Radiant Motherhood/Appendix B

The usual agonies of child birth vary greatly in extent according to the structure of the woman. But, as was shown in Chapter II, the tendency already is present, and probably will increase, for this to be an almost intolerable strain upon the woman. Tardily indeed have efforts to relieve her agonies in child birth been made; Queen Victoria took a grave and adventurous step when she bore one of her children under chloroform. Chloroform, however, only deadens consciousness at a comparatively late stage in child birth, and its use through the many long hours, even perhaps sometimes days of agony which precede the later stages is not often possible. It is, therefore, for some types of women a very insufficient narcotic.

Natural "painless Child Birth" is, of course, the ideal, and is claimed to be the result of the "fruit and rice diet," see Tokology by Dr. Alice Stockham, but although this greatly reduces the pain for many, and undoubtedly makes the months of pregnancy easier, it cannot make birth anything but a torture if the proportion of the child's head to the bony arch is above a given limit. The "Christian Science" claim for not only painless but bloodless birth has been reported to me, but never at first hand, and I have not yet had the first-hand statements of women who are said to have experienced it.

"Twilight Sleep," a comparatively recent discovery, has been much advocated, much praised and much blamed. There may be types of women who find it advantageous, but the ​fact that it necessitates going to a nursing home, away from home, is very much against its use under ideal circumstances. For those who have no home, or a sordid and overcrowded one, a nursing home may be a place of refuge. "Twilight Sleep" (scopolamine-morphine) is, however, for the more sensitive type of woman, an extremely unreliable drug, which may frequently take no narcotic effect upon the patient, who suffers added agony as the result of relying upon it, and it may be very dangerous for the child.

There is also the method of birth through the soft part of the body, avoiding the birth of the child through the bony structure altogether. This operation is described as Cesarean section, and involves incision both through the abdominal walls and through the walls of the womb. For some women with very small bones Cesarean section is necessary if they are to produce living children. Even for women who, by paying the price of agony, can produce children by normal birth, this method may be found very advantageous. I see a possibility of its widely extended future use. In hundreds, perhaps thousands of years hence when the child's head will be proportionately even larger in comparison with the mother's bones than it is 'to-day, it may indeed be the only method which will stand between the higher human races and their total extinction.

There is a certain amount of rather gossipy opinion that women who are spared the full torture of child birth do not have equally passionate love for the child. This, however, is nonsense. Love depends far more on the mother's desire for parenthood at the time of the child's conception and her feelings towards it all through the months of waiting than on the hours of birth, although the appealing weakness and fascination of a baby may win a deeper love than the mother-to-be expected to feel for her child.