Today’s history has dramatically affected every single human on the planet since homo sapiens first emerged around 300,000 years ago. And yet, for almost all of that 300,000 years we know very, very little about it. Childbirth is like laundry. If you listened to the laundry episode you’d see the connection. It’s a burden carried almost exclusively by women throughout time. In fact, until around the 18th century, men, in western cultures at least, even medical professionals, were actually forbidden from having anything to do with childbirth or even knowing any information about it. Women were shut away, surrounded by other women and emerged much later, if they were lucky, to present their hard earned bundle of joy to the world. Even fathers did not regularly attend births in the United States at least until around the 1970s. Men were not a part of this at all until very recently. And because men have traditionally been the recorders of written history as we know it, this chapter of the book is mostly just a giant question mark. Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. This topic suggestion came from Jo on Instagram. Jo is a wonderful supporter of History Fix and she and I both got very into the show Call the Midwife, a period drama about midwives working in London in the 1950s, highly recommend if you haven’t watched it. It’s fabulous. Jo messaged me quote “Hello! I’ve been watching the tv show Call the Midwife lately and it’s a lovely but sometimes sad insight into what women went through in that era. I was thinking today after listening to the laundry episode about the whole history of midwives/childbirth and thought maybe it is something you have thought about doing an episode on. My great grandma was a midwife in rural Australia and tragically died one night on her way home in a storm when thrown from a horse,” end quote. And then I was going to save it for mothers day but I keep getting signs from the universe that I need to cover this topic now. Jo’s words struck me “lovely but sad,” she said. And I thought of her great grandmother thrown from her horse on her way home from a delivery, the two extremes of bringing a life into the world, the jubilation, the euphoria of a successful delivery, followed by an unexpected, tragic death. In a way, Jo’s great grandmother traded her own life for the life of that baby and it’s all just so real, so visceral, life and death. It reaches to the very root of what it means to be human, what it means to be alive. And yet it, childbirth, has been hidden away behind a curtain, literally in some cases behind an actual curtain for almost all of time. And, meanwhile, the men gathered and discussed and made up laws to govern superficial problems and wrote down things that didn’t matter, and all the while, the women were bearing the brunt of humanity itself and nobody but them even knew about it. It has History Fix written all over it and I’m honestly honored to cover this topic, so thank you Jo. 

 

But first, I wanted to give you a heads up that I posted a brand new mini fix to the Patreon on Wednesday called “Rockefeller Family Exposed.” After researching the Michael Rockefeller story a couple of weeks ago, I just could not stop thinking about the Rockefeller family and I knew I had to do some more digging. So dig I did and I think you will find what I dug up to be quite interesting, shocking, scandalous, all of that. Here’s a sneak preview: 

 

“A couple weeks ago I told you the story of Michael Rockefeller, son of US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and great grandson of oil tycoon and once richest man in the world, John D. Rockefeller. The Rockefellers are one of the most prominent, well known families in American history and they came out looking pretty decent in that episode. They donated a lot of money to charity, built schools, roads, hospitals, museums. They’re impressive, inspiring even. But, after recording the episode, I began to worry that you may not have gotten the full picture of the Rockefellers. Because, despite the shiny exterior, there are quite a few skeletons in their palatial closets. From a con artist patriarch to a shady monopoly, there is bigamy, there are accusations of rape, there is exploitation, there’s an actual massacre, there are nervous breakdowns and extramartial affairs. And all of this peppered in with lots and lots of monetary donations. Because who could dislike a family that gave hundreds of millions of dollars to charity? Let’s fix that.”

 

You can listen to the first 5 minutes of that for free over on the patreon which is just patreon.com/historyfixpodcast. It’s also linked in the description. And if you’d like to listen to the full 20ish minute episode you can subscribe for just $5. I promise you have spent $5 on worse things. I have well over an hour of bonus content there for subscribers including 3 mini fixes and a trivia game and I’m adding more all the time. So, what are you waiting for? Ok, let’s talk about childbirth. 

