LOOKING FROM DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES: Part #1
When we look at birth (in the general) there is the perspective of the families having a baby and a perspective from the care providers.
FOLLOW-YOUR-DOCTOR’S ORDER TREND:
What did women experience under the Follow-Your-Doctor’s-Orders? Well, they certainly could not create an individual experience.
How did obstetrical nurses and obstetricians see women birthing under this trend? We don’t know what individual women did, how they behaved, coped or managed their own birth experience but most women just went into hospital and had the standard assessments, monitoring and procedures done. They had no skills, no choice, no family support. Did obstetrical nurses sit with women for hours to help them? Who knows, perhaps some did and others didn’t but they were on shifts and had other women birthing at the same time.
Women didn’t think they had ‘choices’ and many didn’t want them. Many of these women would come from families who had no access to modern health systems and considered these to be safer and cleaner. When we go back in our own US history, do a bit of research as to the medical abilities in the Civil War. Go back in Global history and look at the medical abilities in WW 1.
Good or bad, modern medicine has made HUGE gains since WW 2.
In this trend women were moving away from this early medical care into more sophisticated care that has evolved since then. The vast majority of women still believed and remembered that women ‘suffered’ in childbirth (translate this to ‘didn’t cope, manage or deal with the natural and normal pain of contractions’). These women also knew women who died in childbirth or whose baby did. Caesareans were rarely performed and there were general anesthetics. What women experience today is NOTHING like what was going on for birthing women from WW2 to the early 1970s!
Keep in mind that polio vaccines weren’t created until the 1950s. The first use of Penicillin was in 1942!
We’ve got to get real when we consider childbirth today and what, if anything, we can do to improve our experience (as mothers and fathers-to-be) during our babies birth. If we believe that birth was naturally and normally safe then we’re buying into a profound illusion. The reason this illusion is promoted is simple, people forget how difficult life was prior to modern living (clean running water, indoor toilets, electricity, refrigeration, stoves as well as modern medicine).
In countries where there are a lot of refugees, midwives are always surprised that these birthing women want all the bells and whistles of modern medicine. They want to follow their doctor’s orders. They want to use medical pain relief. They often want non-laboring Caesareans.
In fact the World Health Organization realized that in many modernizing countries such as in South America that a percent of women would choose elective Caesareans for several reasons. 1) not to damage their birth canal 2) Not to suffer from the pain 3) Not to risk damage to their baby.
These factors play a very big role in childbirth today and pregnant women face these issues in every pregnancy they have.
Even today, the majority of pregnant women in modern countries are absolutely fine with the standards of care: testing, assessments, monitoring and procedures. Pregnant women do not want to be left damaged and they want their baby to be born healthy.
Within Follow-Your-Doctor’s-Orders trend most women just went along with the standards of care. Birth was just like that. That’s one reason we hear women from this trend say things like: ‘Don’t remember much about the birth’ or ‘That’s the way it was, everyone did it that way’ or ‘I loved my doctor’ or ‘I was knocked out’.
This created passivity means that birth professionals … both staff obstetrical nurses and obstetricians … treated women as though they were passive. They came to expect that birthing women just do what they said. This means passivity created more passivity.
As for fathers? They were just plan excluded. Men sat in waiting rooms. Some had a book in which they could write. Most of you will never have the ability to read what fathers-to-be wrote. Often they talked about how powerless they felt as their wife ‘suffered’. Suffering was so connected to giving birth. Suffering rarely was used to imply a ‘problem’. The word used for ‘problem’ was ‘unfortunate’. Suffering was used to how painful giving birth was.
Modern cultures everywhere were changing by the 1960s and childbirth was one area where change occurred.
NEXT POST: LOOKING FROM DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES: Part #2