Comments on: “…Women With A BMI Higher Than 26 Tend To Have Cervixes That Won’t Dilate…”

By: Jessica

Jessica — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 14:21:02 +0000

Are you serious??? That’s stupid. I must be a freak then because at 255 lbs I birthed a 7 lb, 13 oz baby girl, at 265 lbs I birthed a 7 lb, 11 oz baby and again at 252 lbs a third baby 7 lb, 7.5 oz. Fatness has NOTHING to do with how well you can have a baby. Why can stupid people have a degree?

By: Mirage

Mirage — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:42:16 +0000

Oops. My cervix didn’t get the memo either. From a 4-6 to a 9 in less than half an hour. Isn’t it strange how women’s bodies aren’t all the same size and shape but somehow miraculously they usually know how to do the same things like dialating, urinating, sneezing…

By: cassandra

cassandra — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 15:32:31 +0000

Same here!!! i did the same thing with all three of my babies. and i was full term with them all. and one was a 10 lber. (im considered pretty overweight

By: Breanna

Breanna — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:59:36 +0000

That is a load of crap. I weight a LOT (I won’t say on the net, but my BMI is higher than 40) and I had a wonderful vbac.

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:19:10 +0000

Hu? How’d mine get out then? My BMI was around 35 with my two completely unmedicated births.

By: jespren

jespren — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:11:20 +0000

First, how skinny does a woman have to be to gain 20-30 lbs during pregnancy and still be BELOW bmi of 26??? Second, doing BMI via height/weight is the least accurate way of determining BMI/overweight, and I can’t imagine many OBs doing a hydrostatic test on a late term pregnant woman to check for BMI (only way to accurately determine fat amount vs muscle/blood/bone mass regardless of a person’s fitness level, most professional sports players are ‘obese’ by height/weight because muscle weighs more than fat). Not that a hydrostatic test would be fully accurate on a pregnant woman. Thirdly wouldn’t (logically) a larger woman who is more likely to have a larger baby than a skinny woman, as long as they were able to get out of bed and walk around, be MORE likely to dilate due to weight of baby on cervix? I’m ranting a bit, anytime BMI is used as a measurement of how fat, fit, or healthy someone is it drives me crazy!

By: Jane

Jane — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:42:59 +0000

I think it may be “Observation Bias” when a medical practitioner simply does not notice things that don’t enforce her preconceived notion and notices all the things that do.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:40:14 +0000

WTF!! *smacksforehead*

By: Jane

Jane — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:35:54 +0000

This is a mental trick, I can’t remember the name of it. But the CNM developed this opinion/prejudice against overweight women, and then whenever a woman in the practice is induced, she takes special note of the ones who are overweight and says to herself, “See? Overweight women don’t dilate.” Whereas when a skinny woman doesn’t go into labor naturally, she thinks, “Oh well, we’ll just induce.”

Jerome Groopman goes into this in his book How Doctors Think. I wish I could remember the term he uses.

Now, it’s entirely possible that some women are overweight because they’re couch potatoes, and women who are couch potatoes tend to have badly-positioned babies, and that might make dilation more difficult. But that would only be some of the women some of the time, and it would be the same for a skinny woman who lounged around in a bad position all day long.

I would ask the CNM for the reasoning behind this. Does subcutaneous fat block the cervix? Does it float around the blood stream absorbing oxytocin? What? And when she had no explanation, laugh and say, “That’s just prejudice. Why don’t you just keep a spread sheet for the next year on inductions versus BMI on postdates women, and see if that holds up.”

By: Abbie

Abbie — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:34:56 +0000

Interesting, because mine dilated in an hour and a half, without chemicals and as a first time mom!