Healthy Birth Practice #2: Walk, Move Around, and Change Positions Throughout Labor

Abstract

Women who use upright positions and are mobile during labor have shorter labors, less intervention, fewer cesarean births, and report less severe pain, and describe more satisfaction with their childbirth experience than women in recumbent positions. The evidence for supporting physiologic childbearing for optimal birth fails to disrupt intervention intensive hospital practices that deny 60% of women mobility in labor despite calls by maternity care organizations to not restrict mobility for low risk women in spontaneous labor.