Natural Ways To Induce Labour

At over a week overdue I started looking into natural ways to induce labour. I'd even tried getting very drunk and hungover to see if 'sods law' could be used to bring it on.

After hours of trawling the Internet, talking to friends with babies, and a chat with the midwife I'd pretty much heard every natural method of bringing on labour. Unfortunately what seemed to have worked for most people was not particularly palatable to me. Sex was advised by 2 friends, the midwife and countless forums and websites on the topic. Something to do with the semen ripening the cervix, or some hormone released by the female orgasm.

Perhaps I'm abnormal, but I didn't relish the idea of having sex with a woman who was 9 months pregnant. A couple of my mates couldn't understand the problem, but there were a host of physical and mental issues I just couldn't handle. The main two were the proximity of our baby, and my lack of desire for the pregnant female body. Don't get me wrong, I thought she looked great and didn't have a problem with her changed body shape. I even thought I'd miss the bump when the baby was eventually born. I just didn't find it sexually appealing.

There was also this mucus plug thing I'd heard about, and the thought of waters breaking. What if it did bring on labour, did I want to be in a maternity ward after just having had 'relations' with my partner? Luckily for me Clare felt exactly the same way, she was prepared to do it, but had as little desire as I had. We did discuss the plan of me getting some dutch courage from a drink or two but the unanimous decision was that we look into alternatives.

Another front runner was raspberry leaf tea. We tried a couple of supermarkets but they didn't stock it. There was also brown sugar and water, this came up a lot on forums but hadn't seemed to work for anyone. There was also 'nipple stimulation' well Clare was terrified of lactating, by the look on her face when I mentioned it I knew we wouldn't be trying it. Apparently from the forums and information we looked at it's worth a try.

Another big front runner was 'Castor oil' or a mixture of Castor oil and orange juice. People seem to have mixed feelings about the safety of this method. Some saying it was perfectly safe, and some saying that it should not be used under any circumstances. We decided not to try it.

Blue Cohosh, and Black Cohosh came up regularly also. We had never heard of it, and as we couldn't even locate some raspberry leaf tea we thought there was no chance of getting hold of Cohosh.

2 Midwives had mentioned pineapple, some forums said you had to eat a whole pineapple for it to work. Well I was pretty confident I could get hold of a pineapple, Clare would never eat a whole one so I decided to juice a couple. Some places said that juicing would destroy the active chemical, I figured that if she had the juice of 2 fresh pineapples very soon after they were juiced that she would be getting any supposed benefit of eating a whole pineapple.

I sliced the pineapples up, juiced them and poured Clare a pint. Every so often when she wasn't looking I topped it up a little bit. So eventually she must have drank almost 2 pints of pineapple juice. Along with the membrane sweep, I'm hoping this will start to tip the balance and we will soon be bringing our baby home.

UPDATE FROM MUM:

I went into labour two days after taking the pineapple juice.