Taking Great Pains
Written By Tina Cassidy
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An abridged history of pain relief in childbirth.
circa 1914-1945: twilight sleep takes over
Chloroform, which physicans often used during labor in the 1800s, had a downside. It could make breathing diffcult, even deadly, for the newborn, and the drug was iffy to dispense; you splashed some on a handkerchief and hoped for the best. But by 1914 doctors in Freiburg, Germany, were using a much more precise technique called Daemmerschlaf, or "Twilight Sleep," in which the mother was injected with morphine and scopolamine (a drug that caused amnesia) so that she'd be in a state of finely balanced semi-consciousness, without feeling pain and with scant memory of what happened.
A few U.S. hospitals began offering the injections, but suffragists rallied for more. The end of birth pain, they felt, was part of their emancipation.
Despite physicians' initial reservations, Twilight Sleep became standard procedure. As Edith Wharton writes of a mother-to-be in her 1927 novel, Twilight Sleep: "She had the blind dread of physical pain common also to most of the young women of her set. But all that was easily managed nowadays. . . . There ought to be no Pain. Nothing but Beauty."
circa 1945-1960: cruelty in maternity wards
By the time the postwar baby boom got into full swing, the sheer number of women having babies under Twilight Sleep raised a new issue: The method dulled the pain, but at what cost? Women were restrained and strapped to gurneys for their own protection as they thrashed around in bed, freed from their inhibitions by the drugs. Some had their legs clamped in stirrups for hours in order to be ready when the doctor arrived.
Mothers began to speak out. In 1958, an article headlined "Cruelty in Maternity Wards" ran in Ladies' Home Journal, and described in detail the "tortures that go on in modern delivery rooms." A flood of women sent the magazine their own horror stories. "I've seen patients with no skin on their wrists from fighting the straps," a nurse from Canada wrote.
"Just let a few husbands in the delivery rooms and let them watch what goes on there," said one reader from Detroit. "That's all it will take — they'll change it!"
An Indiana mom claimed, "The whole thing is a horrible nightmare."
