The Second Stage of Labor

The second stage of labor begins when the mother had dilated completely, which is ten centimeters, and finishes when the baby is finally born. This can be considered the expulsive stage and it generally takes around an hour if it is the mother’s first delivery and around thirty and forty minutes in the next deliveries.

Pushing the Placenta Out
This can be considered the third stage from the moment of the birth of the baby and it occurs when the placenta needs to be expelled – it generally does not last more than twenty minutes in all deliveries.

Dealing With Pain in The Delivery
During the first stage of labor, the pain is usually caused by the contractions of the uterus and dilating of the cervix. At the beginning the pain it causes might seem like menstrual cramps. However, in the second stage of labor, as the baby descends and the birth canal stretches, it causes a different type of pain, and there is often times the sensation of a great amount of pressure over the lower pelvis or the rectum.

Most doctors know that, even for women that have prepared for their delivery, it is inherently painful. The amount of pain – and the disposition and capacity to tolerate it – varies from woman to woman. Some women prefer to manage it by using breathing exercises and different distraction techniques they may have learned in their pre delivery classes, while there are other women that prefer medication.

Don’t by any means feel like you are not doing your job as a perfect mother or that your pregnancy is not “natural” if you need medication to alleviate the pain involved in labor. As everyone knows, all of us as humans react differently to pain, both emotionally as physiologically, so if your mother or best friend has not had to use medication in their deliveries, this by does not mean that you are “weak” if you decide to get some help with medication. Remember that there are some women that do not breath correctly when they feel an intense amount of pain, which causes them to tense their muscles up and by doing this they can sometimes increase the work of the delivery. There are also women that twist and move around too much to handle the pain and it makes it difficult to monitor the baby this way. 

In the past doctors used to administer general anesthesia in the last stages of the delivery. However, generally these days, doctors administer medications to tolerate the pain and there are two ways of doing this, which is systemic – in other words, by giving the mother an injection in the blood flow (IV) or in the muscle, which is intra muscular or regional – in other words, by using an epidural and other type of local anesthesia.