What’s best for Mom and Baby?
• Take good care of yourself to reduce the risk of complications or interventions. Healthy women tend to have healthy babies. To stay healthy throughout pregnancy, get early and consistent prenatal care, watch your weight, and don’t smoke or use drugs. Exercise will help keep excess weight off and get you ready for labor, which for many women (especially first timers) is a marathon, not a sprint.
• Don’t be quick to jump into an induction-if you and your baby are healthy, hang in there and let Mother Nature set the birth date. A recently published study of 41,000 births to first-time mothers found that more than half of the C-sections studied were due to inducing labor when it wasn’t medically necessary and admitting women to hospitals too early.