|
|
Excerpt from ‘Get Me Out’: A History of Childbirth
 February 2nd, 2010  
Eve, the first woman to become pregnant, suffered from excruciating pain during the delivery because she cheated on her diet. God told her to not eat an apple, but she was tempted by the serpent’s claim that the forbidden fruit would endow her and Adam with worldly knowledge. In God’s fury, he transformed the serpent into a belly-crawling creature. Then he turned to Eve and said, “I greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”
The thought pattern was set. Women deserved pain. In 1591, Eufame Maclayne was burned at the stake for asking for pain relief during the birth of her twins. Attitudes did not change much when safer anesthetics were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most people thought they were fine for surgery but not childbirth. Devout men and women believed that the pain in childbirth was a heavenly duty. If you couldn’t endure the agony of childbirth, how would you handle the ups and downs of motherhood? (Why no equivalent hazing process for fathers? Vasectomies without pain meds?) Pain relief became somewhat acceptable when Queen Victoria asked Dr. John Snow for a whiff of chloroform to ease her delivery during the birth of Prince Leopold on April 7, 1853. But only somewhat.
Birth from antiquity through the Middle Ages was an all-girls affair orchestrated by men who had never seen a baby born. It was considered obscene for a man to enter the delivery room, yet they wrote the guidebooks, doling out advice based on hunches handed down over generations. (In 1522, Dr. Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room.) Their words of wisdom (or of ignorance) were a man-made concoction of myth, herbs, astrology, and superstition. Nearly everything was about good sex and good thoughts and eating and drinking the right things. It was not simple. As far back as 1500 BC, probably even earlier, women had access to all sorts of explicit information about sex, pregnancy tests, abortions, and contraceptives.
If you were lucky to be in a city, you may have been helped by a licensed midwife (European cities started educating and registering midwives around the fifteenth century); if you were in the rural outback, you may have had an uneducated but experienced midwife or a female family friend. In any event, you were surrounded by a gaggle of women. Oddly enough, expectant women were not supposed to be catered to, but to cater. You were expected to act as hostess and serve the aptly coined “groaning beer” and “groaning cakes.” Friends of the laboring woman were called “gossips,” as in God sibs, as in siblings of God. You can assume they did what all women would do under the circumstances — sit around and talk about other people. So what was once an epithet for “close-to- God” morphed into a term for “behind-the-back chatter.”
Women were told how to speed labor (a concoction of herbs), what to eat (nothing too spicy), what to drink (not too much wine), and what to think (no angry thoughts). Women were told how long to breast-feed and when to hand the baby to a wet nurse. They were told to have enough sex because a splash of sperm moistens the womb. They were also told not to have too much sex because it wears out the baby-making machinery. That’s why “whores have so seldome children,” one guide said, because “satiety gluts that womb.” In France, pregnant women rarely left the house after dark because they were told that if they looked at the moon, the baby would become a lunatic or sleepwalker.
Reprinted from Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank by Randi Hutter Epstein. Copyright 2010 by Randi Hutter Epstein.
Source
Related
- Excerpt from ‘Get Me Out’: A History of Childbirth
Eve, the first woman to become pregnant, suffered from excruciating pain during the delivery because she cheated on her diet. God told her to not eat an apple, but she was tempted by the serpent’s claim that the forbidden fruit would endow her and Adam with worldly knowledge. In God’s fury, he transformed the serpent into a belly-crawling creature. Then he turned to Eve and said, “I greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”
The thought pattern was set. Women deserved pain. In 1591, Eufame Maclayne was burned at the stake for asking for pain relief during the birth of her twins. Attitudes did not change much when safer anesthetics were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most people thought they were fine for surgery but not childbirth. Devout men and women believed that the pain in childbirth was a heavenly duty. If you couldn’t endure the agony of childbirth, how would you handle the ups and downs of motherhood? (Why no equivalent hazing process for fathers? Vasectomies without pain meds?) Pain relief became somewhat acceptable when Queen Victoria asked Dr. John Snow for a whiff of chloroform to ease her delivery during the birth of Prince Leopold on April 7, 1853. But only somewhat.
Birth from antiquity through the Middle Ages was an all-girls affair orchestrated by men who had never seen a baby born. It was considered obscene for a man to enter the delivery room, yet they wrote the guidebooks, doling out advice based on hunches handed down over generations. (In 1522, Dr. Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room.) Their words of wisdom (or of ignorance) were a man-made concoction of myth, herbs, astrology, and superstition. Nearly everything was about good sex and good thoughts and eating and drinking the right things. It was not simple. As far back as 1500 BC, probably even earlier, women had access to all sorts of explicit information about sex, pregnancy tests, abortions, and contraceptives.
