Royals being put to sleep to give birth? *MNHQ edited the title for some sort of clarity*

[Butterandsugar]

Posting in here for traffic, and also in case my lack of experience is at play here.

I have just been advised that when the royal family are due to deliver their babies they are put to sleep and someone else does the "work" for them because it is deemed too traumatic an experience.

Note, apparently this isn't a long winded and not really accurate attempt at saying they have caesarians.

I have scoffed at this, but an being told that this truly is the case. AIBU to not see how this is physically possible? And why on earth something like giving birth is deemed below the royals if so?

I'm pretty certain my grandmother had chloroform. She certainly wasn't awake for her labours.

I gave birth under general anesthetic not by choice, far from it as it would have been the last thing I wanted. I don’t think it would ever be presented as a modern day option for anyone.

Yes, the Betty Draper twilight birth scene in Mad Men is very disturbing.

Almostfifty
No. The point is that posters were suggesting that the OP’s “informant” may have thought this.

HTH

an american author wrote a book about the royals and she said that ( if its fact or not i do not know) the Queen Mum had to have some kind of sperm donation in order to have her girls. i read this book years ago and was thinking ' that can't be right' as IVF etc wasn't around in the 1920 or 30s, but she said that it was.

You are confusing IVF with donor insemination. Two different things. Quite feasible for QM to have used a sperm donor but there was no IVF at the time.

thank you for clearing that up, i read the book about 20 odd years ago now and i guess i was thinking IVF! she said it was a ' rumour' at the time as she was having problems becoming pregnant, but the whole book was pretty much hearsay and gossip, so will never know the truth i guess.

80s, Kitty Kelley threw every bit of unsubstantiated crap into that book. Some of it will be true. That sounds like utter nonsense though. The Queen looks like her father. The marriage was only three years old when the Queen was born, so it would have been very soon, and they were still young, to have made any sort of intervention full stop. He wasn't the Prince of Wales so the imperative to reproduce was less. And most important, the last thing you want, if you're desperate for an heir, is donor sperm.

If you look at pictures of Queen Mary when young, you can see that the Queen looks very like her. There is really no chance that she is the product of donor insemination.

Twilight sleep doesn’t happen anymore it was done away with in the 70’s so still quite late really. They finally realised it wasn’t great for babies or mothers so stopped doing it.

It wasn’t donor insemination. It was supposedly insemination with her own husband’s sperm because QM wouldn’t sleep with him. But that came from Lady Colin Campbell, who talks shite.

When I had my first DC (19 years ago) someone from my ante natal class went on holiday to Greece and came back telling us it was normal there fir women to have a general anaesthetic while in labour. I've always wondered. If that's true.

Any one from Greece able to shed light on this?

I worked with someone in the 90's who told me she had a twilight birth.

This would have been in the 80's I'd imagine. She gave birth in a private maternity home in Ireland, and her baby was adopted. These places are all gone now of course. I think her mother demanded this because she wasn't married and it was all very shameful.

My Spanish cousins as recent as 10-15 years ago were being given a general anaesthetic and forceps towards the end of labour. They were horrified at my home births around the same time. Right back at you chicas!

My DM, in trying to prepare me for giving birth, said that it was fine except for the enema and the shaving. She was very glad to hear those practices had stopped and expectant mothers in the 21st century didn't have to undergo them (she gave birth in the 1970s in England)

Hold up, the Queen says fuck a lot? Tell me more

My Nan - born 1919 - had a tough time in labour with all four of her children who were born at home and was given chloroform. She kept waking up occasionally very distressed and was instantly knocked out again. She gave birth at home on the kitchen table in rural Dartmoor and they didn't have electricity. She remembered all her births as horrible experiences, she also had several traumatic miscarriages.

Cucuracha don't know what CSs you're talking about but I was out the next day after my two. Didn't need more than ibuprofen either.
However, I don't think Kate has had CSs as there seems to be a lot of waiting around as you'd expect with a vaginal delivery. If it was ELCS, she'd
be done about 8:30 in the morning and they'd post the news of the birth about 10am.

I think the Queen was delivered by c section. The Home Secretary was still required until Elizabeth was expecting Charles and George VI knocked it on the head. When he and the QM were expecting Margaret she decided to have the baby in Scotland - so the Home Secretary had to trek to Scotland to be in readiness.

Please could someone explain the George V was euthanased thing. WTAF???

Well he was dying anyway. Respiratory failure I think. His doctor gave him a whacking dose of morphine which hastened the end. Tbh I doubt he minded much. Palliative care was a bit crap in 1936.

The person I know altough she's not a friend of mine, knows her through a shared hobby. The friend has had the queen to tea and genuinely has her private number. Queenie swears and can laugh at herself apparently.
After a few shandies this friend likes to brag about their royal connections.

George v was dying. He was given morphine in the neck to hasten his death so that the story could make the early copies of the Times in the morning.
In those days a lot of dying people were given an injection to put them out of theirr misery.
It was done at the doctors discretion.

Sorry, but I loved this description "put to sleep and someone else does the "work" for them because it is deemed too traumatic an experience."

It conjoined up an image of a sort of whipping boy/woman to me: the Queen lying unconscious on a bed while doctors perform a c-section. While some poor lady-in-waiting, who isn't even pregnant, sat on a bed next to her screaming and panting away feeling the pain for her.

Olennas I had my first baby in 1980, a little later than your DM obviously, and I too had to be shaved and have an enema. Trying to hold an enema in when you've got a baby trying to get out is a feat of quite epic proportions I found.

Hugely relieved when it came to the second just under 5 years later when I found out there was to be no enema and no shave.

When I was pregnant I read that all women in Spain are given episiotomies as routine.

And in Brazil everyone who isn’t dirt poor pays for a ELCS.