At Carle Foundation Hospital, taking a new birthing technique for a spin
Oct. 3—URBANA — For Madison Walsh, being in labor with her first child in July came with a lot of turns.
"The nurse would come in and turn me every hour," she recalled.
The repositioning of her body during labor was part of a technique called Spinning Babies now in use by labor and delivery nurses at Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana.
Spinning Babies — which offers a prenatal component and involves position changes and stretching for the mom during labor — is aimed at helping the baby navigate the pelvis better to be in the best position for birth, and ideally, at shortening labor.
Most of the hospital's labor and delivery nurses — 85 percent — have now been trained in Spinning Babies, and it's become part of the birthing process there, according to Carle OB/GYN Dr. Jeremy Johnson, medical director for women's health services.
In his 27th year of delivering babies, Johnson recalled wondering how Spinning Babies could work upon first learning about it. After having observed the stretching and maneuvering involved, he said he's impressed.
"It's something so simple," he said.
Walsh, a nurse supervisor in pediatrics at Carle, said her first child, Rory, was born at the hospital on July 4 at 9 pounds, 2 ounces, and her labor took 12 hours.
As part of the Spinning Babies process, she said, a nurse placed a positioning ball between her legs to help open her hips and at one point was stretching her legs as they hung off the bed.
"I had minimal pain afterward," she recalled. "I was up and walking within two hours and really only needed Tylenol and ibuprofen to keep myself comfortable afterward."
While Spinning Babies is new at Carle, it's been around since 2001 and was developed by Minneapolis midwife Gail Tully.
A baby descends through the mother's pelvis by turning to fit each curve, and "if fetal rotation can be made easier, birth is easier for everyone," according to Spinning Babies' own description of the technique.
A lot of the positions in which the those delivering the baby are placed are intended to stretch out the pelvis to help widen the area the baby passes through, Johnson said.
As an increasing number of babies are born at the hospital with this technique in use, Carle will be looking at the lengths of labor and pushing and ultimately the rate of cesarean section births, Johnson said.
Vaginal births are preferred when possible, because it means a quicker recovery for both mother and child, he said.
Not all C-section births can be avoided, though.
"There are certain pelvic types that, regardless of what we do, are just not amenable to vaginal birth," Johnson said.
Carle labor and delivery nurses were trained at the Urbana campus by a Spinning Babies instructor. The training was made possible by a grant from Women's Legacy Circle.
