I'm thinking that as long as everything progresses smoothly to me, I won't bother. With both my first there was a drop in heartrate during my pushing contractions. I feel like this is a normal occurance, although my second did have the cord around her neck once loosley.
I felt disturbed during both births when my birth attendants told me to hurry and push out the baby because of the heartrate.
A drop in the heartrate during pushing *is* a normal occurance. But it is the "standard of care" for midwives to monitor and interfer if "needed". Some will down right feel they have saved a babies life if they hear a drop and force the mom to push the baby out really fast.
If I were having a long or difficult labor, I might check once or twice to make sure baby is handling it well. I will follow my intuition. I doubt my intuition will have me checking it every 10 minutes during pushing. My midwife hardly checked it at all in my 36 hour labor.
i don't plan on monitoring it. if something 'feels' wrong, then i'll need to figure something out. but if everything is going along fine and normally, i'm not worried about it.
I won't monitor it. My personal opinion is that I have no experience doing it so I really don't even know what I would be looking for. Is there a heartbeat is obvious. But how low is *too* low and for how long, etc. I think it would cause me more worry and fear than anything trying to decipher what I am hearing. Besides, all 3 of my kids have kicked viciously during labor! I had no problem knowing they were alive without a monitor strapped to me!
I'm not going to monitor mine. My first baby's heartbeat never wavered a single beat- and I had TONS of drugs and pushed for almost three hours with him! They let me push and push because his heartbeat was so steady. The cord was around his neck once, and wrapped around him all over the place, but he was pink and wide awake and perfect! It is not only my wish, but my sincere intuition that this next baby will come much faster and much easier than my first.
I don't think I will be monitoring it either...
that being said, I might listen in just to hear that sound through my belly one last time... since it something that I love hearing...
We did not monitor for FHT during pregnancy or labor. Kick counts were enough beforehand, and once I was in labor, since there were so few distractions I could tell for myself that the baby was responding well to the labor (properly reactive). Before, I was always too tuned into external markers (such as the MW doing FHT) that I failed to tune into what my body and baby were already telling me.
No plans to, honestly. I can't find a single reliable source on what is "normal" for the baby's heartbeat during labor. Many MWs/UCers believe that decels are normal (at least to a point) during pushing and ctx- while I can't begin to count the number of women I've encountered who "had" to have a C-section because of decels. Is it normal? Is it an emergency? If its normal- what range is normal?
I'm not going to have sophisticated machines on hand anyhow- just a fetoscope if anything and its not accurate enough to bother, IMO. I'd rather assume that things are fine then worry about checking in every few minutes. Heart's been fine for the last 6+ months, I'll assume it will be fine outside the womb too, and not stress myself out over whats going on as baby transitions from womb to world
I have real concerns about the reliability of heart beat counts. We count for 15 seconds or 30 and X by 4 or 2. 32X4 and 34X4 are very different FHTs, but look at how easy it would be to miscount!
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