Babies induced early at greater risk

Check out this crazy article: Doctors Reccommend Mothers Wait All 39 Weeks, which was featured on NPR's All Things Considered. It's about women who are choosing to be induced (to deliver their babies early) for no medically sound reason. Being born even a few weeks early can be dangerous for a child's health and development.

Article author Gretchen Cuda Kroen writes:

"From 1990 to 2006 the percentage of women who induced labor more than doubled, and nearly a third of women were having cesareans. The increase wasn't because of emergencies, says Jay Iams, a specialist in maternal fetal medicine at Ohio State University, but rather because women and doctors began scheduling deliveries for convenience.

... when it comes to the arrival date of your bundle of joy, experts now say that planning too far ahead can do more harm than good. A full-term pregnancy lasts 40 weeks, but elective deliveries are often planned for two or three weeks earlier. And even though 37 weeks is also still considered full term, studies show that babies born even a few weeks too early are at greater risk for health problems than those who are born later. That has some doctors campaigning to curb the trend of scheduled labor and delivery."