About six weeks after their babies were born, we again visited the transition couples in their homes. As on the first occasion, we interviewed each husband and wife as a couple, and tape-recorded the discussion (92 couples were interviewed at this second phase of the study). This interview focused on two broad issues: how the couples had coped with the labor and birth, and how they were reacting to the early days of parenthood.

LABOR AND BIRTH

In this interview, we directed the first three questions about the experience of labor and birth primarily at wives. We asked them to talk about the length of their labor, the types of pain relief used, and the extent of surgical intervention. These questions were designed to allow wives to share their experiences, and to give us some indication of the relative ease or difficulty of the birth.

Ease or Difficulty of Birth

Not surprisingly, wives' answers to these questions revealed widely differing experiences. The number of hours in labor ranged from 1 to 48, with about half of the wives reporting labors of 11 hours or more. The huge range of answers to this question undoubtedly reflects not only the variability of labor itself, but also the difficulty in defining the start of “labor,” without information from the attending health professionals.