from MotherWise and what I want to explain to you today in this webinar podcast, it's basically a little overview of understanding the four stages of childbirth and the three phases of labor. You'll often hear midwives talk about labor and birth because they're kind of two separate parts. The labor is when the cervix is dilating. That's when the bottom of the womb is opening up and then once the woman is fully dilated and that birth canal is basically formed, then she begins the birth and the pushing phase. That's why it's called labor and birth, but there are really four stages, to be more precise.
The first stage is labor. That's the shortening and opening of the cervix. The second stage is birth. That's the pushing phase and then the third stage is the afterbirth which is the placenta and the fourth stage, is well the most amazing magical vibe that is going on in that first hour or two after a baby is born. It's an amazing incredible moment within the atmosphere of the
room if you can imagine that. It's like a bubble and if you burst the bubble it's gone. It's a time that needs to be very preciously respected and looked after so that there's not too much texting and phoning and noise and commotion. Often when a baby's born, everyone's like yay let's tell the world, but I would recommend that you just hold off a little bit. Just give yourself that first couple of hours to really enjoy the moment. Plus you've still got the placenta to come. There's still perhaps some perinatal suturing. We still need to get that baby latched on and the baby needs to be weighed.
Of course, the first thing everybody always asks is, "oh, what does it weigh?", well we don't know. The baby's having skin-to-skin on mother. It's only just been born so give yourself a couple of hours. Tell those people that you really want to tell, but feel like you could hold off on telling the whole world as well. You know you don't have to get in there straightaway.
The labor is such which is the opening and the dilating of the cervix that has three phases to it. They are the latent phase, the active phase, and the advanced active or transitional phase. Now the latent phase can go on, who knows how long for. Typically a couple of overnights would be absolutely normal. The first overnight of latent labor might be something like a ten or twenty-second contraction every eight minutes, something like that. It's not that strong. It's just starting to soften and ripen. The cervix is starting to shorten a little bit, and sometimes a woman can still sleep through some of it. Labor is a very nocturnal activity that's when your hormones go higher at night. Then in the morning as that sun comes up then the contractions go down and then the next day you tend to be just sleeping like a cat all day, snoozing away while you're not having contractions.
Then that second night you'll rock on into some more latent labor contractions. That's absolutely normal. Just as it should be and often on that second night it is harder to sleep. You've still not established strong active labor which is defined as having three to four contractions every 10 minutes all over a moment longer that you can't talk through. You're not doing that yet. You might be having 30, 40, 50-second contractions that are taking your breath away a little bit. You have to sort of focus I would say on those. They might be every four, five, six, seven minutes. Once you have had one or two hours of three to four contractions every ten minutes all over a minute long that you can't talk through. Once you've done that then you're generally established into active labor and by that stage, you're usually around four centimeters or so at the beginning and then the advanced active stage of the labor is that last centimeter or two of dilation when you go into what we call the transitional time which is a really ferocious time of contractions. They're just rolling on top of each other. 90 seconds long, four contractions every minute, every 10 minutes or so it may be even five contractions just piling on top of you, and that's a really really tough time. Really tough time of labor, but this we get you through that.
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