The cult of natural childbirth has gone too far
Eliane Glaser fait la critique du livre :
A review of Lamaze: An International History by Paula Michaels; about the dark history of the natural childbirth movement
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In the 1950s a woman undergoing a typical hospital birth would have been shaved, given an enema and strapped into stirrups. The medical establishment was indeed paternalistic, and episiotomies were routine. The natural birth movement, spearheaded by the French obstetrician Fernand Lamaze and the British doctor Grantly Dick-Read– the first president of the National Childbirth Trust – represented an understandable reaction. A need to redress imbalances of power between doctors, midwives and mothers is what led to natural childbirth becoming enshrined in the medical establishment, even if individual obstetricians have remained privately unconvinced.
Natural childbirth has mistakenly come to be regarded as automatically woman-centred, with midwives portrayed as helping women – in the teeth of the white-coated male establishment – to achieve the authentic experience they supposedly really want. But being bullied or cajoled into having a natural birth because of trumped-up risks to “baby” is not what I call feminism. I was alarmed when hardly any flags were raised when guidelines were recently released suggesting women with low-risk pregnancies should give birth at home or in a midwife-led unit: for these women, anaesthesia is out of the question.