Birth History: A Dysfunctional Culture

May is Pregnancy Awareness Month, and while I've covered some of these topics before, I've been planning to put them together in more of a series for quite some time now. There is so much to learn while pregnant, and it can get quite overwhelming when you're faced with decisions that range from the mundane to the life-changing. So much of how our medical community views pregnancy, however, is still deeply rooted in old traditions and practices, some of which were, and continue to be, groundbreaking in the field of obstetrics. Some, on the other hand, not so much.

I once heard someone say how hard can it be? You go to the hospital and push out a baby. If only it were that easy. And if you go behind the scenes much, it's probably never been that easy, for reasons that are often not clear to us until we experience childbirth ourselves. Even then, without some historical perspective, we may not realize just how dysfunctional maternity care in this country still remains, probably a century later.

Many maternity care practices were nothing short of barbaric and humiliating, yet were seen as standard practice and therefore somehow acceptable. Whether it's having your hands tied down in labor, being given pain medication that you feel you don't want or need (as we see in Peggy Vincent's Baby Catcher) or given prophylactic episiotomies and forceps births (we'll get to that later), it's all been considered status quo in "modern" obstetrics. And yet, as we see with new guidelines on episiotomy, VBAC and other protocols, it can be painfully slow to implement these changes.

You can't begin to understand the 'typical' mindset towards birth today unless you understand its history. It is a bright spot in some places, in others very dark and tarnished.

You might want to read:

Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born