Midwife Melody Morrow, a well known midwife and Spinning Babies enthusiast in Dallas, Texas shares the story of her own sister Harmony’s breech experience. An ECV was attempted by a trusted and breech-skilled doctor. The baby remained breech. In this case, Melody’s little nephew’s arm got up behind his head. The doctor, skilled in vaginal breech birth, saw the risk of this arm getting stuck on the pelvic brim at the inlet.
So, Spinning Babies® Aware Practitioner, Kristin Hosaka, DC, went to work with Harmony for structural alignment and body balancing. Kristin took our Professional Bodywork Education Workshop in July 2018 and became a Spinning Babies Aware Practitioner. She is a well-known chiropractor in the Dallas area for pregnant parents and new babies. She’s taken several Spinning Babies Workshops and is an active member of our Spinning Babies Community as well as the Dallas birth scene. Dr. Kristin noted the x-ray and using her advanced skills was able to gently do specific bodywork techniques to allow baby to move his own arm forward to his chest. No manipulation is necessary with this approach, but we believe this approach before a manual external cephalic version may reduce compound presentations and increase ECV success.
Soon, labor began on its own.
Everything was going well as labor established. Harmony and her husband arrived at the hospital and their doctor was still on his way. Melody had just arrived to give Auntie support boosted with her midwifery skills. Suddenly the heart rate dropped. A cesarean was done quickly and baby was born with good Apgars. While many emergency cesareans doesn’t actually reveal a reason for a period of low heart rate, this time, the cause was suspected to be the umbilical cord, not wrapped but piled around the feet. Close monitoring of breech babies, as all positions, is important to catch issues like cord compression. (Some of the neurological vulnerabilities which exist for 9-11% of breech babies may not appear in electronic fetal monitoring strips.)
Benefits of beginning labor may be the higher catecholamine levels (stress hormones) that babies use to prepare for breathing air. Challenges of finishing labor with a sudden cesarean are a lack of fetal preparation with a rise in stress hormones, and the parents acceptance of unexpected changes in birth method. The informed consent process addresses the chance of finishing the breech labor with a cesarean, but actually having a cesarean can still be a change. Parents and baby were healthy and proud. The collaboration of midwife, doctor and chiropractor all worked together for the best possible outcome. And in this case, cesarean was the best outcome.
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