Labor (childbirth)

“ The determining cause of labor is seated in the womb itself. The contractions of this organ occasion the 'pains' and expel the child, assisted by the muscles of the abdomen and the diaphragm. That the assistance of the latter forces is not necessary, is conclusively proved by the occurrence of childbirth after the decease of the mother. For instance, a case is on record in which labor commenced and twins were born after the mother had been dead for three days. ”

“ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in a lecture to ladies, thus strongly states her views regarding maternity and painless childbirth:
"We must educate our daughters to think that motherhood is grand, and that God never cursed it. And this curse, if it be a curse, may be rolled off, as man has rolled away the curse of labor ”

“ C. The first stage of labor usually lasts several hours and is hard work. The mother needs to relax, rest, and be reassured. Give her water and fruit juices. In this picture the second stage of labor is well along. It is shorter than the first stage and the mother will now be pushing down with each contraction, helping to force the baby into the world. ”

“ Premature labor as resorted to on the mother’s behalf alone, putting aside the cases we have incidentally considered, where the lives of both herself and her offspring are of necessity taken into account, includes also its induction in the earlier months of pregnancy before the fœtus is viable. ”

“ SHALL PREGNANT WOMEN WORK?
1. OVER-WORKED MOTHERS.—Children born of over-worked mothers, are liable to a be dwarfed and puny race. However, their chances are better than those of the children of inactive, dependent, indolent mothers who have neither brain nor muscle to transmit to son or daughter. The truth seems to be that excessive labor, with either body or mind, is alike injurious to both men and women; and herein lies the sting of that old curse. This paragraph suggests all that need be said on the question whether pregnant women should or should not labor. ”

“ But any work that could possibly be harmful to either mother or child would instantly be interrupted. From the time a baby is born until the time it is ready to thrive on other food than mother's milk, the mother will have to be excused from socially productive labor. ”

“ In a number of towns special "Mother and Child" houses have been established where the woman worker can pass the last months of her pregnancy as well as the period of lactation and can learn the art of rearing her child. In addition to this, in order to raise the general level of the life of the mother who feeds her child by breast, every woman worker is granted an additional subsidy during the period of lactation ”

“ But they have affected women to a greater degree than men, because women are physically weaker than men and because motherhood is the natural, unalterable portion of womanhood. When work, not adapted to a woman's strength, has a detrimental influence upon her health, it is not only an injury to her as an individual, it is also an even greater injury to her as a potential mother and to her unborn children. Every physician who has patients among factory workers knows from personal experience in how many respects factory labor is injurious to the maternal functions of women. ”

“ A woman in pregnancy, as at other times, [Pg 96] should be actively employed, and if it can be in some absorbing, congenial, lucrative work, so much the better. It is the incessant nothings of woman’s work which, while accomplishing so little, yet wear out the nerves, and exhaust the patience.
“Labor is life! ”

“ We have pointed out many circumstances under which premature labor is demanded, by the rules of humanity and of medicine, for the sake of the mother’s life, and have seen that in several States it is for this cause allowed. ”

“ To give the mother an opportunity herself to feed the child, which is of great importance for its health and development, a half hour's leave after every three hours of work is granted to every woman who feeds her child by breast. Wherever possible nurseries are established at all large enterprises, where the mother is able to leave her child under proper care during her working hours and feed it during the intervals. ”

“ Such direction, indeed, should, toward the end of pregnancy, constitute the mother's sole participation in the housework.
In a general way the amount and the kind of work that a woman may be permitted to undertake during pregnancy depend upon what she has been used to. It is not unlikely that anyone who is unaccustomed to manual labor may injure her health and cause the pregnancy to end prematurely if she undertakes hard work. On the other hand, women of the working classes sometimes continue at their occupations to the natural end of pregnancy without harmful consequences. ”

“ It seldom happens that the mother who has had good prenatal care, followed by good care during and after labor, is unable to nurse her baby if she orders her own life in the way that is known to be necessary to promote and maintain the production of breast milk. ”

“ In those cases of labor, which are much the less frequent, and require no extraordinary assistence, the utmost of the real merit of these bunglers is only of the negative kind: that is to say, they have not destroyed the mother nor the child ”

“ The causes which may impede a labor, and increase its difficulties, are numerous, and they are of several different kinds—some depending upon the mother, and others upon the child. Some of these may be easily removed, or modified, but others present more serious difficulty. ”

“ Labor is sometimes induced when the mother’s pelvis is normal, but the child has grown as large as is safe in anticipation of a spontaneous labor, and particularly if the expected date of confinement has passed. ”

“ These drugs are given to infants at the breast, not because the child is ill, but to compose it to rest, in order to prevent their cries interfering with the protracted labor by which they strive to obtain a miserable subsistence. The infants become pale, tremulous, and emaciated, the joints and head enlarge, they become listless, and death at length steps in to their relief. ”

“ THE AGE AS AFFECTING LABOR. If the patient be considerably advanced in years at the time of her first pregnancy, the labor is apt to be, or rather, must necessarily be, a more difficult one than would occur earlier in life.
270In the life of any woman there is a period at which her system has become, as we say, matured, or, in other words, capable of child-bearing. After the system has become thus matured, it is evidently more natural, and consequently more healthful to bear children than not to do so. ”

“ Pregnancy and labor are not, we repeat, diseased conditions. They are healthful processes, and should be looked upon as such by every woman. Bad labors are very infrequent. It is as foolish to dread them, as it is for the railway traveller to give way to misgivings in regard to his safety. Instead of desponding, science bids the woman to look forward with cheerfulness and hope to the joys of maternity. ”

“ The birth process is called labor, and it is indeed labor, for it usually means much pain and struggle for the mother, although the baby's journey from the uterus to the world is only a few inches. It takes anywhere from an hour to two days for a baby to be born. Doctors are learning more and more how to lessen the pain, and by [Pg 10] the end of another generation it ought to be possible for child-birth to be practically painless for most women. By that time people will more generally understand how to have babies only when they want them and can afford them. ”

“ We know, too, that among the mothers, abortion, miscarriages, toxæmias, difficult or impossible labors may be largely prevented through prenatal care; while among babies, the enormously high death rate, during the first month of life from causes which begin to operate before birth, convinces us that we must begin to take care of the baby nine months before he is born, if he is to have the greatest benefits of present available knowledge. Such early care reduces still births and injury during labor ”

“ And some physicians, even, have remained many hours with these patients, when at last it has been discovered, to the great mortification of all concerned, that one important feature was yet wanting, in order for labor to take place, namely, the presence in the mother’s womb of an actual child.
This change of life, I remarked, is a natural occurrence to every woman. It is as natural for menstruation to cease as it is for it to begin. Were the habits of society such as they should be, health, and health only, would be the natural result in all these changes ”

“ It is known that the sex of children exercises an appreciable influence upon the result of labors at the full time, as regards the possibility of their passing alive, unaided or at all, through the pelvis, and as regards the length of the labor, which also progressively endangers the life of the mother and their own; the average female fœtus, in cases at all difficult, having the advantage over the male by its inferiority in size, especially important in the cranial diameters. ”

“ He, in His wisdom, foreknew that it would not be proper for every woman to marry precisely at that age in which it is most natural for her to become pregnant, and consequently her system was formed with a reference to that circumstance, although it is admitted that labor is somewhat more difficult and protracted if it occur for the first time late in the fruitful period. ”

“ Economic Aspects of the Father's Competency.—The death-rate of babies in families in which the mother has to earn outside the home under factory conditions of labor in order to secure absolute necessities is so high that it is seen to be not socially thrifty to thus place a double burden upon mothers. ”

“ If an experienced accoucheur now arrives to take charge 181of the case he will be likely to apply the forceps, but it would have been better if he had been there and applied them sooner, before the patient had undergone so much suffering; and the midwife who attends a woman in the first stage of the labor should ascertain if any of the following causes of powerless labor exists: Is there a weak constitution or one exhausted by disease? Is it a first labor and the woman of advanced age? Has the patient had very many children? Is there excess of liquor amnii? Is there malposition of the uterus? ”

“ The rude shelter of boughs and leaves, which is their only house, is perhaps made a little more private than usual for the benefit of the labouring woman. The pregnant woman goes on with her work up to the moment of labour and resumes it almost immediately afterwards. She at once becomes responsible for the care of the infant. The only special treatment after childbirth is to sit with the back close to a fire, so as to heat it as much as can be borne. ”

“ For the child the most notable result of labor relates to the revolutionary changes in its mode of existence. Up to the time of birth the fetus received nourishment by way of the placenta, but after separation from the mother another source of food must be found. The health of the tissues, perpetually in need of oxygen, requires that the lungs act very promptly. ”

“ Social Causes.—I wish to call attention more particularly to some of the abuses of modern life which not unfrequently interfere with gestation. These exist among all classes of society, high and low: among the poor they are unfortunately forced; among the wealthy they are the result of devotion to fashion and society. As we have seen that in the Old World abortion is common in the rural districts, it is an evidence of hard labor, especially in the field, at the wash-tub, and labor by which the abdomen is compressed, the abdominal muscles freely exercised. ”

“ Preternatural labor, or cross-births, are those in which some other part than the head presents. We cannot in general assign any reason for such occurrences, nor can the woman, by any sensation of her own, be assured that the presentation is unusual. Apprehensions of this kind should not be indulged in. If the feet or breech present, the delivery is to be accomplished by properly accommodating the position of the child to the capacity of the pelvis, but no force should be employed; and though there is always some risk to the life of the infant, yet there is none to the mother. ”

“ Complications of Labor.—Labor may be brought on by extreme mental anxiety. The child may be born without any actual pain. It may be expelled while the patient has an evacuation of the bowels, especially if the bowel movement has been induced by enemata or a purgative. Children may be born without the usual progression of labor, yet with all normal conditions present. In cases where the mother dies during labor the uterus continues to contract until the child is born about fifteen minutes later. ”

“ Picture a woman with five or six little ones living on the average working man’s wage of ten dollars a week. The mother is broken in health and spirit, a worn out shadow of the woman she once was. Where is the man or woman who would reproach me for trying to put into this woman’s hands knowledge that will save her from giving birth to any more babies doomed to certain poverty and misery and perhaps to disease and death. ”

“ The building up of the placenta by the mother, and the due performance of function by that great and wonderful extemporised organ, require certain favouring conditions, which have been never unperceived by the common sense of mankind. Those conditions are certainly not to be found in factory labour. A woman who has to be thinking of the time-keeper at the gate and the foreman in the mill, who has ever in her ears the din of belts and wheels and mill-stones, who has dust in her lungs and weariness in her back, can hardly do justice to the child in her womb. ”