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Women are having babies longer these days than they did 50 years ago
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
Women today are taking longer to give birth than they did 50 years ago, according to researchers from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) who analyzed data on 140,000 births.
The study analyzed birth data from the 1960s and 2000s. It turned out that over the past half century, the duration of the first stage of labor, when the cervix opens, has increased by 2.6 hours in women who have never given birth before. In women who are not giving birth for the first time, this stage now lasts 2 hours longer.
An NIH study found that the use of powerful pain-relief methods during labor in the United States is now an order of magnitude more common. Epidurals —injections of painkillers into the spinal fluid—are now given to more than 50 percent of women in labor; in the 1960s, they were used in only 4 percent of cases.
It is known that epidural anesthesia usually slows down labor, but this does not fully explain the trend. Thus, in the 2000s, doctors began to use the hormone oxytocin, which speeds up labor, more often: now it is used in 31% of cases, and in the 1960s - in 12%.
The study also found that babies are now born on average five days earlier and weigh more than they did 50 years ago.
Modern mothers are on average 4 years older than those who gave birth in the 1960s. Expectant mothers have become plumper. In the previous generation, the body mass index – that is, the ratio between a person’s height and weight – before pregnancy was about 23 kg/m², while in the current generation it is 24.9.
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