What causes obstructed labour?
Obstructed labour is caused by: • the baby being in the wrong position (eg lying across the uterus) so it cannot be born head first in the normal way; or • the women’s pelvis is too narrow for the baby to pass through the birth passage in the normal way. A lack of adequate nutrition, hard manual work from an early age and early marriage can lead to a young girl of teenage years becoming pregnant before she is fully developed. In such cases the baby is likely to be too big for a normal delivery to be possible. Sometimes a woman will experience obstructed labour because the baby is in the wrong position. This can happen to any pregnant mother. A woman who may have had multiple normal deliveries in the past, can experience obstructed labour and be left suffering with an obstetric fistula.
