If My Mom Had an “Easy” Labor, Will I?

What’s the data on family history impacting my own pregnancy experience? If my mom had a hard (or easy) labor and delivery, will it be the same for me? My mom has told me over and over again how easy her labor was with me, and I am crossing my fingers for the same!

—Hoping for generational luck

There are a lot of reasons to think this might be true. Mothers and daughters share (on average) various characteristics that could determine length of labor. This includes, for example, pelvic shape. On the other hand, inheritance is noisy and imperfect, so it’s not clear how important this really is. It’s a question for data!

Data here is also likely to be imperfect. In particular, it would be unusual to have medical record data on characteristics of labor for both mom and daughter. Our medical records tend not to go back that far. This means that if researchers want to study it, they generally need to rely on recollection of labor, at least for the mother.

One recent study that does this collected data from 323 mother-daughter pairs in Israel. For the daughters, the researchers observed actual measured length of labor. For the moms, they asked them about length of labor. They classified labor as “longer” if it was greater than 10 hours. They found that if the mother’s labor was more than 10 hours, the daughter was about twice as likely to have a labor longer than 10 hours too.

Unfortunately, there is no more detailed data to look to. Length of labor is one metric of difficulty but certainly not the only one, and there is no guarantee that your childbirth will look like your mom’s. In light of this data, though, you can definitely hope!