Un-hooked

[chattybadtz]

Can you refuse an IV or Hep block during labor? I'm 23 weeks and this is my third pregnancy. I just hate the thought of being "hooked up" to anything but a fetal monitor.

Am I being too extreme with this request or is this just hospital policy?

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Comments

[unconformed]

You can always refuse anything. My first birth was in a hospital, and I didn't have anything except intermittent fetal monitoring.
Routine IVs are probably hospital policy but hospital policy is not the law. They can't kick you out in the middle of labor for refusing an IV or saline lock.

[amyura]

Around my area, IVs are for epidurals, inductions, GBS+ for antibiotics, and heplock for VBACs. In other words, you get an IV when there's something actually going in, otherwise, no. And I think we're about average when it comes to natural-vs-interventions.

With my VBAC-turned-truly-emergency-CS, my water broke early and my midwives said not to even show up to the hospital until it'd been almost 24 hours, and I labored in the hospital for a few hours before anyone even said anything about a heplock, and I had intermittent EFM. And that was with a VBAC-- they're even more loosey-goosey with uncomplicated vaginal births.

[countessof_roth]

Both of my hospital births i did not start out with an IV. First birth- i only got one because i requested after 25+ hours of labor with a malpositioned kid pain relief.

Second birth- no IV, had kid in the tub 100% natural.

IT IS POSSIBLE TO HAVE A NATURAL BIRTH IN A HOSPITAL. HOwever, you NEED to make sure your provider is 100% behind you and will back you up.

[either_or]

i didn't have one with my first. with my second, i needed hydration after a day of barfing. it wasn't as bad as i'd imagined. still waterbirthed and everything.

[blackrootbeer]

I want to say this is pretty rare, for my sister as soon as she had the IV they told her she could walk around... her room. They said the shower was off limits. there was no tub. she was basically confined to a pretty small area, maybe 9 x9? This hospital "offered" a laboring tub (not allowed to actually birth in the water, they claim it gives the baby wet lung) but the nurse got down right offended when we asked.

[altarflame]

The levels of pressure and resistance you face will largely be geographic - I live in South Florida, for instance, where people really try to strong arm you to accept the care that is "standard protocol," sometimes to a scary degree. Here, a hep lock is the compromise between the moms who don't want an IV and the doctors who do, and if you resist you will have rotating teams of people in and out of your room trying to explain to you that if you start hemorrhaging and your veins collapse and they can't find a vein, (dun dun DUN) YOU WILL DIE O_O

I don't know what it's like where you are, but it's not hard to find statistics for hospitals if you know where you're going in advance (so you know what you're up against...) In any hospital birthing situation, your chances of avoiding unwanted interventions are greatly increased by heading there later in labor :)