WHO revises childbirth guidelines

GENEVA (AFP) – The UN health agency said Thursday it has revised a benchmark used by health professionals worldwide in caring for women during childbirth because it has caused a surge in interventions like caesarean sections that could be unnecessary.

Since the 1950s, a woman progressing through labor at a rate slower than one centimeter of cervical dilation per hour has been considered “abnormal,” said Olufemi Oladapo, a medical officer with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) department of reproductive health.

When doctors and other care providers confront labor moving slower than that rate, “the tendency is to act”, either with a caesarean section or with the use of drugs like oxytocin that speed up labor, leading to the “increased medicalization” of childbirth, he said.

In new guidelines unveiled Thursday, the WHO called for the elimination of the one centimeter per hour benchmark.

“Recent research has shown that that line does not apply to all women and every birth is unique,” Oladapo told reporters in Geneva.

“The recommendation that we are making now is that that line should not be used to identify women at risk of adverse outcome,” he added.

The new WHO guidelines say that for a woman delivering her first child, any labor that does not extend beyond 12 hours should be considered normal.

For a subsequent pregnancy, the figure drops to less than 10 hours.