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Labouring with food?
You are anticipating the hardest, most intensely physical event of your life. An event that will challenge you mind body and soul. An event where the energy you will be expending will be equivalent to running a full marathon. And then your midwife gives you the bad news. You are expected to achieve all this on an empty stomach because the hospital does not 'allow' labouring women to eat or drink.
If it sounds barbaric, it is. But don’t despair because throughout the country, attitudes to eating and drinking in labour are beginning to change.
Enforced fasting, the practice of routinely withholding food and drink from women during labour, is without scientific merit. Despite this, most hospitals still refuse women food and drink in labour - preferring instead to keep them artificially hydrated and maintain their blood sugar levels by using an intravenous drip of water and glucose (also known as dextrose).
There are several traditional reasons for a 'nil by mouth' policy in labour. Hospitals like to keep the birth environment as clean as possible. Some fear that if a woman eats during labour, she may vomit or have diarrhoea. OK, it’s not a very nice thought, but there is no scientific evidence that refusing women food prevents either of these problems.
The other reason is surprisingly controversial. Physicians argue that if a general anaesthetic is needed and a woman has been eating during labour, there is a risk that she might inhale her own vomit, resulting in respiratory problems and occasionally death. While this is a frightening scenario there is a growing body of evidence which shows that on the rare occasions when aspiration has occurred, (when the contents of the stomach are regurgitated and inhaled into the lungs) eating in labour has not been the cause of the problem. In most cases the cause has been improperly administered anaesthesia.
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