Laugh Your Way Through Childbirth

Laughing gas may seem like an antiquated option, but many moms are clamouring for the pain-control method.

“In this country, most people when they hear about nitrous, they think it sounds pretty retro, that it sounds very old-fashioned and they’re sure there’s something bad or dangerous about it and we must’ve chosen to eliminate it. But I think we eliminated it because we went for the more specialized, higher-tech options,” said Judith Bishop, a certified nurse midwife at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center.

Unlike an epidural, which can effectively numb the patient from the waist down, nitrous oxide just reduces the levels of pain. This makes it a good option for mothers who want to experience a more natural child-birth, or for women who miss the window in which administering an epidural is possible.

It is also a good option for rural clinics who might not have access to an anesthesiologist to administer the complicated pain-killer. Laughing gas is much easier to give the mothers and simple enough they can even self regulate their doses. It is a common practice in the United Kingdom, but it has fallen out of practice in the States.

Presently only two hospitals in the United States offer it for women in labour, but interest is growing. The federal government is expected to be reviewing the treatment soon and new equipment is going to be produced sometime in April.

Suzanne Serat, a midwife from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, said that up to 20 percent of her patients would like the option, and that the hospital will be ordering two machines to administer the painkiller.

“We have a number of people who don’t want to feel the pain of labor, and nitrous oxide would not be a good option for them. They really need an epidural, and that’s perfect for them,” she said.

“Then we have a number of people who are going to wait and see what happens, and when they’re in labor, decide they’d like something and then the only option for them is an epidural but they don’t need something that strong. So they would choose to use something in the middle, but we just don’t have anything in the middle.”

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