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March 8th, 2016 
Awake Goy In 1900 less than 5% of women birthed in hospitals. By 1935, almost 80% did (Midwifery Today, 2000) . What happened in those 30 years, and why do I care? To understand our present circumstances it is vital we find as best an understanding as possible from the sources available to us, of what lead us to where we are today and what have we lost in the process, and from this, what we need to reclaim.
I would like to highlight the correlation between the publicising of twilight sleep and the massive shift to hospital birth instead of home birth, although I do not believe it was as simple as they want you to surmise, and other less discussed factors are also responsible for the shift. I will introduce the history and a brief look at the procedure of the immensely dangerous ‘twilight sleep’ (The Freiburg Method) and the people and agencies that advocated this technique, and conclude with my thoughts about why I believe they wanted birthing to be taken to hospitals and the effect I believe it has had on the female psyche, and the overall community.
Dr Kronig in Germany began experiments upon twilight slee, after becoming inspired by Dr Von Steinbuchel, who penned and performed the first twilight births (Centralblatt fur Gynakologie, No. 48, 1902). Dr Kronig and Dr Gauss used the technique called twilight sleep on wealthy women; he and colleagues constantly monitored these women, gave them pre-labour drug tests and psychological evaluations, and luxury at every step , such as a room that was dark, noise proof, and set for the event to come. Dr Kronig felt that upper class women could not surrender themselves to labour and this is why they suffered so much pain; he had previously witnessed women of much lower class totally surrender to labour and make it as natural as walking, so natural, that even whilst walking. He saw a traveling community walking from one place to another, a heavily pregnant woman slipped behind a bush, squatted and came out with a wrapped up baby and continued walking with her group. He found that surrendering to your circumstances was what contributed to much or little pain, and that wealthy women did not have this skill (Deliver me from Pain, Wolf, 2009).
Certain female feminists, suffragettes and socialites had spoken out of their horrid labours and how hellish the ordeal was, perhaps Kronig was correct in his views, and this is why they rallied to support and demand hospitals to use the procedure. Although I feel some may have felt like this, others just may have wanted a taste of the movies, as it had glamorised twilight birth. Others were eventually forced to hospital because midwives had been swept aside for obstetricians and trained midwives were hard to find, and others, because of the introduction of insurance felt if they would be covered anyway, then perhaps they would be safer, because if their baby or self were at risk, they would not die as a result of the complications. Little did they know that the obstetrician was THE complication.
I highly defend us women and disrepute the claims that we all wanted to suffer less and all had ‘tokophobia’ (an intense fear of birthing). If we did, then publicity ideas like that of Edward Bernays would not be needed to manipulate our view. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, son of Anne (Freud’s sister) and Ely Bernays (brother of Freud’s wife Martha). Bernays incidentally knew from childhood his Jewish wife Doris Fleishman, who was the first American citizen to gain a passport in her maiden name; she had a big influence upon and admiration from fellow feminists. Bernays claimed that through watching his wife’s life work, she and her feminist colleagues proved thoroughly his theories (Henry,2012) that people could be controlled as easily as a car, you just had to understand what the gasoline was.
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind…is it not possible to control and regiment the masses without them knowing it…just as a motorist can regulate the speed of his car by manipulating the flow of gasoline” (Bernay’s, PR, Ewen, 1996, pg169).
Bernays bragged of how he talked the suffragettes into a march, which he infiltrated with beautiful rich upper class ladies to be photographed smoking. This engineered front page advertisement doubled the sales of ‘lucky cigarettes’ and changed social values; a woman began to smoke wherever she chose, and now fashionably. So it is widely accepted that he was in a position to, and had manipulated the suffragettes. Bernays’ publishing worked on political agendas at the White House, engineering positions of interest during the first world war, commenting that if public relations could infiltrate peace talks during war, they could infiltrate anything (Communicating Politics, Sanders, 2008). As he did so well infiltrating the feminist movement openly, had close relations with the suffragettes and was a politically paid advocate, we could then wonder how well he may have done without bragging, after all his theory was just that, manipulating others without their knowledge.
Twilight birth was everywhere; a movie motion picture made by Dr Schloessingk (understudy of Kronig and Gauss in Germany who came to the US to promote this work) was showcased in several American countries, alongside prominent leading female advocates lecturing before or after the film. Dr Schloessingk also summarised a small monologue from over 100 volumes of literature, condensed for administration in America, if the obstetrician chose to use it. Books, Magazines, Newspapers were full of individual stories. Journalists Tracey and Lauppe infiltrated the Freidburg hospital secretly to give birth and write about the experience, as they felt they had to; ‘relieve one half of humanity from it’s antique burden of suffering which the other half of humanity has never understood’ (The Wondrous Story of Anaesthesia, Eger et al, pg 852, 2014).
