How Childbirth Went Industrial: A Deconstruction
Web Exclusive – November 27, 2006
“The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so.”
— Josh Billings
Henci Goer, author of The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth, skewers a recent, ripe-for-the-deconstructing article in the New Yorker on the rise of cesarean sections. If you read Atul Gawande’s article with mounting dismay, this brilliant, research-based riposte will leave you thoroughly restored.
Gawande’s history of obstetrics begins with the premise that childbirth is a complicated, dangerous business where, “At almost every step . . . the process can go wrong.” In particular, “obstruction of labor” poses a threat. To illustrate this, Gawande recounts the story of the English Princess Charlotte, who in 1817 gave birth to a stillborn boy after 50 hours of labor and then succumbed to a postpartum hemorrhage. The parallel with Rourke’s labor is surely intentional.
According to Gawande, yesterday’s tragedies can now be averted thanks to the development of new and improved obstetric procedures, drugs, and instruments. “By the early twentieth century,” he says, “the problems of human birth seemed to have been largely solved.” In the next paragraph, however, he retracts this statement. A 1933 report, he writes, found that most maternal deaths were attributable to medical mismanagement and that women were “better off delivering at home” with midwives who avoided using those same procedures, drugs, and instruments.

Continue reading “Henci Goer at Mothering Mag: How Childbirth Went Industrial: A Deconstruction” →