History moment: empty-headed midwives

Today's history moment comes from Dr. Eucharius Rösslin's wildly popular pregnancy advice book The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives, published in 1513. He never attended a birth or even studied childbirth. But that didn't keep him from writing this lovely poem about baby-killing midwives.

I'm talking about the midwives all
Whose heads are empty as a hall
And through their dreadful negligence
Cause babies' death devoid of sense
So thus we see far and about
Official murder, there's no doubt.

Source: Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank by Randi Hutter Epstein, MD. 

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Amy Romano, a CNM who blogs at Lamaze's Science & Sensibility, has written a great response to two New Yorker articles by physician Atul Gawande. I've been wanting to discuss his articles, but haven't had the time to write up my thoughts. Mom's Tinfoil Hat, an OB-GYN-in-training, agrees that Romano's analysis is worth the read.

First, read his two articles, How Childbirth Went Industrial (2006) and The Cost Conundrum (2009), then read Romano's response: The Maternity Conundrum: One Thing Atul Gawande Doesn’t Get About Health Care Reform.

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Separate and Unequal

In this excerpt from a book-in-progress, Faith Gibson describes working as a L&D nurse in a segregated maternity ward in the South. She contrasts the care that white and black mothers received. Ironically, black mothers and babies fared much better because the institutional "neglect" allowed them to have physiological births with very little disturbance or management. From the early 1900s and well into the 1970s, the standard of care for white mothers in this hospital included separation from family members, enema & shave, confinement to bed, heavy use of narcotics and Scopolamine during labor and general anesthesia during the birth, episiotomy and forceps delivery, and separation of mother and newborn.

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The New Normal

Just out: an article about the medicalization of childbirth in Canada. It's called "The New Normal", written by Elizabeth Payne in The Ottawa Citizen.

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