I learned something I never knew before: Apparently, when the suffragettes were working their asses off to get the vote and to win a more active, visible role for women in society, they also fought for pain control during childbirth. This both surprised me and made absolutely perfect sense. Many of them advocated for what was called "twilight sleep," a deep narcosis first developed in Freiberg, Germany as a way of avoiding the pain of labor and birth. Women activists argued that they should be given the option to be pain-free.
However, twilight sleep and narcotics during birth meant physicians often had to slap newborns awake once they emerged from the birth canal. Literally flip them over, holding on their feet, and give them a hearty wallop.
So twilight sleep went the way of the corset. My grandma used it, I know, for one of her deliveries, due to some confusing and unspecified complications my mom didn't really know much about.
Then came the seventies, when women fought not to have narcotics and painkillers be a requisite part of a physician-dictated delivery regimen. Birth has gone from a curse we should be released from through science, to a "natural process" requiring no science at all.
But most importantly, women now have a choice--at least kind of sort of.* Pain relief or comfort measures, birth with medical support or home birth. And that's all thanks to our foremothers who raised the question of who gets to decide how a woman gives birth.
It fills me with profound respect for their efforts.
On a side note, apparently around 80% of women at our local hospital opt for an epidural. That really surprised me; we live in liberal Hippytown and I expected it to be closer to 50/50.
*Midwifery, except as practiced by CMN, is illegal in my state. Which is really pitiful, because many women in our community opt for midwifes to attend their births and these midwives are occasionally prosecuted by the state for practicing medicine without a license (even if the family involved did not want to press charges). So your choice is labor at home or in the one regional hospital that has an L&D ward.
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4 comments:
Man- those Germans and their narcotics!!! Half of the most potent narcotics in the world were first synthesized in Germany. Well, I personally want to thank them on behalf of my many pain-free procedures. (Oh, and I guess I should thank them for producing H, too, right? Love of my life, blah, blah, blah...)
Anyway, I think that you're right, that the best part of all of this is the CHOICE. I happen to know what goes on in my lower half when I push too hard (fissures, oh, the fissures), and even if I do manage to have them completely healed before giving birth, to have them reopen would SUCK. So, I'm all about the c-section. Maybe I will change my mind when such blessed event actually occurs, but for now, practically minded, I think that (pain or not) I have no business pushing a baby out of my lower end. And screw anyone who makes me feel badly for making that CHOICE. Sigh.
I wonder if the need for pain control coincided with births moving from the home to hospitals?
I know it was around the Victorian era that dox started making laboring/delivering women lie down (use stirrups?) to make the doc's job easier.
Lying down happens to be THE absolutely most painful position to be in. Positions that are more comfortable and that promote progress in labor (like squatting or leaning) don't allow a doctor easy access for seeing or messing with your lady bits.
I only had to be on my back for 10 seconds about 4 times during labor and it was excruciating. Anyone who labors or gives birth lying on her back deserves a freaking purple heart medal! no wonder they clamor for drugs. I would have.
I'm glad our fore-mothers won us the right to choose.
I choose drugs. :)
Very interesting.
I read a book a couple of years ago that was fictional but had some truth woven in about a small community back in the early 1900's and their midwife and then having a doctor come in and saying that women weren't allowed to give birth at home and the whole twilight sleep thing.
It's good that for the most part now women have a choice in how they will give birth.
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