Teri Vlassopoulos’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
If you are growing a human, from about 30 weeks onwards it should be head down in your womb, biding its time until it’s ready to smash its way through your vaginal canal. Unfortunately some babies are lazy, have a poor sense of direction, or just want to mess with you and your plan for a perfect unassisted home birth and remain breech well into the third trimester. Some are even transverse (sideways), as if your uterus is a goddamn hammock for them to lounge in. Don’t worry, most babies flip on their own eventually, but there are exercises you can do to speed up the process and avoid medical intervention.
1. Balance is key. If your muscles are tight or your pelvis is misaligned, your baby will have difficulty moving into the correct position. Daily forward leaning inversions help lengthen the muscles and point the baby in the right direction. To do an inversion, sit with your knees on the couch or your bed. Slowly lower your upper half until your forearms are on the ground. Do this multiple times a day being careful not to lose your balance and land directly on your head.
2. Go on all fours. This is less extreme than an inversion, but just as helpful. Get down on your knees and rest your forearms on the ground. Stick your butt into the air. Then twerk.
3. Sit up straight, young lady! Always maintain good posture; a baby is not going to take you seriously if you keep slouching like that.
4. Visit your local pool. While it may be difficult to stay upside down on land, flips in the water might coax the baby to do the same thing. If you live close to an ocean, even better. Go swimming at dawn near a pod of dolphins. They will sense your predicament and use their beaks to nudge your baby into the right position. Relax, they’re just dolphins.
5. On your belly, carefully paint a picture of your baby in the position you would like it to be (head down!). Take a photograph of it. Use it for your Christmas cards.
6. Talk to your baby, calmly and rationally. Don’t beg or plead; the baby has already figured out your weaknesses and, like a horse, can sense when you’re afraid or desperate and will take an evil kind of pleasure in it. Ask the baby to flip. Please flip. Please, just this once. Offer presents.
7. Alternatively, your partner can place their mouth on your lower abdomen and encourage the baby to move towards their voice. Do this until everyone agrees that it’s getting kind of weird.
8. Science.
9. Tie a rope to the ceiling. Climb the rope and hang upside down. Do this twice a day for as long as you can manage, preferably before meals. Don’t be alarmed if you feel nauseous afterwards. You should be used to that feeling by now anyway.
10. Apply something cold to the top of your uterus and something warm to the bottom. Like the most basic of single celled organisms, the baby will instinctually move towards the warmth, unless they’ve already succumbed to reverse psychology, in which case, try the other way around.
11. Concentrate really, really hard. How can you not have a psychic connection with the being inhabiting your body?
12. Moxibustion! Saying the word out loud is almost as helpful as actually doing it. Moxibustion, moxibustion, moxibustion. Moxibustion involves burning mugwort next to the outer corner of your baby toe. The herb encourages the baby to wiggle around in there. Your acupuncturist can do this, but why not try it yourself too? Moxibustion.
There’s no guarantee that any of these exercises will work, but they’re worth trying if only to spare the guilt that you didn’t do everything you possibly could to prepare yourself and your baby for an easy, intervention-free labor. No one will judge you if the baby doesn’t turn, and even if they do, they will transmit their judgment via silent loaded looks and/or talking behind your back so as to avoid awkward conversations and/or making you cry.
Best of luck.
You forgot the old “Watermelon and Bunsen Burner ” trick. Works every time.
“Humor” tag it may have, but this is at least 1000% more comprehensible than the goddamn Spinning Babies website and nearly as informative.
I KNOW, Spinning Babies is such a confusing site to navigate.
Ha so true. I also tried to read it during my last labour after some morphine and it was marginally more comprehensible.
Sending this to my mom immediately since I was a breech baby.
Can confirm that I am both lazy AND have a poor sense of direction.
Printing this out and taping it to my fridge. I am 24 weeks and baby is still breech (yeah, yeah, I know – I’ve got time), but WHILE I AM ALL FOR MEDICALLY ASSISTED BIRTH and plan to deliver this baby in a hospital with ample interventions as necessary, I really don’t want a C-section. I have a good feeling about that dolphin trick, though I may try it with string-rays, just for the endorphins.
Then again, maybe my baby just senses that I’m not cosmically aligned with my Gaia-self, as evidenced by my eagerness to give birth in a hospital environment, and is showing my how upside-down my world view is by being, well, right-side-up.
You do have time, but even if you do have a c-section, it will be ok! It was my worst fear, but I now have two beautiful children who took the alternate exit, and they are gorgeous and brilliant and bonded to me and I love them an unreasonable amount. Bonus: they came out with perfectly round heads, like little softballs.
Not gonna lie, my first thought after “took the alternate exit” was “………butt babies??”
Yes I am an adult woman, why do you ask.
Yes, you have so much time! My baby ended up turning on her own around 34 weeks… and then I needed an emergency c-section anyway. But the c-section was really not bad – honest. And agreed, bonus super round head!