If you were lucky to be in a city, you may have been helped by a licensed midwife (European cities started educating and registering midwives around the fifteenth century); if you were in the rural outback, you may have had an uneducated but experienced midwife or a female family friend. In any event, you were surrounded by a gaggle of women. Oddly enough, expectant women were not supposed to be catered to, but to cater. You were expected to act as hostess and serve the aptly coined “groaning beer” and “groaning cakes.” Friends of the laboring woman were called “gossips,” as in God sibs, as in siblings of God. You can assume they did what all women would do under the circumstances — sit around and talk about other people. So what was once an epithet for “close-to- God” morphed into a term for “behind-the-back chatter.”
Women were told how to speed labor (a concoction of herbs), what to eat (nothing too spicy), what to drink (not too much wine), and what to think (no angry thoughts). Women were told how long to breast-feed and when to hand the baby to a wet nurse. They were told to have enough sex because a splash of sperm moistens the womb. They were also told not to have too much sex because it wears out the baby-making machinery. That’s why “whores have so seldome children,” one guide said, because “satiety gluts that womb.” In France, pregnant women rarely left the house after dark because they were told that if they looked at the moon, the baby would become a lunatic or sleepwalker.
Reprinted from Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank by Randi Hutter Epstein. Copyright 2010 by Randi Hutter Epstein.
Source
- Black women at increased risk for weakened heart muscle at childbirth
Black women are at significantly increased risk for developing a potentially deadly weakening of the heart muscle around the time of childbirth, researchers report.
A study examining the incidence of peripartum cardiomyopathy in women who gave birth at a Medical College of Georgia’s teaching hospital between July 2003 and July 2008, showed that while 55 percent of the women were white, 93 percent of those who developed cardiomyopathy were black, said Dr. Mindy B. Gentry, an MCG cardiologist.
“When it hits, it’s totally unexpected because these are young, otherwise healthy women with young children. (They aren’t patients) you’d expect to have any sort of health problem much less heart failure,” Dr. Gentry said.
Other risk factors include hypertension, being unmarried, smoking during pregnancy and having more than two previous pregnancies, but African-American race was the most important predictor, said Dr. Gentry, corresponding author on the study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Two previously published studies from Haiti and South Africa found a higher incidence of peripartum cardiomyopathy than in other parts of the world but essentially all the participants were black. The heterogeneous population giving birth at MCGHealth Medical Center made it easier to assess the effect of race, Dr. Gentry noted.
Further research is needed to identify potential environmental and/or genetic factors associated with African descent that explain the increased risk, the researchers said. They have begun follow up studies looking for any racial differences in healthy hearts following delivery, such as how much blood is ejected with each beat.
Peripartum cardiomyopathy typically occurs in the last month of pregnancy or the first few months after delivery. Symptoms include shortness of breath, particularly when lying down, as excess fluid congests the lungs and the rest of the body. The suffocating backlog is caused by an enlarged, stiff heart muscle that no longer pumps efficiently.
Drugs can improve pumping efficiency. About half the time, the condition spontaneously reverses but it can cause debilitation and death, with mortality rates ranging from 15-56 percent. Of the 28 women with peripartum cardiomyopathy in the MCG study, one patient died and another required a heart transplant.
In every pregnancy, the blood volume increases about 50 percent to accommodate increased demands from the placenta and baby. Heart rate increases to help circulate the extra blood, Dr. Gentry said. Black women also are at increased risk for abnormal increases in blood pressure, called preeclampsia, that can occur late in pregnancy.
- Early Ectopic Pregnancy Symptoms – Tips To Identify It
When the tubes of a woman are either blocked or damaged then the fertilised ova does not go to the uterus but attaches itself to the walls of the fallopian tube and starts developing there. Ectopic pregnancies or tubal pregnancies as they are also called are those where the fertilised egg fails to reach the [...]
- Baby No.8 on the way for the mother of all surrogates
After giving birth to seven babies, Jill Hawkins was happy to call time on her career as a surrogate mother.
But then she found she missed being pregnant so much that she decided to do it all again.
The 45-year-old was implanted with two embryos from a professional couple in their early thirties.