 

Let’s take it all the way back, as far as we can anyway. For the first almost all of the human timeline we know nothing at all about childbirth because there were no written records and nothing would have survived to tell us anything about it. But we can gather some insight from studying the evolution of humans from our earlier ancestors. And what this tells us is that childbirth is much more difficult and dangerous for humans, homo sapiens, than it is for other species. We evolved from ape-like creatures that walked on four legs, like a chimpanzee or a gorilla. Eventually, after lots of evolutionary tweaking, humans started to walk upright on two legs. In order to do this effectively, our pelvises had to get smaller. Later, as we continued to evolve, our brains got larger and larger. So this is a problem for reproduction. Because it means mothers had much smaller pelvises and babies had much larger heads. The head to pelvis size ratio is what makes human childbirth so much more difficult than other species. I mean you watch a horse give birth, it’s like not a problem. Baby just flops out and stands right up. Because of the head to pelvis ratio in humans, we are forced to give birth to very underdeveloped, not ready, babies and even then it’s super sketchy and often unsuccessful. This is because of a size problem but also an energy problem. Maybe even more an energy problem actually. One theory suggests that it would take too much energy to feed an unborn baby for any longer than 9 months. According to researchers, humans can only sustain using 2 or 2.5 times more energy than they do at rest or during just like normal activity. So if you’re going go do something super physical for a long period of time, you are metabolically limited to only being able to use 2 or 2.5 times your normal energy use. The third trimester of pregnancy requires around 2 to 2.5 times the woman’s normal energy use. So we just cannot take in enough energy to sustain a baby for any longer than that. Every 9 month pregnant woman is basically running a marathon all the time. 

 

Another theory suggests that agriculture exacerbated the head to pelvis ratio problem. For most of human history, we were hunter gatherers, eating mostly meat, nuts, seeds, berries, that sort of thing. Humans with a more nutritious hunter gatherer diet were long and lean. Once we turned to farming and a mostly grain based diet, humans became shorter and stockier. Women’s pelvises shrunk even further and babies tended to be fatter. Scientists came upon this theory after noticing that there were far more infant skeletons found in the burials of agricultural farming communities than in hunter gather burials. But, I just want to point out that there are other variables that have to be considered. Hunter gatherers typically breastfed their babies for far longer because it was all they had to feed them. Infants don’t have teeth to chew on meat or nuts. Once we turned to agriculture, babies were weaned much earlier because they could eat softened grains. But this definitely would have compromised their nutrition and also their immune systems which are basically transferred from mother to baby through breastmilk. So there are other possible reasons why there are more baby skeletons found once we turned to agriculture. 

 

Outside of biology, evolution, skeletal remains, we have very little evidence about childbirth during prehistory. Some of the earliest clues we have are small carved sculptures of pregnant women, often very exaggerated. And these come from many different prehistoric cultures. One example is the Venus of Willendorf, I remember learning about this in art history class in college. It’s a little stone statue of a pregnant woman with very large, almost comically large breasts, about 4 inches tall, that was found in Austria and it’s believed to be around 30,000 years old. This thing is so old it’s actually one of the oldest surviving works of art, which I guess is why I learned about it in art history. But it’s not the only one. Similar statues are found all over from all different cultures. And we don’t really know what they were used for. Some experts believe that they were thought to aid in fertility. Some think that they may have actually been worn by women like an amulet to protect them during pregnancy and childbirth. 

 

We have a few clues coming much later from the ancient Babyonians, Egyptians, and Greeks. We know that 4,000 years ago in Babylon, they used birthing chairs, which were like horseshoe shaped stools as opposed to women lying on their backs. And birthing furniture like this would be used actually for most of history, it wasn’t until quite recently that women were constrained to lying on their backs in bed. From ancient Egypt, we have a wall relief carving from 1450 BC in the birth room of the Luxor temple showing Queen Mutemwia giving birth to her son and future pharaoh Amenhotep III using a similar piece of furniture. We actually have Egyptian carvings and illustrations showing women giving birth in all sorts of positions - standing up, squatting, kneeling, and sitting, you know, making use of gravity to help with the labor. A birthing chair is also depicted in a Greek votive sculpture from around 200 BC. These stools were used for thousands of years across many cultures. We know that birthing chairs used around a thousand years ago in Britain were portable. They were designed to be disassembled and easily carried from place to place. And this suggests that they were owned by midwives who brought them with them to births. 

