Labour and delivery: a clinician's perspective on a biomechanics problem

Abstract

Predicting how and when a pregnant woman will deliver her fetus has always been a problem for the clinician, and, consequently, there has been little progress made in preventing poor outcomes from pregnancies that deliver too soon or too late. In the opinion of the author, a maternal–fetal medicine specialist, rethinking labour within a biomechanical framework and studying it like an engineering problem could be a promising approach to unlocking the mysteries of labour.