If your doctor or certified nurse midwife says your pregnancy is “low risk,” you can make a lot of choices about how you want your labor and delivery to go. This sheet tells you what some of those choices are. Talk with your health care staff about the ones you want to try.
Choices Available to You
- Wait for active labor to start before you go to the hospital (instead of coming in at the first signs of labor)
- Walk around the Labor and Delivery Unit or your hospital room
- Sit in a chair, squat, kneel, or sit on a birthing ball or birth stool
- Wait for a longer period of time before having staff break your water
- Intermittent fetal heart rate monitoring. If you choose this, your care team will monitor the baby’s heart rate at certain times, but not all the time. Note: If you or your baby start to show signs of distress, we may want to start monitoring your baby all the time
- Limited vaginal exams. During labor, your doctor will do an exam to see how your labor is coming along. You can ask for this to be done less often.
An ethnic woman is in the throes of childbirth. She is breathing heavily but looks confident and prepared for what is to come.
Different Pain Options
- Walk around the Labor and Delivery Unit or your hospital room
- Change your position wherever you are sitting or standing
- Dim the lights
- Use a heating pad or ice pack
- Use a Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) unit. The unit is connected to your skin with pads that send electrical pulses to your muscles creating a tingling sensation. This helps decrease the sensation of pain
- Take a shower
- Sit on a birthing ball
- Listen to music (you must bring your own music player and music)
- Use aromatherapy (you must bring your own, no candles, incense or anything that lights on fire)
Young pregnant woman in the hospital ward sitting on fitness ball and ready to delivery a baby.