 

So let’s talk about midwives. I know people say prostitution is the oldest profession, but I assure you, as long as there have been prostitutes there have also been midwives. It’s just that men knew about prostitutes, cared, dare I say, about prostitutes, and they wanted nothing to do with midwives. So they were relegated to the shadows of history. When it was time for a woman to give birth, she was assisted by her female relatives and a midwife. Midwives were always women at this point and they were highly skilled. They knew how to deliver babies. They had knowledge of herbal remedies that would aid the mother if needed. They knew how to set up the room and position the mother properly. They knew how to turn a baby that wasn’t positioned right. And in many cases they even stuck around after the birth for up to a month to ensure that the mother was well enough to care for the baby and to help teach the mother skills like breastfeeding. Midwives were even known to take new babies to their baptisms so the mothers could rest and recover. 

 

Midwifery was a skill that was passed down generation to generation through a community of midwives. Eventually books were published about it but for most of time, women weren’t writing books and women were the only ones who knew midwifery so it was just passed down word of mouth and taught by example. In some societies, midwives entered basically apprenticeships where they assisted other midwives until they had acquired the skills necessary to do it on their own. Some midwives traveled long distances, going wherever they were needed.

 

But despite their best efforts, childbirth was incredibly dangerous. In medieval times, as many as one third of women died during their childbearing years. Now that’s not to say they died of childbirth, just during their childbearing years, but it’s safe to say many of them did die during childbirth. Childbirth is still, today, the sixth leading cause of death of women between the ages of 20 and 34. Back then, it was extremely fatal. In fact, most women wrote a will as soon as they found out they were pregnant. The main cause of childbirth related death was infection, childbed fever. But many mothers also died of hemorrhage, bleeding out, or eclampsia which is super high blood pressure that leads to seizures and death. If you’ve watched Downton Abbey, you are not soon to forget eclampsia, no spoilers. Sometimes the baby just got stuck though, an obstructed labor. And in this case, the choice often had to be made between saving the mother or saving the baby. And this is awful so skip ahead 10 seconds if you want to be spared. If the decision was to save the mother, midwives sometimes had to crush the baby’s skull in order to remove it, no longer alive of course, from the mother. Caesarian section or C sections were used since ancient times, with the first documented C section happening in the year 1020. But they were not used for the reason you think. Today, they’re used when a normal delivery is not possible or is too risky to save the life of both the mother and the baby. Originally, and until quite recently, they were used as a way to save the baby while sacrificing the life of the mother. Mothers were not expected to survive C sections until like the late 1800s. It was a death sentence. They cut the baby out and let the mother die. 

 

So, a lot can go wrong and it often did. And, during certain time periods, most notably the 1500s, midwives were sometimes accused of witchcraft if the delivery ended poorly and many were executed as witches. Please refer to episode 29 for more on that. During all of this time, women almost universally gave birth at home, hospital births are a very new thing, we’ll get to that soon. Women gave birth at home and without any pain relief whatsoever. Not that it wasn’t available, it just wasn’t allowed because of religious beliefs, believe it or not. In the bible story of Adam and Eve, part of Eve’s punishment for tasting the forbidden fruit is that she will experience great pain when she bears children. And so Christians of the time believed that the pain of childbirth was not something you could or should avoid. That it was ordered by God as punishment on women. In 1591, a Scottish woman named Euphame Maclayne was burned at the stake after asking for pain relief during the delivery of twins. This request was viewed as heresy. 

 

While we know very little about childbirth for people of middle and lower classes, we start to get some intel about how noblewomen gave birth starting in the 1500s, most accounts coming from Tudor England the days of Henry VIII whose whole life really centered around childbirth, something he ironically had absolutely nothing to do with. In those days, upper class women at least would have what was called a lying in period starting weeks before the birth. Before this started, she would go to church to be given a blessing by a priest, basically last rites in case this didn’t go well. Then she retreated into a private room of her house where she would stay until a few weeks after the baby was born. No men were allowed to see her during this lying in period. The windows in the room would have been covered up to imitate the darkness of the womb and it would have been a very calm, tranquil, peaceful environment. Midwives would assist her before during and after the birth and many, many prayers would have been said for her protection. We know this about noblewomen. We do not know if this is how it went down for less wealthy women. I really doubt it. They did not have the luxury of shutting themselves away in a peaceful room for a month or more. They had other children they had to care for. They had work to do. And many of them probably gave birth without access to a midwife with just, whatever woman they could get to help them. But not a man, never a man, in western cultures at least. 