And last night Miss Hawkins said she was ‘absolutely ecstatic’ after a home pregnancy test revealed at least one of the embryos has started to grow in her womb.
It will be the first time she has carried a child not from her own eggs.
She will find out later this month if she is expecting one baby or twins.
Miss Hawkins, who has no children of her own, will hand over the baby – or babies – to the couple while still in the maternity ward.
She insists that she has no desire to keep a baby, and that she is continuing to be a surrogate mother because she loves being pregnant.
All the previous children she has given away have been conceived using her own eggs and sperm from the father which was artificially inseminated.
Miss Hawkins, who will be paid around £12,000 in ‘expenses’ for her pregnancy, had spent 18 months trying for an eighth baby, but without success.
‘My eggs have just packed up which is not unusual for a woman of my age,’ she said.
‘I was worried that because my eggs aren’t as strong as they were that the rest of me might not be up to it either.
‘But I’ve had scans and there’s nothing wrong with my womb so being a host should not be a problem.
In a previous interview, she insisted she would not undergo IVF treatment to become a surrogate mother for the eight time.
But it seems that the temptation was too great and Miss Hawkins stepped in to help a 32-year-old mother-of-one who is unable to become pregnant again because of the powerful drugs she had to take after a lung transplant.
The woman and her husband had six embryos frozen before the transplant – two of which are now in Miss Hawkins’ womb.
Miss Hawkins, from Brighton, said: ‘It’s a new experience this time because they are not my biological children. I feel different.
‘I feel there’s not so much pressure on me because it’s not my genes. I’m just providing the womb for the baby to grow in.
She added: ‘Being a host is more of a hassle because of all the fertility drugs you have to take.
‘The side effects can make you feel weepy one moment and then bursting with rage the next.’
Miss Hawkins, a legal secretary, is the most prolific surrogate mother living in Britain.
Carole Horlock, from Stevenage in Hertfordshire, who has given birth to 12 surrogate babies, held the title before moving to France four years ago.
Source
- What Are Dots Of Light Floating In A Darkened Room?
When 4 or 5 years old, I awoke, in the middle of the night, in an orphanage bedroom to see lots of dots of lights in a darkened room, floating around and lighting the room. The rest of the kids were sleeping. When I stood up in the crib, I spread the blanket to cover [...]
Excerpt from ‘Get Me Out’: A History of Childbirth
February 2nd, 2010
Eve, the first woman to become pregnant, suffered from excruciating pain during the delivery because she cheated on her diet. God told her to not eat an apple, but she was tempted by the serpent’s claim that the forbidden fruit would endow her and Adam with worldly knowledge. In God’s fury, he transformed the serpent into a belly-crawling creature. Then he turned to Eve and said, “I greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”
The thought pattern was set. Women deserved pain. In 1591, Eufame Maclayne was burned at the stake for asking for pain relief during the birth of her twins. Attitudes did not change much when safer anesthetics were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most people thought they were fine for surgery but not childbirth. Devout men and women believed that the pain in childbirth was a heavenly duty. If you couldn’t endure the agony of childbirth, how would you handle the ups and downs of motherhood? (Why no equivalent hazing process for fathers? Vasectomies without pain meds?) Pain relief became somewhat acceptable when Queen Victoria asked Dr. John Snow for a whiff of chloroform to ease her delivery during the birth of Prince Leopold on April 7, 1853. But only somewhat.
Birth from antiquity through the Middle Ages was an all-girls affair orchestrated by men who had never seen a baby born. It was considered obscene for a man to enter the delivery room, yet they wrote the guidebooks, doling out advice based on hunches handed down over generations. (In 1522, Dr. Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room.) Their words of wisdom (or of ignorance) were a man-made concoction of myth, herbs, astrology, and superstition. Nearly everything was about good sex and good thoughts and eating and drinking the right things. It was not simple. As far back as 1500 BC, probably even earlier, women had access to all sorts of explicit information about sex, pregnancy tests, abortions, and contraceptives.
If you were lucky to be in a city, you may have been helped by a licensed midwife (European cities started educating and registering midwives around the fifteenth century); if you were in the rural outback, you may have had an uneducated but experienced midwife or a female family friend. In any event, you were surrounded by a gaggle of women. Oddly enough, expectant women were not supposed to be catered to, but to cater. You were expected to act as hostess and serve the aptly coined “groaning beer” and “groaning cakes.” Friends of the laboring woman were called “gossips,” as in God sibs, as in siblings of God. You can assume they did what all women would do under the circumstances — sit around and talk about other people. So what was once an epithet for “close-to- God” morphed into a term for “behind-the-back chatter.”
