Archive for the ‘Baby’ Category
Forceps
Forceps deliveries are carried out after the first stage, when the cervix is fully dilated. Forceps are used if for some reason the baby’s head is not coming down the birth canal or if the baby is in distress and needs to be born rapidly. Premature babies may be delivered by forceps to spare their heads from being too compressed as they come through the birth canal. Forceps are also usually used to protect the baby’s head in a breech birth.
If your baby needs a forceps delivery, you will be asked to lie on your back and your legs will be put into stirrups. You will receive a local anesthetic. An episiotomy will be done to increase the vaginal opening. Forceps will be gently inserted around the baby’s head. Gentle pulling helps the head out. Once the head is born, the rest of the delivery occurs normally. If the baby’s head faces the wrong way, forceps may be used to rotate the baby’s head to help delivery.
Forceps deliveries are very safe and there is little chance of the baby being harmed in any way, although most will have marks on the head from the forceps for a few days after the birth. Forceps deliveries occur more often after a protracted labor where the mother becomes exhausted, where she has had an epidural and cannot feel to push with each contraction or where the baby’s head is large or in the wrong position.
Sometimes a vacuum extractor, also called a ventouse, is used instead of forceps. This is a cup placed on the baby’s head that is operated by a vacuum pump. It can be inserted before the cervix is fully dilated and is used, in conjunction with the mother’s pushing, to deliver the baby. A small circular mark where the cup was placed shows on the baby’s head for a few days after the delivery.
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New Roles for Fathers
Family life has undergone many changes in the recent decades, and the responsibilities assigned specifically to one or the other to a pair of parents have shifted and become somewhat blurred. There are more single parents today and more never married parents. Many of them shoulder total responsibility for their families. When both parents work outside the home, they learn to share responsibilities for housework and child care as they share the responsibilities of breadwinning. Nearly one million men in the United States are raising their alone. It is no longer cause for eyebrows to be raised and gossips to gather when a divorced father is awarded sole custody of his children. And joint-custody provisions in divorce-described as "equal opportunity in parenting"-have now been adopted by a majority of states. Some men take on the role of househusband, assuming the major part of the nurturing of the children, while their wife’s careers provide financial support.
Still, the traditional nuclear family survives, and in many homes the familiar structure of mother as full-time homemaker and the father as financial provider continues. It used to be customary for the at-home mother to be almost entirely in charge of the house and the children. Today, however, we find fathers taking more interest, helping more often with household chores, and involving themselves more fully in the lives of their children than their father did. They are no longer strict and unapproachable beings who are seen by the children only foe a few minutes a day and demand peace and quiet when they are home. Their relationship with their children is personal and openly loving; they talk about feelings, they show that they care.
There are also more public indications today that men no longer measure their worth only by their achievements outside their homes, as their fathers did before them. Both child care literature and advertising now direct information to "parents" instead of only to mothers; childbirth education classes require the participation of fathers. Parental leave of absence, extended to males in Sweden in 1979, is becoming more common among companies in this country, and federal legislation may soon guarantee men as well as women eighteen weeks of unpaid parental leave from their jobs in any two year period, offering protection for both the employees’ jobs and their benefits during their absences.
Men usually are not able to choose between their children and their work, as some women can, and many have not had the role model of a nurturing father to emulate. However, a father today is apt to involve himself as much as he possibly can from the very beginning of his wife’s pregnancy, sharing the important decisions about the doctor she will see, the birthing environment, and the hospital of which the baby will be born. He may accompany his wife on some of her visits to obstetrician. He participates in childbirth classes, in which he learns to coach his wife during the birth of their child, and then supports and aids her throughout her labor and delivery. Various studies have indicated that delivery times are shorter, anesthetics are used less frequently, mothers and babies are calmer, and infant’s feeding problems are less likely when fathers are present in delivery rooms. After their babies are born, fathers often accompany their wives on visits to the pediatrician, if their work hours allow, and some take their babies for checkups alone.
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