 

Now in other cultures it was different. In Japan childbirth was a much more public affair. We have reports about the childbirth of wealthy Japanese women from around 1,000 years ago suggesting that they also set up a birthing room which was supposed to be at the northernmost part of the house. The room would have been draped all in white, which is quite a contrast to the dark womb-like environments set up in Tudor England. And, the biggest difference of all, people were allowed to watch. Male and female relatives would watch over a curtain as the baby was born. It was like a spectacle, a show with an audience. Monks would often be present as well, saying prayers that were often reserved for people who were near death. Because childbirth was just as deadly in Japan. The being shut away in a room thing though, that’s not just British. That’s also seen in Chinese and Latin American cultures. 

 

In the 1700s, things started to change, big time, but not necessarily for the better. This sort of started with the invention of forceps which are like tongs that are used for pulling a baby out by its head when it’s stuck. And this tool saved a lot of babies, it did, but it also got men involved in childbirth. Because, women were not allowed to practice medicine. Until now, midwives weren’t really viewed as medical professionals so they just sort of let it slide. But in the 1700s, when forceps came out, all of a sudden this is a medical device, this is a tool that doctors use and women were not allowed to use forceps. So suddenly we see male midwives for the first time ever. And yes they were called midwives, not midhusbands, because they could use forceps and women legally couldn’t. Many wealthy women switched to using male midwives because it meant possibly being able to save their baby’s life with forceps while lower income women typically stuck to female midwives. 

 

By the 1800s, men in the medical profession started to set their sights on childbirth more and more. Babies were being born all the time. They could make a lot of money delivering babies. It was a business decision more than anything and they started to attack midwifery. They launched whole campaigns against it, touting the new pain relief, anesthesia, that was coming out as another reason women should turn to male doctors to deliver their babies instead of female midwives. These campaigns against midwives, including the passage of new laws and restrictions on training and education of women in the profession all but destroyed it in the US. By the turn of the 20th century, male doctors were delivering around half of babies in the US, despite having very little training or knowledge about how to actually deliver a baby. This really affected midwives in the American south. Traditionally, before the Civil War, many midwives in the south were enslaved Black women. And even after the end of slavery, Black female midwives continued to deliver around 75% of babies in the south. When restrictions were placed on midwives, requiring certain training and education levels that Black women were unable to attain, this entire community of Black midwives disappeared. According to Oregon Health and Science University quote “denying education to midwives of color has had a lasting effect on communities that relied on them for care. Today, less than 5% of midwives in the United States are people of color. Disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality rates are striking; Black mothers are 2-3 times more likely to die in childbirth than white mothers. This impact is a reflection of the powers and forces that disconnected midwives from their communities,” end quote. 

 

Surprisingly, and yet also not surprising at all, when men started delivering babies, childbirth related deaths actually increased. This was before we knew about germs and how germs spread. These male doctors were performing other procedures too. When they weren’t delivering babies completely untrained, they were dealing with sick people, performing surgeries, and autopsies. They were not washing their hands and they were not wearing gloves. And so they were transferring bacteria from literal dead bodies to women as they delivered these babies. And maternal death due to infection actually skyrocketed during this time. So while wealthy women often opted for a man to deliver their baby, this usually backfired. Wealthy women were dying in childbirth more often than poor women. And this doesn’t make sense for any other reason than the incompetence of their midwife slash doctor. Poor women were still using midwives at this time. Wealthy women had opted for male doctors who number one had no idea what they were doing and number two were quite often transmitting bacterial infections due to a lack of hygiene.

 

But that would change, of course with the discovery of penicillin and introduction of antibiotics in the first half of the 20th century. This is also what made C-sections a viable delivery option and not a death sentence for the mother. It’s also what pushed the US almost entirely away from midwifery by the mid 1900s. Now, it was different in the UK where midwives continued to play a large role in delivering babies, like in Call the Midwife. But in the US, by the 1950s, 88% of babies were delivered in hospitals by doctors, not midwives. But guys, that’s like very recent. The first US president to be delivered in a hospital was Jimmy Carter in 1924. Guys Jimmy Carter is still alive as of this recording, I mean he’s like 100 but still. Hospital births are a very recent thing. And, after we got past the exploding bacterial infection hiccup, procedures and technology used by doctors in hospitals have saved a lot of lives - things like ultrasounds, fetal heart rate monitors, C-sections, antibiotics, surgery to stop hemorrhaging. The doctor's office hospital birth came with a lot of access to life saving measures that aren’t always possible at home. It also came with pain relief in the form of epidurals and spinal blocks that are a major plus for many women who do not feel ordered by God to endure the pain of childbirth. Today 98% of births in the US happen in hospitals.   

