Twilight sleep was introduced with the combination of morphine, to relieve pain, and scopolamine and amnesic which caused women to have no memories of the process of giving birth to the child. Upper-class women initially welcomed it as a symbol of the medical process, although its negative effects were later published. “Dr. Joseph Lee describes childbirth as a disease process that harms both mothers and babies “often and greatly.” He said that if birth were properly seen as a destructive pathology rather than a normal function, "midwifery would be impossible to even mention." In the first issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, DeLee proposed a sequence of interventions aimed at saving women from the “natural evils of labor.” Interventions included routine use of sedatives, ether, episiotomies, and forceps. (Quote put) As the years went by more and more midwifery was not used in the middle and upper classes, the lower class were the ones who used midwifery the most because they couldn't afford to go to the hospital and pay for them and a doctor to assist at childbirth. The midwife began a slow uprising in the United States in the form of nurse-midwife, when the Frontier Nursing Service was founded in a poor rural county in Kentucky in 1925. It was founded by Mary Breckinridge, who worked as a public health nurse for the Red Cross in France at the end of the world
tags