07/02/2022
Right before your baby is born, your body gives you a rush of adrenaline, to boost you through the last pushes and make you nice and alert to meet your baby.
Hooray! You did it! You have your baby in your arms and you are basking in the GLORIOUS glow of what you have achieved, gazing down at your new human. Your body is flooded with oxytocin and you are experiencing one of life's most enormous natural highs.
Your adrenaline naturally begins to fall, and oxytocin takes over again to fill you with love and solidify the bond between you and your baby.
BUT
If you feel
- interrupted (people wanting to take a look at any tears, people wanting to check the baby, people wanting to hurry along the delivery of your placenta)
- or disturbed (new people entering the room, the lights being switched on, people talking loudly)
- or hurried (people clock watching the delivery of your placenta)
your adrenaline will remain high, which inhibits the flow of oxytocin. Hopefully you already know that oxytocin helps your uterus to contract while you're in labour. This first helps to thin and dilate your cervix, then helps to push your baby out.
But THEN helps to expel your placenta and shrink your uterus down to stop any bleeding.
Yes, sometimes synthetic oxytocin and active management of the third stage can be necessary. But confusingly, sometimes it can also cause the problems it's trying to solve, much like other birth interventions, by increasing the flow of adrenaline and inhibiting the flow of oxytocin.
So my advice:
Leave well enough alone! All the things that maximise oxytocin during the first and second stages (calm, quiet, dark, loving environment) also work wonders during the third stage, with the added amazing boost of being skin to skin with your baby and hopefully feeding them too.
During the third stage, you are STILL IN LABOUR, so tell your birth attendants to leave well enough alone and let you finish in peace 🙏❤️