 

But, but, the medicalization of childbirth did take a lot away as well, especially at first. Birth had always been fairly ceremonial, it was like a ritual, a rite of passage. Women giving birth were surrounded by other women, women that they trusted, women that had done this before, a community of women, chanting and praying over them, positioning them, comforting them, helping them issue this new life into the world. The experience in early hospital births was in stark, stark contrast. In the May 1958 issue of the Ladies Home Journal magazine is an anonymous letter sent in by a labor and delivery nurse. She writes quote “When I first started in my profession, I thought it would be wonderful to help bring new life into this world. I was and am still shocked at the manner in which a mother-to-be is rushed into the delivery room and strapped down with cuffs around her arms and legs and steel clamps over her shoulders and chest. It is common practice to take the mother right into the delivery room as soon as she is “prepared.” Often she is strapped in the lithotomy position, legs in stirrups with knees pulled far apart, for as long as eight hours. On one occasion, an obstetrician informed the nurses on duty that he was going to a dinner and that they should slow up things. The young mother was taken into the delivery room and strapped down hand and foot with her legs tied together,” end quote. Authors Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick write about this letter in their book “Designing Motherhood,” saying quote “The letter touched a nerve. Women across the country wrote in to share their own stories of abuse, including being strapped down and drugged in an effort to keep them still, quiet, and passive,” end quote. 

 

This sterile, sort of scary, alien abduction-like style of hospital birthing led to the natural birth movement starting in the 1970s where many women reverted back to home births with midwives in order to be more in control of the experience. However, studies show that babies born at home are three times more likely to die during or shortly after birth. Now that stat is like all home births, though. For planned home births with low-risk pregnancies, survival rate is the same as for babies born in hospitals. But honestly, hospital childbirth has even changed so so much since that anonymous letter in the 1950s. My delivery room was dimly lit, we were allowed to play whatever music we wanted. I could move around the room, walk the halls (with my first baby anyway, the second was during covid and we were stuck in the room) There was an exercise ball, a bathtub even. And both of my babies were delivered by women, doctors, not midwives but female doctors which was an option women did not have for a very long time. According to a 2023 survey, 62% of OBGYNs in the US are now women which feels like a happy medium between the worlds of comforting female midwives and forcep bearing male doctors. 

 

But while childbirth has become dramatically less dangerous over the last 100 years, you might still be surprised by some of the statistics according to the World Health Organization quote “Every day in 2020, almost 800 women died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. A maternal death occurred almost every two minutes in 2020,” end quote. Now that’s 2020 so it makes me wonder how much Covid affected those stats because of limited access to prenatal care. I was pregnant in 2020 and many of my appointments were virtual. They weren’t checking my blood pressure or fetal heart rate or anything through a computer screen. They asked me during one of those if I had a blood pressure monitor thing at home. I was like “um no.” But these stats are worldwide remember. It goes on to say quote “Almost 95% of all maternal deaths occurred in low and lower middle-income countries in 2020,” end quote. Almost every two minutes, 800 every day. But even that, those horrifying stats, are a major major improvement over even recent decades. Between 2000 and 2020, the maternal mortality ratio which is the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births dropped by about 34% worldwide. In 20 years. That’s considerable. 

 

So, I mean it’s safe to say that modern childbirth is much, much safer than childbirth has ever been historically. If you’ve had prenatal care and you’re giving birth in a first world hospital, you’re probably going to be just fine. And that’s a win for mankind. But, while the health, the chance of survival of childbearers has greatly improved, something else, I think, has been lost in the shift towards doctor controlled hospital births. Physical health is prioritized but what’s lost is the wellbeing of the mother. Throughout time, she was attended to before, during and well after the birth. She was cared for, checked on, helped by midwives or other women. Like I said earlier, midwives often hung around for a month after the baby was born, taking it to its baptism so the mother could rest, helping the mother, making sure she was fed and rested. Today, unless you are very rich and you can afford some sort of night nurse nanny situation, that is not a thing. You give birth which is a big deal it’s an incredibly difficult physical feat not to mention emotional and psychologically just like shocking and then you’re discharged from the hospital as soon as 24 hours after that and they’re just like “I know you haven’t slept or eaten in several days, go care for this new baby now, see ya bye.” And you can’t even carry the baby carrier to the car. You can’t lift that much weight for a while. You’re not supposed to drive. You better hope you have a partner or someone there with you to help you because you have only just begun to recover from a major ordeal and under any other circumstances you would be on like mandatory bedrest. But not with a new baby. There’s no rest. You literally cannot rest for the foreseeable future. If you have a C-section, major surgery, they cut through multiple layers of your body - skin, subcutaneous tissue, fascia, muscle, the uterus, the amniotic sac - this is like 5 a layer cake that they’re cutting through and spreading open and then pulling a human being out of. And then they stitch you up and kick you out 48 hours later to care for a new baby. What other major surgery ends that way? It’s bananas. But it did not used to be like that. Yes, you very well may of died, but if you didn’t die, you were surrounded by a community of women for weeks who helped you, and taught you, and cared for you and made sure you were okay. 

