Birth

According to Tina Cassidy’s recent Birth: A History , birth has been (in the words of the TLS reviewer) a “ripe terrain for fads” and “oftne a vigilante affair.” Not all the fads have been New Ageish; some have been scientific. The reviewer summarizes:

“after the move from midwives to doctors, mortality rates initially shot up, as did rates of postpartum debility. Hospital births starting in the eighteenth century were a huge liability; impatient obstetricians zealously used their instruments to wrest babies from only partially opened wombs; and doctors often did not wash their hands and so transmitted the deadly puerperal virus from woman to woman – or, indeed, from corpse to woman . . . .

“Even in the early twentieth century, after germ theory was known about, hospitals were still the worst places to give birth and yet, paradoxically, they became the birthing place of choice for an ever-increasing number of women; infant mortality jumped 50 percent between 1915 and 1929 in the United States in lockstep with the widespread across-class shift form home to hospital.”

Marsden Wagner says that the public is being duped in similar ways today. Wagner’s no quack: “A paediatrician, perinatologist, policy wonk, expert witness at countless trials, and World Health Organization (WHO) adviser, he is a whistleblower with a clear agenda.” He claims in his book, Born in the USA , that the fad of the moment is “too much medical intervention in the names of two cultural values: ‘convenience’ and ‘control.’” He points out that the US has “the second worst newborn mortality figures in the industrialized world, despite having the most expensive maternity system. Women are 70 per cent more likely to die in childbirth in the US than in Europe.” Wagner specifically attacks the overuse of C-sections, induction, and “the tribal nature of the obstetrics profession.” He provides evidence that “when the C-section rate goes over 15 per cent, the maternal mortality rate increases.”

Along the way, “Wagner does marshal plenty of evidence that midwives are the safest attendants for low-risk births – because they are trained to wait patiently for and facilitate birth, rather than to intervene and/or hasten it . . . . And evidence also shows that planned home births for low-risk patients are as safe as hospital births.”