oohh yay I finally got into the Joyous Births forums!!
this is all just copied and pasted from
http://www.joyousbirth.info/forums/showthread.php?t=34257&highlight=postdates but you will have to register and then wait a bit to be able to see the forums.. :
When Research is Flawed: Management of Post-Term Pregnancy Henci Goer
http://www.lamaze.org/Research/WhenResearchisFlawed/PosttermPregnancyCochrane/tabid/173/Default.aspx
To quote Menticoglou and Hall's conclusion: “Routine induction at 41 weeks is ritual induction at term, unsupported by rational evidence of benefit. It is unacceptable, illogical and unsupportable interference with a normal physiologic situation.”
Ageing of the Placenta Harold Fox
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1720716/pdf/v077p0F171.pdf
Our current knowledge of the human placenta is briefly reviewed. Particular stress is placed upon the considerable functional reserve capacity of the placenta, the unimportance of most visible abnormalities of the placenta, the lack of any evidence that the placenta ages during gestation and the lack of significance of placental weight. The effects on the placenta of infection and of maternal cigarette smoking are considered and the concept of placental insufficiency critically discussed. It is concluded that most cases of 'placental insufficiency' are, in reality, examples of maternal vascular insufficiency resulting from inadequate placentation during the early stages of pregnancy.
Wings: a radio program on the magic of placentas! It's beautiful.
http://wings.org/ftp/2010%20shows/2010-lo-bandwidth%20shows/lo-wings03-10Placenta-28_40-64kbps.mp3
Birthlove’s 10 month mama page – extensive references. Leilah McCracken
http://birthlove.cyclzone.com/pages/ten_month_mama.html
Ten month pregnancies can be tiring and eroding, but for some women- it is simply how long we are intended to gestate.
Think of it this way: I was 11 when I got my first period; my best friend was 13. We "ripened" at different ages. People ripen prenatally at different ages, too: some women take as long as 46 weeks before their babies are ready to come out. (Women like me.)
In healthy, well-fed women long pregnancies don't lead to brain damaged, nutrient-starved babies! It's actually the opposite: my own "late" babies- my 6th and 7th children- are bright, precocious, healthy, darling, uniquely gifted in language- it would have been unthinkable to steal away their precious pregnancy time for my own convenience, or to follow some ridiculous, arbitrary medical timetable. (It would have been equally unthinkable to "naturally induce"- an oxymoron if there ever was one.)
And even though these babies were my biggest (10.8 lbs and 12.6 lbs respectively), their births were my least painful, most straightforward, and quickest: my body had lots of time to soften and prepare for birth, and when my time came, I was ready (as were my babies).
When is that baby due? Henci Goer
http://parenting.ivillage.com/pregnancy/0,,jb56,00.html
When it comes to determining your due date, "things," as the Gilbert and Sullivan ditty goes, "are seldom what they seem." The methods of calculation are far from exact, common assumptions about the average length of pregnancy are wrong and calling it a "due date" is misleading. Understanding these uncertainties may help to curb your natural impatience to know exactly when labor will begin.
Many obstetricians want to induce labor when you exceed your due date by a set number of days, in the belief that prolonged pregnancy increases risk. As with dating the pregnancy, the evidence for inducing labor after a certain time past the due date isn't nearly as clear-cut as you might think, but that's another subject.) If induction were harmless, it wouldn't matter, but it's not. Among other adverse effects, inducing labor increases the odds of fetal distress during labor and cesarean section in first-time mothers, and mistiming the induction can result in a premature baby.
Suspect Diagnoses Come with Biophysical Profiling Gloria Lemay
http://www.midwiferytoday.com/articles/biophysical.asp
In the past year, I have had a number of letters and phone calls from doulas, midwives and childbirth educators about a flaw in this testing method. An unusually large number of diagnoses seem to be made that "there is not enough amniotic fluid." This seems to be the factor in this outline that is most often used as an excuse for induction. It is important for parents to know that this is likely an inaccurate assessment.
Midwifery. 1991 Mar;7(1):31-9. Related Articles, Links
A Timely Birth Gail Hart
http://www.midwiferytoday.com/articles/timely.asp
The timing of birth has major consequences for a baby. Too early or too late can mean the difference between life and death. Or so we have come to believe; and it's undoubtedly true at the extreme ends of preterm and postterm birth dates. Although few babies are born at these extremes of the normal length of pregnancy, much of our prenatal care is based on bringing babies to birth "in a timely fashion"—neither too early nor too late. But our understanding of "timely" is clouded, and some of our methods are self-defeating. By intervening in the natural timing of birth, we sometimes exacerbate the problems or create entirely new ones.
