American women give birth earlier on average than British and Dutch women. For example, 44 percent of Dutch and 40 percent of British women give birth after forty weeks of pregnancy or more. In the US, this applies to only 23 percent of women.
The majority of American women give birth at about 38.5 weeks. The average gestational age in the US was 39.1 weeks in 1990, according to research by Amsterdam UMC, Boston University School of Public Health, Oxford University and Harvard Medical School.
According to the researchers, the difference can be explained by a difference in approach in healthcare. “Maternity care in American hospitals is mainly designed for the convenience of healthcare personnel. It does not meet the needs of women who give birth,” says researcher Neel Shah of Harvard Medical School.
He points to the data on (home) births. In the US, home births peak in the same early morning hours as in other countries. But hospital deliveries in the US mainly take place during office hours: between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. “That’s not in line with the general natural order of things,” Shah emphasizes.
Professor of Obstetrics Ank de Jonge was involved in the research on behalf of Amsterdam UMC. She sees that birth care in the US is much more dependent on gynaecologists, while midwives in the Netherlands and England supervise most births. “American birth care relies much more on medical intervention than that in England and the Netherlands.”
The researchers analyzed more than 3.8 million births in the US, 156,000 births in the Netherlands and 56,000 births in England. In the Netherlands, this concerned data from 2014. The English data cover the period from 2008 to 2010.
