My Overall Hypnobabies Student's Statistics

This is the first of 4 posts.  Each birth is unique and I don’t think of my students as numbers by any means.  But I am also fascinated by numbers, so I enjoy doing my stats each year.  I am going to post my overall Doula and then Hypnobabies Students Stats.  Then I will also post my stats for doula clients and Hypnobabies Students for 2009.

This post is for all my Hypnobabies Students (some of my doula clients do the home study and I do not count them in these statistics)

Cesarean Rate: 18%  (If I take out my 2 VBAC moms who didn’t even get a chance to try and my mom that had a surprise breech baby and was forced to have a cesarean then it is 13%)  Way better than the national average of over 30%.  The power of education.  🙂

The rest of the statistics don’t include the cesarean moms.

So of the moms who had vaginal births looking at epidural/un-medicated:

80%  un-medicated

20%  epidurals

So of the moms who had vaginal births with NO Pitocin looking at epidural/un-medicated:

96%  un-medicated

4% medicated (1 mom whose baby was born 20 min later.  She said if she had a doula she wouldn’t have asked for epidural)

Stats of vaginal birth moms regarding comfort:

50%  completely comfortable

25%  some manageable discomfort

25% had discomfort during active birthing time

Moms with no pitocin comfort level:

53% completely comfortable

29%  some manageable discomfort

18%  had discomfort during active birthing time

What can we learn from this?

Hypnobabies works! 75% mostly comfortable births and 82% of moms with no pitocin were mostly comfortable.

The moms who had discomfort had a reason; posterior baby, malpositioned baby, SPD or pitocin.

If a mom wants to have an un-medicated birth, Hypnobabies is a great class to take.  It gives you a lot of tools to help moms birth without medication.

The education moms get about normal birth and the pros and cons of intervention helps them to make positive choices.  The relaxation and hypnosis tools helps them to stay comfortable and reprogam their minds about birth.  These things together help moms avoid cesareans, unless they are truly medically needed!  These things also help moms stay comfortable during their birth and give them tools to manage any discomfort they do have.

Also, when possible let your birthing time begin on its own.  If you choose to be induced, know you can still do it un-medicated!  I have seen it done!  🙂

4 moms who had comfortable births did have pitocin.  They really were active in monitoring how quickly the nurse turned the pitocin up.  Slower is better.  The nurses like to turn it up every 20 minutes.  This isn’t a race to see how quickly we can force the baby out.