 

Women today mostly survive childbirth but that doesn’t mean they’re okay. A lot of new moms are not okay. They go through this ordeal, this major major shift and then they’re just on their own. And no one has prepared them for this and no one is there to help them, not really. The whole time you’re pregnant, you’re doted on, you go to all these appointments, you have baby showers, people eww and ahh at your growing belly, they tell you you’re glowing, and then after you have the baby, nothing. I mean they want to see the baby but they show very little concern for the mother. And the postpartum period after childbirth is the most dangerous time for mothers. Most maternal deaths in the US happen during this time after the baby is born. And it’s like no one cares. Like the mother was just a vessel for the baby and once the baby is out, who cares. Newborns have their first doctor's appointment like a day or two after you get home from the hospital. I remember being shocked by that like “really? You want me to put him in the car and drive him somewhere tomorrow? He literally just got born.” But mothers do not check back in with the doctor for 6 weeks after birth. And those 6 weeks are quite literally the most dangerous time for a woman who has given birth. If she is going to die from complications from childbirth, today, it is most likely going to be during those 6 weeks when no one is checking on her. When I had my second baby in January of 2021, my 6 week postpartum appointment was virtual, through a computer screen. They just like asked me questions “how’s it going? You feeling okay?” I remember my mom was genuinely upset about that she was like “no, they need to like physically look at your body,” but that was covid. 

 

The isolation of entering motherhood utterly alone, I mean hopefully you have your partner or maybe your mom, your sister, whatever but really it’s very isolating. That is new. The shift towards doctors and hospitals and get um in get um out, on to the next one, they’ll figure it out. That is very new. That advancement took women out of these communities, these age old birthing communities of midwives and other women who rallied around them, took care of them, cheered them on. And that’s really the greatest loss of modern childbirth and I think it’s led to a lot of mental health problems for new mothers. Because it’s really really hard and, for the most part, they’re struggling alone. 

But you know, they’re alive. After my first baby was born, I had a fever, I guess I had childbed fever. I mean it was really bad, I was like uncontrollably shivering and shaking, like convulsing. And I remember pressing the button for the nurse like over and over again and no one was coming. My husband finally ventured out into the hallway to find someone, I’ll never forget the look of terror in his eyes. And he ventured to the nurse’s station and was like “someone please help us,” and finally a nurse came. I think they were super understaffed at the time. I remember an emergency room doctor had to be called up to deliver a baby because there were so many deliveries and they were so understaffed. And so this nurse like begrudgingly came into my room and like didn’t believe me. I could tell she didn’t believe me even though I was shaking uncontrollably, she just like thought I was being dramatic. I remember I just wanted like some tylenol or ibuprofen to bring my temperature down and she was dragging her feet about even taking my temperature. And finally she did and I did have a fever and it was a whole thing, they put me on IV antibiotics for days and my baby also had to get IV antibiotics. I’ll never forget that splint with the needle sticking out of his tiny perfect baby arm, I burst into tears when they brought him back to me like that. But, you know, those antibiotics probably saved our lives. We had to fight for them, for some reason. I had to fight to get someone to care about me after the baby was out of the vessel. I had been dismissed in their minds. I was fine. But I really wasn’t. And while I’m very thankful that we now have the ability to save the lives of mothers who would have died in shocking numbers in the past, I do believe we can do better. The mother’s deserve better. But maybe that’s just the price of saving all those lives. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from the World Health Organization, the Guardian, Oregon Health and Science University, birth injury help center, Designing Motherhood, whattoexpect.com, Slate, and Statistica. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.