Childbirth

“Maternal mortality remained high during this period. To understand why women wanted to go to the hospital to have their babies in the 1920s and 1930s, we must take into account two factors other than proven safety . . . First is the increasing mystification of medical knowledge in the postbacteriological era; second is the declining ability of women’s traditional networks to meet the demands of childbirth. . . . The price of the new science was a growing separation between expert and layperson, between obstetrical specialists and birthing women (Leavitt, 174) . . . . Birth in the hospital encouraged interference because the equipment and staff were readily accessible. Rather than making childbirth safer, physicians in the 1920s and 1930s, according to their own evaluation, were responsible for maintaining unnecessarily high rates of maternal mortality. . . . Approximately 25.4 percent of hospital deliveries were operative. . . . Urban rates of puerperal infection increased particularly during the decade of the 1920s, indicating that hospitals may have increased maternity-related infection risks for women” (182). “Maternal mortality took an esp. sharp plunge in the 1940s, from 37.6 per 10,000 live births to 8.3. That drop was due in part to the increasing incidence of hospital delivery. Three in five women delivered their babies in hospitals in 1940, but by 1950 close to 90 percent did so. . . . Infant mortality also declined, though not as precipitously. Antibiotics and immunization brought down infant deaths from 47 per 1,000 live births in 1940 to 31.3 in 1949” (S. Hartmann, 174-5).