Women were told how to speed labor (a concoction of herbs), what to eat (nothing too spicy), what to drink (not too much wine), and what to think (no angry thoughts). Women were told how long to breast-feed and when to hand the baby to a wet nurse. They were told to have enough sex because a splash of sperm moistens the womb. They were also told not to have too much sex because it wears out the baby-making machinery. That’s why “whores have so seldome children,” one guide said, because “satiety gluts that womb.” In France, pregnant women rarely left the house after dark because they were told that if they looked at the moon, the baby would become a lunatic or sleepwalker.
Reprinted from Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank by Randi Hutter Epstein. Copyright 2010 by Randi Hutter Epstein.
Source
Related
- Excerpt from ‘Get Me Out’: A History of Childbirth
Eve, the first woman to become pregnant, suffered from excruciating pain during the delivery because she cheated on her diet. God told her to not eat an apple, but she was tempted by the serpent’s claim that the forbidden fruit would endow her and Adam with worldly knowledge. In God’s fury, he transformed the serpent into a belly-crawling creature. Then he turned to Eve and said, “I greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”
The thought pattern was set. Women deserved pain. In 1591, Eufame Maclayne was burned at the stake for asking for pain relief during the birth of her twins. Attitudes did not change much when safer anesthetics were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most people thought they were fine for surgery but not childbirth. Devout men and women believed that the pain in childbirth was a heavenly duty. If you couldn’t endure the agony of childbirth, how would you handle the ups and downs of motherhood? (Why no equivalent hazing process for fathers? Vasectomies without pain meds?) Pain relief became somewhat acceptable when Queen Victoria asked Dr. John Snow for a whiff of chloroform to ease her delivery during the birth of Prince Leopold on April 7, 1853. But only somewhat.
Birth from antiquity through the Middle Ages was an all-girls affair orchestrated by men who had never seen a baby born. It was considered obscene for a man to enter the delivery room, yet they wrote the guidebooks, doling out advice based on hunches handed down over generations. (In 1522, Dr. Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room.) Their words of wisdom (or of ignorance) were a man-made concoction of myth, herbs, astrology, and superstition. Nearly everything was about good sex and good thoughts and eating and drinking the right things. It was not simple. As far back as 1500 BC, probably even earlier, women had access to all sorts of explicit information about sex, pregnancy tests, abortions, and contraceptives.
If you were lucky to be in a city, you may have been helped by a licensed midwife (European cities started educating and registering midwives around the fifteenth century); if you were in the rural outback, you may have had an uneducated but experienced midwife or a female family friend. In any event, you were surrounded by a gaggle of women. Oddly enough, expectant women were not supposed to be catered to, but to cater. You were expected to act as hostess and serve the aptly coined “groaning beer” and “groaning cakes.” Friends of the laboring woman were called “gossips,” as in God sibs, as in siblings of God. You can assume they did what all women would do under the circumstances — sit around and talk about other people. So what was once an epithet for “close-to- God” morphed into a term for “behind-the-back chatter.”
Women were told how to speed labor (a concoction of herbs), what to eat (nothing too spicy), what to drink (not too much wine), and what to think (no angry thoughts). Women were told how long to breast-feed and when to hand the baby to a wet nurse. They were told to have enough sex because a splash of sperm moistens the womb. They were also told not to have too much sex because it wears out the baby-making machinery. That’s why “whores have so seldome children,” one guide said, because “satiety gluts that womb.” In France, pregnant women rarely left the house after dark because they were told that if they looked at the moon, the baby would become a lunatic or sleepwalker.
Reprinted from Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank by Randi Hutter Epstein. Copyright 2010 by Randi Hutter Epstein.
Source
- Black women at increased risk for weakened heart muscle at childbirth
Black women are at significantly increased risk for developing a potentially deadly weakening of the heart muscle around the time of childbirth, researchers report.
A study examining the incidence of peripartum cardiomyopathy in women who gave birth at a Medical College of Georgia’s teaching hospital between July 2003 and July 2008, showed that while 55 percent of the women were white, 93 percent of those who developed cardiomyopathy were black, said Dr. Mindy B. Gentry, an MCG cardiologist.
“When it hits, it’s totally unexpected because these are young, otherwise healthy women with young children. (They aren’t patients) you’d expect to have any sort of health problem much less heart failure,” Dr. Gentry said.