Socialites/ celebrities such as Mrs John Jacob ‘Astor’, and others shared their romantic experiences, either through feminism and suffragette action or propaganda. They rallied stores and invited propagandists to take on their cause. The suffragettes understood Bernays’ work well and devoted huge efforts to forever be in the limelight to persuade women of their ideas.
Mary Dennett, the field secretary of the Massachusetts Suffrage Association, also formed Voluntary Parenthood League, Later Planned Parenthood under feminist Marguerite Sanger, as well as being the first women to produce sexual education pamphlets, and was a huge advocate for birth control. Mary co-founded ‘the national twilight sleep association’ in New York in 1913 to promote, lecture and form branch organizations with Mrs C. Temple Emmett, Julian Heath and Cecil Stewart. Mary Dennett claimed she left the suffragettes in 1915 because she felt they only expressed the opinions that they were paid to have.
Francis Carmody was a massive advocate of twilight sleep and founded the brooklyn twilight sleep hospital with her attorney husband in 1914; to many she became the face of twilight sleep. Her first birth had been an ordeal that she openly described as horrific, and her second birth was at the freiburg hospital in Germany, performed in a manner as it should ideally be done. Carmody raved of her wonderful experience and promoted above and beyond what she believed to be a fantastic birthing method that all women were entitled to. However a side effect of haemorrhaging, which some believed was due to the drug cocktail scolpamine and morphine, took her life in 1915 whilst in labor with her third child. Her husband refutes that twilight birth was to blame, but hemorrhage is a side effect of this drug cocktail being given in labor according to the literature review monologue that was completed in 1915 by Hellman.
The romantic and the real
Twilight birth was romanticised as being the dream birth, which eased all pain and suffering. Women were to be given the drug cocktail of scolpamine and morphine. Pain was to be reduced and all memories erased. Women fell asleep and awoke with a great appetite and a child they were unaware of birthing. They took a week or so to recover and then were fit to resume all duties.
we can say that under proper surroundings and under proper conditions and in properly selected cases this treatment is ideal. Conducted along the lines laid down by Gauss, it is absolutely safe for mother and child.”(Hellman, 1915).
Although I will discuss later that even when the ‘proper’ twilight birth was performed, there where risks of parental bonding difficulties. However if we assume as he says, that it could be safe when performed correctly, then when we standardize this treatment, we take away the one to one monitoring, the psychological evaluations, the pre-drug sensitivity tests, the constant monitoring to ensure drug amounts are safe for mother and baby; we have a really dodgy situation.
Women in hospitals were all to be given the same amount of scolpamine and morphine, with no individual differentiation. This resulted in mass delusions and hysterical behaviour. Because the cocktail mixture was causing maternal and infant deaths, the morphine became reduced, so the pain relief was reduced, but the amount of a hallucinogenic, memory loss inducing drug remained the same. This made the pain heightened, but the memory still erased, and delusions still apparent.
Hysterical, delusional women, in full labor pain, were strapped to beds, tied down and even put into high cribs to stop them attacking themselves and others. They soon had to use lamb’s wool straps to reduce markings on the wrists and stop husbands from asking questions. Women were often put in gowns like straight jackets and were given cushioned head wear to ensure safety as they would beat their
heads against things.
The next day, however, most women were totally unaware of what they went through, having their vaginas cut as they screamed in pain and birthed in the most unnatural of circumstances.
The drawback that some of these women were very aware of was a massive detachment from their babies, and in the end, this was the reason that forced the end of twilight sleep. Jewish Dr Joseph De Lee, after counsel with feminist leaders, performed his version of twilight birth for years, and up until the seventies some hospitals in America continued with this method of cruelty at a psychotic level.
Brief History of Obstetrics
Queen Victoria was given an anaesthetic by her Dr during birth. Obstetrics became a man’s domain and forceps and anaesthetics were his most prized tool kit. This was BLIND science, literally, as it was indecent to look at your hands when you put a large sharp metal object into a woman’s vagina. All training had been done on mannequins and sand bag babies before the obstetrician met the women he could not look at, whilst treating her; it is plain crazy. This was the beginning of one man replacing a team of up to twenty women.