I had two that stayed breech until 41 weeks, and one of those flipped but came out posterior, which hurt like hell and broke his collarbone—and they were both back labor.
The third one I was sent to a chiropractor by my midwife. There is a technique called “the webster technique” that only some chiro’s do. Not only was my daughter not breech, she was the only labor I didn’t have back labor, the only labor that I felt the head engage, and it was WONDERFUL. I swear by my chiropractor. It’s cheap ($40 or sometimes insurance pays), and works way better than the ironing board or moxibustion or any of the other methods. You can call around now and see when they would want you to start going, it took about 3 visits for me. But I felt so great after chiro anyway because I could lay on my stomach and rest, I didn’t even care.
Oh, and it’s gentle, doesn’t involve the head or neck, and doesn’t involve the baby, even. It just felt like somebody suggesting to my hips that they might want to work with the rest of me, and bingo, they went along with the idea. Pretty non-invasive.
The Webster technique totally did not work to flip our baby, but it did feel wonderful and made us suddenly able to walk without back pain for the last few weeks of the first pregnancy, so seconded!
I got all the way to #9 before I had a hunch that these might not be serious tips, and even then I wasn’t certain. Sounds legit to me.
If I say moxibustion three times in a row will Michael Keaton rise from the dead? I’m worried that Michael Keaton will rise from the dead. (Michael Keaton is not dead).
I’m 17 weeks along and when I got to #3 I shot up straight in my chair. (I also could not tell the article was kidding for a while.)
Or slip on some ice in the grocery store parking lot and fall really hard on your ass. Worked like a charm for my mom.
As an EMT, I was reading this with such a horrified look on my face and thennnnn I saw the humor tag and whew, no worries here. Safe deliveries, everyone!
I’m a med student going into OB/GYN. A few months back, a lady came in to labor and delivery near full term and her baby was breech. The plan was to do an external cephalic version (basically the docs try to turn the baby head-down by pushing/massaging the uterus from the outside). The woman decided that she wanted to wait a few hours and plan music into her vagina to see if that would get the baby to flip on its own.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
Why the woman didn’t play vagina music at home before this (scheduled) procedure rather than sitting in a windowless room in the hospital to do so, I do not know. To be fair, external cephalic version sucks to go through (and doesn’t always work) but you gotta have all your baby-flipping attempts out of the way before you head to the hospital!
Tried them all. Didn’t work. 11-year-old is still just that stubborn.
Mental image of your 11-year-old is of a child still insistent on not moving through the world right-side up
but I’m VERY impressed by the arm & core strength of this imagined fresh human, not to mention the frankly astonishing balance required to perambulate reality on one’s hands instead of one’s feet.
That’s a very good metaphor for it, really.
Seconded, including an ECV. Two year old has a beautiful sense of her own mind. One day (when we aren’t on a schedule to leave the house?) I will be glad about it 🙂
Moxibustion.
Sixteen years ago, my midwives recommended a moxibustion variant — putting clothespins on both pinkie toes. I went along with this on the grounds that dumb as it sounded, it couldn’t hurt (other than in the literal sense that putting clothespins on your toes does). And we promised the fetus a pony if she’d flip.
Spoiler: It didn’t work. They did think that it had, though, making the examination while I was going through transition a little surprising — “Wait a minute, that isn’t a head.” Everything turned out fine, though, and I still taunt her with the pony she would have had if she’d been an obedient child and emerged headfirst. (You can keep a pony in an apartment, right?)
sorry but apparently there are tiny ponies who can live in apartments like large dogs https://www.pinterest.com/pin/103864335130111218/
(omg so cute if you google image “tiny pony” tho)
Miniature horses can be used as guide/support animals for the blind! http://www.guidehorse.com/ And you can get them tiny little sneakers so their hoofs don’t damage your flooring.
Woah, thank you for sharing this picture.
Five years ago, my firstborn was transverse. So I did spinning babies and he flipped… breech! HAHA MAMA EFF YOU, it was as though he said. I spinned and spinned but he just would not flip. But I was determined to have a completely natural birth. Determined, I say! Eventually my doula recommended moxibustion… and it worked! Tralala! Then, I went two weeks past my due date, had to be induced, and ended up with an emergency c-section 36 hours after my water broke. I also ended up with a healthy, amazing, glorious little boy who makes every day wonderful. So it was all worth it in the end.
I was born breech, and I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a word my parents have said to me. I mostly just took suggestions, and went my own way.
But my mother would not have a caesarean, despite being at the older end of the spectrum for first pregnancies, and refused to listen to the patronising doctors, so perhaps it is genetic?
My baby was transverse from 18 weeks until somewhere around transition (thankfully no one thought to check before my husband, in his least-helpful moment, suggested it (stop touching my belly stop stop stop stop STOP OR I WILL BARF ON YOU STOOOOOPPPP)). I think it was the dolphins what spun her around there at the end.
I will say, a transverse baby can kick neither your stomach nor you bladder, so that was nice.
Woah, thank you for sharing this picture.