In order to hypercontrol the birth, some practices have been introduced in recent years that at the time were believed to improve delivery care, but that undergoing studies do not prove to have significant advantages, and are also invasive for the mother and the baby.
This happens with the use of fetal electrocardiogram in childbirth, now called into question by a study published in the magazine The New England Journal of Medicine, in which they have analyzed the data of 11,000 pregnant women.
The fetal electrocardiogram (ECG)
Monitoring allows the baby's heart rate to be controlled by means of electrodes. There is an external monitoring, which is placed as a belt in the abdomen of the pregnant woman that can be removed and put on intermittently and controls two fundamental parameters: the baby's heartbeat and the mother's contractions, and an internal one, the fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) that It is placed at the time of delivery vaginally directly in the baby's head.
Internal monitoring is continuous and prevents the woman from moving freely at the time of delivery since there is a cable that connects the baby to the monitor.
For me it was, without a doubt, one of the most unpleasant practices in my births. It bothered me a lot to have to lie down during contractions with a cable coming out of "there." Not to mention what hurt me when they placed the electrode on my baby's head, which by the way was born with a small wound on her scalp, so it obviously also hurt when they were placed.
Is it any use?
In 2005, the FDA approved the use of STAN S31, a fetal electrocardiogram which analyzes the variations in the ST segment, which indicates the amount of time that elapses from the end of a contraction of the ventricles until the beginning of the rest period.
Any abnormality recorded in the monitoring would be associated with fetal distress and could indicate the need to speed up the delivery or perform a C-section.
But they considered that the results about their benefits were not entirely clear, so researchers from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Eunice Kennedy Shriver, belonging to the National Institutes of Health of the US, decided to conduct a study analyzing data from 11 A thousand pregnant women They divided them into two groups: those that had used monitoring with Stan31 and those that had been controlled only fetal heart rate readings.
Complications occurred during births, such as fetal death, seizures, need for artificial ventilation, acidosis or an Apgar test score of 3 or less. The results indicated that there were no significant differences between both groups. There were no more complications nor were there more caesarean sections with one or another system.
Continuous internal fetal monitoring is still widely used in most hospitals, as well as many practices that being reviewed again do not seem to offer advantages in the control of fetal well-being in risk-free births, while its routine use only achieves an increase in medicalization of the birth process.