Normal human pregnancy is approximately 280 days, with a variation of about three weeks. There may be reason for concern if labor has not begun weeks after the due date, since placental function begins to slow after some point in gestation. Placental insufficiency can lead to poor fetal growth and, eventually, damage to the baby's organ systems or even stillbirth. This is rare, but it is not necessarily connected to the calendar. The placenta can begin to fail at any point in pregnancy, and part of good prenatal care is monitoring growth and fluid levels so we can act before the baby's reserves are drained. We induce labor—even advise a cesarean without labor—if the baby is in trouble, regardless of due dates. It is obvious that a baby is "better off out than in" if the placenta can no longer nourish him/her or if the uterus has become a dangerous place.
What is Normal? Marsden Wagner
http://www.acegraphics.com.au/articles/wagner01.html
Active management illustrates the confusion in the medical approach as to what is normal and what is pathological in birth. A WHO publication states:
By medicalizing birth, i.e. separating a woman from her own environment and surrounding her with strange people using strange machines to do strange things to her in an effort to assist her (and some of this may occasionally be necessary), the woman's state of mind and body is so altered that her ways of carrying through this intimate act must also be altered and the state of the baby born must equally be altered. The result is that it is no longer possible to know what births would have been like before these manipulations. Most health care providers no longer know what "non-medicalized" birth is. This is an overwhelmingly important issue.
Almost all women in most developed countries give birth in hospitals, leaving the providers of the birth services with no genuine yardstick against which to measure their care. What is the range of length of safe labor? What is the true (i.e. absolute minimum) incidence of respiratory distress syndrome of newborn babies? What is the incidence of tears of the tissues surrounding the vaginal opening if the tissues are not first cut? What is the incidence of depression in women after "non-medicalized" birth? The answer to these, and many more questions is the same: no one knows. The entire modern obstetric and neonatology literature is essentially based on observations of medicalized birth. (WHO 1985a).
Medicalization also results in distortions of what is abnormal or pathological birth. How can it be that when the active management protocol is applied, over 40 percent of Dublin women having their first baby have a "dysfunctional myometrium" incapable of expelling a baby without the help of doctors and drugs? Active management was devised "for the early recognition and correction of inefficient myometrial activity" (O'Herlihy 1993), but the inventors of active management had never attempted to measure myometrial activity!
Prospective risk of unexplained stillbirth in singleton pregnancies at term: population based analysis
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC28178/
Unexpected late fetal death is tragic but not uncommon, most such fetal deaths being unexplained. Although five times more common than sudden infant death,1 they have attracted scant public attention.
The risk of unexplained stillbirth at
35 weeks is 1:500
36 weeks is 1:556
37 weeks is 1:645
38 weeks is 1:730
39 weeks is 1:840
40 weeks is 1:926
41 weeks is 1:826
42 weeks is 1:769
43 weeks is 1:633
A Doctor's Comments on Post-Maturity
http://www.joyousbirth.info/articles/drcommentsonpostmaturity.html
With the background of my experience with postmature babies, which is far more comprehensive than most other practitioners under the rule of induction at forty-two weeks or earlier, I have to assert categorically that the so-called recognized signs of postmaturity are fallacious because babies mature at different rates. Those signs are practically never due to real postmaturity, they are more likely to be due to other factors like a severe illness during pregnancy, or placental infarction well before term.
I knew that postmaturity signs were unreliable long before I ever started attending homebirths, because I can still remember the famous and respected paediatrician Kate Campbell telling us students about postmature babies having long hair and long fingernails and other signs, and premature babies having the reverse. But once I got into general practice and was ********** babies in hospital, I noticed that those signs were most unreliable, and that some babies born before term had long fingernails and hair, and some babies born after term did not.
Postdates: separating fact from fiction
http://www.theunnecesarean.com/blog/2009/10/3/postdates-separating-fact-from-fiction.html
http://pregnancy.about.com/od/induction/a/risksinduction.htm
5 Reasons to Avoid Induction of Labor
1. Increased risk of abnormal fetal heart rate, shoulder dystocia and other problems with the baby in labor.
2. Increased risk of your baby being admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
3. Increased risk of forceps or vacuum extraction used for birth.
4. Increased risk of cesarean section.
5. Increased risks to the baby of prematurity and jaundice.
Nice, simple article, good for sharing around. Explains a little of the five points with footnoting.
Edited by Emmi_
Going over 42 weeks
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my mum went 19days overdue with me, and went into labour naturally. She had a 6hr labour and I turned out fine 
(for some reason she was induced on due date with my younger brother though).
)
