Word: childbirth
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...showed the same enthusiasm. All of them had given birth without general anesthetics in St. Mary's Hospital, where more (1,182) babies have been delivered by natural child birth than in any other hospital in the U.S. The fifth-birthday celebration of St. Mary's natural-childbirth program last week reflected the growing acceptance of a method that was first tried (and denounced) in the U.S. less than 20 years ago, and is now at least a part-time practice in maternity wards from Long Island to Los Angeles...
Fear & Pain. Modern concepts of natural childbirth were first suggested more than 40 years ago by British Obstetrician Grantly Dick Read, who taught that bearing children is not necessarily painful, that pain comes only because of fear, which may interfere with contractions of uterine muscles that open the womb and push the child out through the birth canal. Pavlovian psychologists in Soviet Russia took Dick Read's idea one step farther. Both fear and pain, they reasoned, could be overcome by conditioning. During the 1940s, Soviet doctors began educating mothers to be unafraid of childbirth, and by 1951 hospitals...
Visiting Russia in 1951, French Obstetrician Fernand Lamaze brought psycho-prophylaxis, a new form of childbirth preparation, back to France with him, began insisting that maternity patients get ready for birth with a routine of exercise. He taught his patients chest breathing to prepare them for the time when their abdominal muscles would help expel the baby from the uterus. He schooled his patients in effleurage, a simple massage of the lower abdomen that serves to lessen muscular tension during contractions. Most important, Lamaze taught women to relax while participating actively in labor...
Sister Charitas' observations are based on sound medical theory. Obstetricians are increasingly aware that an overdependence on anesthetics can lead to fetal damage. On the other hand, nobody expects mothers going through natural childbirth to be martyrs. St. Mary's Dr. Carl Dreyer tells all natural-childbirth mothers in the delivery room: "Any time this ceases to be fun, we can give you gas." But a surprising number never ask for it, prefer instead to reap the psychological benefits of wide-awake participation in their baby's birth. "It is common for a natural-childbirth mother right...
...such luck. The ape woman dies in childbirth. The spiv, robbed by a cruel fate of his bearded breadwinner, faces destitution-or even employment. But at the last minute he is saved by a master stroke of showmanship: he discovers that the public, which paid good money to see the ape woman alive, will also pay good money to see her dead...