Breech Babies and the Webster Technique

Last weeek, I heard a soon-to-be mother say to me something horrible: “Oh no, I wish I’d known about this sooner – now it’s too late!”

The woman was 37 1/2 weeks pregnant with her first child. Her baby was stuck in a transverse lie and while the bab was moving arms and legs plenty, he just wasn’t moving into the head down position for a normal delivery. She had tried many different things over the last few weeks to help the baby move – visualization, yoga, acupuncture and even upside-down handstands in the pool – to no avail. It wasn’t until further internet searching that she learned of the Webster Technique but by this time, she had already had an external version performed (a painful, invasive technique of trying to manually move the baby through the mom’s belly) and the cesarean section had been scheduled for the next day.

What I thought was so horrible about this situation wasn’t that she’s having a c-section, it isn’t that all the time and energy she put into natural childbirth classes is for not, and it wasn’t that she will have a tougher time recovering from the surgery on top of learning to be a new mom. The mom and baby are just fine.

What’s horrible about it was that she didn’t know. She didn’t know about the Webster Technique until it was too late.

I take responsibility for that.

And that’s what this post is all about. By putting this information up here, it is my hope that two things come of it:

1) that a pregnant woman with a breech baby searching for information finds this sooner rather than later and they can get help before they necessarily have to have a surgical delivery.

2) that all pregnant women find this early on in their pregnancy and get quality care before a transverse lie or breech presentation is ever a problem.

I will list tons of resources for you to learn more about it, but quite simply, the Webster Technique is a chiropractic adjusting method that reduces the pelvic tension that commonly prevents the developing baby to move sufficiently within the uterus. It used to be commonly called “The Webster Turning Technique” but is now more accurately called “The Webster In-Utero Constraint Technique“.

It is a gentle, non-invasive technique that is completely safe for pregnant women that I use all the way up to the time of delivery if necessary. The best chances of allowing the baby the space to move into proper position in late term pregnancies occur when we have the time to do at least 4-6 adjustments in a 2 week period. The ideal scenario is when I am able to take care of a mother-to-be throughout the whole pregnancy on a wellness basis and the baby just turns head down at the beginning of the last trimester as nature intended.

Too many times I have received calls from pregnant moms that are only a few days away from from a scheduled c-section. In my experience, only about half of those babies turned (because by that time, the baby is pretty big relative to the size of the uterus) whereas all of the moms I have been able to take care of throughout their entire pregnancy had normal head down presentation at the time of their delivery.

So if you are reading this and have further questions after exploring the articles below, please feel free to contact me so I can help you in some way – either by seeing me (if you are near San Diego, CA) or by me finding someone close to where you live. Or if you’re searching for information for a loved one that has a breech presentation, forward this on to them and have them contact me directly as well.

I want to help the delivery to be as easy and wonderful as nature intended it for both mom and baby.

The Webster Technique: A Technique for Pregnant Women