Women who worked up until their due date had four times the rate of c-sections as women who started their maternity leave at 35 weeks, a new study from UC Berkeley has found.
Now, I'm not sure how you can control for self-selection in that kind of study. I imagine that women starting their maternity leave early are both more likely to be placing a priority on their birth experience and better off financially, each of which could affect their outcomes. (I'm assuming they excluded people with scheduled c-sections from the study.)
On the other hand, the results were is four times as likely, not a titchy 10 to 15 percent or something. That, as Dr. Seuss might say, is a whopping number, and it makes me inclined to think there really is something going on here.
It's not really hard to imagine what either: On the one hand, there's the stress of trying to do your job with an open-ended question of whether you might have to leave at a moment's notice, trying to have things ready and yet still work, with bosses and people who are going to step into your shoes watching you anxiously. And other hand, there's the stress of trying to decide when/if you have to leave when contractions start, whether you're up for driving yourself home, when to call the family, and then changing gears in an instant from worker to woman-in-labor. Hardly optimal conditions.
I was lucky: Since I was leaving my job instead of taking maternity leave, it was easier for me to choose to set my last day at 35 weeks. And I have to say, since my daughter came early (37 weeks and 2 days), I'm extremely glad I did. Even though you never exactly feel prepared, having tied up loose ends, cleared out my desk and said my goodbyes and then taking those two weeks free of deadline pressure and office details to sleep/nest/prepare felt wonderful. It may be the closest thing to taking a complete vacation without traveling I've ever done. Can I prove that that helped with my fairly uncomplicated birth? Of course not, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I know how much of a luxury that sounds like to so many people. I sure as hell couldn't blithely skip five (or even two) weeks of work now. In general, it's hard enough to get maternity or paternity leave at all, and the UC Berkeley researchers, while advocating strongly that maternity leave
start earlier, note that people who choose to work up to their due date
(or up to their labor as the case often is) are usually doing so
because they can't afford maternity leave after the birth otherwise, and clearly that trumps.
I guess for now we can add the health advantages they've identified to the list of casualties of our work-over-family culture.
Image from Take Back Your Time.
More by this author:
