Randi Hutter Epstein's Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank.


Reading between the lines.
Feb. 15 2010 6:59 AM

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Childbirth …

The quest for safer delivery has not been smooth.


For most of human history, childbirth has presented grave potential danger to mother and child. That's because—the theory goes—evolution, normally so pragmatic, has presented us with a dual challenge. Our pelvises must be narrow enough to allow us to walk upright without waddling yet large enough to deliver a baby with a head containing a human brain. All things considered, walking has been an asset to the species, but don't tell that to a woman screaming for an epidural. They don't call it labor for nothing.

The quest to make the ordeal safer—and more comfortable—goes back a long way. Over the centuries, women have been pried open, stitched, unstitched, cut apart, herded into hospitals, herded out of hospitals, told to exercise, told not to exercise, told to take drugs, told not to take drugs, etc., by authorities motivated by good intentions, ideology, and/or profit. Advances have been made, and so have mistakes. Yet despite the horrors and false starts, childbirth in the First World has become infinitely safer—so safe that women struggling with infertility now sometimes opt for IVF, and more involved measures such as donor eggs, in part because they want to go through pregnancy and labor. A process once feared has become a sought-after experience.

In her lively history Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank, Randi Hutter Epstein injects new energy into the now-familiar story of how male doctors gradually usurped a procedure that was once the provenance of midwives and how they sometimes victimized women in the process. Her book takes a kind of great-man—and not so great-man—approach to childbirth's history, focusing on some of the personalities who transformed it for better and for worse. Among other things, Epstein (herself an M.D.) shows how ignorance of the birth process, even of female anatomy, has never been a bar to men's attempt to wrest control from the practiced hand of midwives: Some of the early treatises on women's health were written by, of all people, monks.


The campaign really took off, though, when the new "experts" began to offer devices, "something concrete that they had and that midwives lacked." Among the ranks of "men with tools" were the Chamberlen family, who for two centuries, beginning in the late 1500s, aggressively guarded the design of their famous forceps. In ensuing eras, the tools were wielded in hospital maternity wards, sometimes by doctors who went from laboring mother to laboring mother (or, worse, from autopsied body to laboring mother) without washing up between visits. Epstein shows how these doctors, confident in the purity of their motives and of their hands, were slow to accept that they were the reason women were dying from childbed fever. "For centuries," Epstein writes, "anything that went wrong was blamed on some kind of inherent female weakness. "

She also shows how affluent women were especially susceptible to the doctors' double-whammy—shiny tools wielded in facilities that weren't always hygienic. Well before the days of the voluntary C-section, the notion was often put about that middle- and upper-class women were too posh to push. Or rather, too pale and peaked to push. This view of fragile womanhood opened up the market for doctors proffering techniques that might make the hard female lot easier.

Poor women, by contrast, were regarded as marvelously well-equipped to withstand the duress of labor. They could not afford the tools, so no need to create a demand where no market existed. And given that they were believed to have such wonderful fortitude and such a high pain threshold, it was seen as ethically permissible to practice on them. In the American North, Epstein says, Irish immigrants were the medical subjects of choice. In the antebellum South, an ambitious doctor named J. Marion Sims acquired a group of slave women in his quest to develop a cure for fistula, a terrible condition that results when the vaginal wall tears during labor.

Sims operated repeatedly on at least three slaves, whose interior regions he would pry open using a speculum of his invention, made from "two large spoons he picked up at the local hardware store." The speculum enabled him to plumb the vagina—seeing "everything, as no man had ever seen before," as he put it—and to stitch them repeatedly. Without anesthesia. "He sewed Anarcha upward of 30 times," Epstein writes of one of his subjects, a sentence that physically affected me every time I read it. Sims did advance obstetric medicine, but he later rightly became regarded as a "poster child for patient abuse."

Affluent women, too, could be victimized, particularly when the men with tools were joined by men with drugs. In the early 20th century, German doctors started a vogue for "twilight sleep," a treatment during which the laboring mother was given drugs that did not entirely alleviate the pain—women were restrained to contain their thrashing—but enabled her to forget about it afterward. Ironically, Epstein points out, twilight sleep was embraced by early-20th-century feminists who saw it as a way to allow women to rise above their physical role as child bearers. Thing was, twilight sleep treatment also reduced the mother's ability to push and sometimes impaired infant breathing. The vogue began to abate when a woman died.