How Normal Childbirth Got Trapped on the Wrong Side of History:
The perfect storm that turned healthy childbearing women into the patients of a surgical specialty, and normal childbirth into a surgical procedure
~ the last and most important UNTOLD story of the 20th Century
Unpublished manuscript by faith gibson, LM, all rights reserved, 2005
This book-2-be is the story of childbearing and childbirth practice both before and after the relatively modern (late 1800s) discoveries of the biological sciences that were to give us what we not think of as “modern medicine”.
This account acknowledges two phases that were difficult and dangers for mothers and babies, that in many ways are two sides of the same coin.
The first are historical times (pre-antibiotic epoch of human history) and contemporary places (i.e. third world countries & areas of the world with misogynist dictators!)) where the inherent dangers in pregnancy and childbirth birth in times when and where that are no medically effective treatments for the relatively common complications of childbearing (high blood pressure, Rh-negative mother, placenta previa, postpartum hemorrhage, etc).
The second the historical/contemporary issues during the 20th and early 21st century in the United States that were the unintentional product of the newly-minted hybrid profession of obstetrics (formerly a medical discipline that was part of a family doctor’s practice) and gynecology (a long-time surgical discipline associated with the pathologies of female reproduction) during the last decade of the 19th century (1890-99) and the first 50 years of the 20th century.