Other risk factors include hypertension, being unmarried, smoking during pregnancy and having more than two previous pregnancies, but African-American race was the most important predictor, said Dr. Gentry, corresponding author on the study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Two previously published studies from Haiti and South Africa found a higher incidence of peripartum cardiomyopathy than in other parts of the world but essentially all the participants were black. The heterogeneous population giving birth at MCGHealth Medical Center made it easier to assess the effect of race, Dr. Gentry noted.
Further research is needed to identify potential environmental and/or genetic factors associated with African descent that explain the increased risk, the researchers said. They have begun follow up studies looking for any racial differences in healthy hearts following delivery, such as how much blood is ejected with each beat.
Peripartum cardiomyopathy typically occurs in the last month of pregnancy or the first few months after delivery. Symptoms include shortness of breath, particularly when lying down, as excess fluid congests the lungs and the rest of the body. The suffocating backlog is caused by an enlarged, stiff heart muscle that no longer pumps efficiently.
Drugs can improve pumping efficiency. About half the time, the condition spontaneously reverses but it can cause debilitation and death, with mortality rates ranging from 15-56 percent. Of the 28 women with peripartum cardiomyopathy in the MCG study, one patient died and another required a heart transplant.
In every pregnancy, the blood volume increases about 50 percent to accommodate increased demands from the placenta and baby. Heart rate increases to help circulate the extra blood, Dr. Gentry said. Black women also are at increased risk for abnormal increases in blood pressure, called preeclampsia, that can occur late in pregnancy.
- Early Ectopic Pregnancy Symptoms – Tips To Identify It
When the tubes of a woman are either blocked or damaged then the fertilised ova does not go to the uterus but attaches itself to the walls of the fallopian tube and starts developing there. Ectopic pregnancies or tubal pregnancies as they are also called are those where the fertilised egg fails to reach the [...]
- Baby No.8 on the way for the mother of all surrogates
After giving birth to seven babies, Jill Hawkins was happy to call time on her career as a surrogate mother.
But then she found she missed being pregnant so much that she decided to do it all again.
The 45-year-old was implanted with two embryos from a professional couple in their early thirties.
And last night Miss Hawkins said she was ‘absolutely ecstatic’ after a home pregnancy test revealed at least one of the embryos has started to grow in her womb.
It will be the first time she has carried a child not from her own eggs.
She will find out later this month if she is expecting one baby or twins.
Miss Hawkins, who has no children of her own, will hand over the baby – or babies – to the couple while still in the maternity ward.
She insists that she has no desire to keep a baby, and that she is continuing to be a surrogate mother because she loves being pregnant.
All the previous children she has given away have been conceived using her own eggs and sperm from the father which was artificially inseminated.
Miss Hawkins, who will be paid around £12,000 in ‘expenses’ for her pregnancy, had spent 18 months trying for an eighth baby, but without success.
‘My eggs have just packed up which is not unusual for a woman of my age,’ she said.
‘I was worried that because my eggs aren’t as strong as they were that the rest of me might not be up to it either.
‘But I’ve had scans and there’s nothing wrong with my womb so being a host should not be a problem.
In a previous interview, she insisted she would not undergo IVF treatment to become a surrogate mother for the eight time.
But it seems that the temptation was too great and Miss Hawkins stepped in to help a 32-year-old mother-of-one who is unable to become pregnant again because of the powerful drugs she had to take after a lung transplant.
The woman and her husband had six embryos frozen before the transplant – two of which are now in Miss Hawkins’ womb.
Miss Hawkins, from Brighton, said: ‘It’s a new experience this time because they are not my biological children. I feel different.
‘I feel there’s not so much pressure on me because it’s not my genes. I’m just providing the womb for the baby to grow in.
She added: ‘Being a host is more of a hassle because of all the fertility drugs you have to take.
‘The side effects can make you feel weepy one moment and then bursting with rage the next.’
Miss Hawkins, a legal secretary, is the most prolific surrogate mother living in Britain.
Carole Horlock, from Stevenage in Hertfordshire, who has given birth to 12 surrogate babies, held the title before moving to France four years ago.
Source
- What Are Dots Of Light Floating In A Darkened Room?
When 4 or 5 years old, I awoke, in the middle of the night, in an orphanage bedroom to see lots of dots of lights in a darkened room, floating around and lighting the room. The rest of the kids were sleeping. When I stood up in the crib, I spread the blanket to cover [...]
|
|
