Quote:
Originally Posted by Apricot  "Episiotomy spares the baby’s head the necessity of serving as a battering ram against perineal obstruction.”
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This was the theory popularized by Joseph DeLee, a leading early 20th-century OB. He also speculated that nature may have intended women, like salmon, to be "used up" by the reproductive process. He considered physiological birth to be an "evil" that obstetricians could save women from by aggressive active management.
The regimen he developed, which rapidly became the standard for hospital birth, involved sedating women with scopolamine ("Twilight Sleep") in early labor (though some OBs skipped this part--it's a hallucinogen that doesn't induce full unconsciousness and it made many women unmanageable (i.e. sent them off on what was basically a bad trip--hence the practice of using straps to restrain them to bed); waiting for the cervix to dilate or for crowning; knocking the mother out with ether, performing a "prophylactic" episiotomy, applying forceps and pulling the baby out.
My MIL's first labor in the late '50s went too fast for her to be given scopolamine, but when crowning started they knocked her out with ether, even though the baby's head was out before they could apply the forceps. When she came-to she was furious and wanted to know why they'd knocked her out when the baby was all but born. The nurse told her that crowning was the most painful part of birth and that no woman in her right mind would want to subject herself to that kind of pain.
My MIL thought otherwise and was living in England when she got pregnant with her next baby. She studied "natural childbirth" with followers of Grantley Dick-Read and had the rest of her babies (four) with no medication and no interventions other than episiotomies (they were all but impossible to avoid in those days, and almost no one questioned them), which was still very unusual in the late '50s and early '60s. And she did get a shot of Pit to induce her second baby after she went to 43 weeks. IM Pit--yikes! But at least in the early days of the natural childbirth movement, if you managed to get "permission" from your OB to try it, they pretty much left you alone to labor in peace (though without support--most hospitals didn't allow husbands or partners to stay with laboring women until well into the '70s).
As an interesting aside, my mother's OB was an early infertility specialist whose area of expertise was in treating Holocaust survivors who'd undergone medical experimentation. So he saw first-hand the negative effects of giving pregnant and laboring women medications of any type, and she had me drug-free in 1963. A vaginal breech birth to a primip who was 4'11" and married to a man who was 6'3" no less (though she did have the requisite episiotomy, and I got forceps applied to my head while I was pulled out butt-first--completely intervention-free birth was still hard to come by).
All I heard growing up was about how wonderful "natural childbirth" was and how lucky my mom felt to experience it--then I heard the same from my MIL. And of the 11 biological grandchildren between them, none of their births were induced/augmented or medicated, even those that took place in the hospital. I do think it makes a difference to hear about the experiences of women in your own family who've managed to give birth without medication--I was definitely spared the fear of birth-pain that so many women grow up with.
Katie Prown
Legislative Chair
Wisconsin Guild of Midwives
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: You would think I was born in 1950, or something.
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