Social births, as they were afterwards referred as, were when women from the neighbourhood and family would attend each other for up to a week in shifts, sometimes ten-twenty women, taking turns, to cook clean and watch each other’s children as the birth was aided, maintaining the perfect team to support the mother in labor. Although I feel this is a natural labour, a loving and caring community who depended upon each other, I also feel it could sometimes be a scary one when things went wrong, and this would have given women hope in hospitals, but we have to remember when I mention this, that birth is normal, not abnormal, contrary to the obstetric base of belief and that intervention is for necessity, not normality. A mother, who previously may have died alongside her child in labor, could have the fortunate intervention of forceps and pain relief to keep them both alive if she was a middle class or upper class lady.
What appears to be an obstetrics fashion, though, is to bring out all guns blazing and ensure everything is sped up, causing mothers and babies back in the 18th century to have forceps blades slice part of their babies and themselves in the rush to overturn nature. This new-found obstetrics, one man replacing over ten women, began the removal of midwifery which was to later return on demand. Working women felt the bite of this when they could no longer rally a midwife and friends to their aid, as obstetricians and hospitals were taking over the role, some working class women hated the thought of going to the hospital, and had previously birthed successfully at home, but with the older generation leaving them behind, and communities no longer having the strength they once had, they did as the rest did, reluctantly going into hospital to face interventions and drugs that she had said she did not want.
Today “obstetricians employed in the United States typically earn salaries in the range from $95,096 to $299,438” (Doctor Salaries). Surely this is not a career path anyone would want to lose. So harmful intervention will continue in the way it began, mostly unnecessary.
Lasting effects of this shift
The effects of this were high rates of maternal deaths, loss of community led care and midwifery skills, and a parent who found it difficult to bond with her child.
The lasting effects of a mother and child who cannot bond can form attachment disorders, and become what is coined insecurely attached, is a mother who normally avoids touching her baby, handles baby awkwardly and behaves negatively or resentfully to her baby. In these cases the baby can later be at risk of physical and mental neglect at the hands of mom; the risks are higher when no bond has been established. Insecure attachment can have a negative effect upon the development of the baby. His cognitive abilities may suffer as he is unwilling to leave mom as he does not feel secure enough to explore. Physical development may suffer. The baby may not thrive because mom will not be able to place her baby’s needs before her own, for example not night feeding. Language may be impaired as language develops through interaction from the main care giver and the baby. Emotional development will be hindered as the baby will get stressed quickly and may be unable to cope with situations that produce anxiety for a child. Social development may be delayed as trust is something they have no confidence in. In later life children struggle to have healthy relationships and often suffer some sort of personality disorder. Insecure attachment is exactly what it says; people are insecure and unattached to the world around them.
I am not suggesting all moms who have found bonding difficult will have a child with developmental delays, and later personality disorders as some moms cope fantastically well in these circumstances, and no alterations are noted, but these are very possible and common outcomes that need highlighting. However, the effects on moms are usually the same; they hate themselves for not wanting to mother their child and this continual self hate alters their own being and behaviours.
Conclusion
I understand the critic would claim that today we do not suffer the loss of babies and mothers like we once did. I would argue that sanitation, better housing, and the fact that most people in western countries eat more than they did 120 years ago are all reasons for this. I would also like to point out that the money circulating in healthcare in the western world is more than enough to ensure real care for all, and that in America infant mortality statistics are shocking for a country with it’s so called intellectual and technological growth.
I think the highly unlikely ‘coincidence’ of the elimination of midwives, the insurance covering labors attended to in hospital care, and the highly publicized twilight sleep, all brought women into hospitals (Brought to bed, Leavitt, 1986). The consequence of this at a micro level caused injury to baby and mom, sometimes fatal. Whether or not a mom remembered their ordeal in unconscionable hands, they went through it, it happened and they were aware in that moment. Mothers and babies found difficulty bonding, and women missed their moment of enormous self-pride.
On a macro level, we have lost ten to twenty strong women who loved each other, helped each other and were the nurses of each other. We have lost a way of birthing that hit upon all areas of society. We parented together; if you helped birth a baby, that baby was a part of your world, a part of your care, and your responsibility. What a perception that would give you for your community and nation. We would be proud to love ‘our own’ if we birthed them all, and nobody would be able to shame our stance of loving our people if we really felt that they were OUR PEOPLE.
I believe women have lost something beautiful. What could have been an advancement of emergency care became sordid and evil, as usual with a perfect balance of activity that was intentional by some and unintentional by others.
The war to take your spirit and your strength is here and now. I am under no illusion that our nature is under attack, and bonds must be broken. That the love, care, and respect we had for our communities’ fellow man has been removed as clinically as our babies were.
Source Article from http://renegadetribune.com/hospital-births-replaced-home-births/
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