Has birthing gotten longer and harder over the decades?

[emonslemons]

Do you have any stories of mothers, aunties, grandmothers and how their births went.......I don't know how true it is but many of the women I have spoken to from the last generation say they had much quicker and easier births!
This has always fascinated me! And I wonder why their experiences seem so different......admittedly most women I talk to have been middle eastern although my own mother had a much quicker first birth than me and she's English.

^'The past' is not one time with similar circumstances.

Infant and maternal mortality did go up with urbanisation and medicalisation of childbirth.^

How could you possibly know? It would be impossible to get any sort of accurate statistics from before 1837 which was also the time when industrialisation and urbanisation was already underway. And even then, stillbirths were not recorded. So you might have a family with 5 spaced children but you can't have any any idea what happened in between.

I don't think breastfeeding acts as a contraceptive much beyond 6 months, so doubt if that was the reason. Although I have heard the theory that hard work may have had something to do having a smaller family than otherwise might be the case before reliable contraception, eg too tired to do the deed!

From a similar background than yours, my DH had a family tree of his family from Lewis from about the 1790s, where, while infant mortality was very high, there were also plenty of people living into their 70s and 80s. I thought that might be the healthy rural life, until I found a tree of my family from Lancashire with a very similar pattern. Also, the largest family I found in my tree was one of 14 children (including 2 sets of twins) in the 17th century. Not sure of the survival rates of the children, but the mother lived into old age.

I think it is a reflection that there is no such thing as 'only' losing one baby. I think our mentality that it was a 'lesser' thing in the past is utter nonsense. It clearly had a devastating effect.

Yes, exactly the point I was making in a PP. The return was it seemed an average amount of babies to have died at the time.
To paraphrase Hamlet: we all have one father. All fathers one day die. Doesn't make it not awful.
Even more so with babies: 'common' doesn't make it hurt less.

Fascinating discussion.

In my (recent) family history, my Mother was so pissed off at her experience of hospital birth in 1969, she went on to have my younger sister at home.

Me - pre eclampsia, induction, strirrups and only your back, my Dad told 'she'll be ages yet' by some junior doc hence missing the birth, babies whipped away straight to the nursery, routine injections to dry up your milk - the one woman on the ward who insisted on b/f was regarded as a right nutter.

My sister - 1972 - local midwife, if you were overdue she'd take you for a ride in her Morris Minor over all the bumpy roads, home birth, perfectly straightforward.

Miscarriage - everyone very sympathetic while my mother was relieved as she didn't want another one.

D&C following miscarriage - doctor refused to perform it until my father had signed the forms because a wife was her husband's property. and he had a right to more children and apparently there was some risk of affecting future conceptions/pregnancies. WTF?

My Mother refused to get my Dad to sign, and to his credit my Dad refused to sign on her instructions (he would have signed to get it over with but did what my Mother wanted). My Mother had to threaten to sue before they performed the op.

My stepmother (half-sister) - 1983. Shaved with dry BIC razor, enema, flat on your back in stirrups.

Weather 5 children spaced evenly and neatly over 24 years? Now, without contraception and without the education to use NFP which is confusing even now with apps etc'

My great grandmother had 8 children (7 survivors), though not evenly spaced, over 21 years - she was already 24 or 25 when she had the first. On the other hand, her eldest sister had 6 children over 8 years (1858 to 1866). They were reasonably well off but lived in central Liverpool and all the children lived to be adults.

Kilmuir Bed rest is not recommended AT ALL in the UK for standard pregnancies!?! No one does it bar people with serious health issues or very weak cervixes. It's just not a thing at all. When have you heard of a modern woman going to bed and staying there when pregnant?
In some European countries I understand it is more readily prescribed.

Edam out of interest, why did your mum refuse a D&C? Medical grounds? Having been through several miscarriages the natural process is vile, I would only refuse if someone had not warned me how painful natural loss is (nowadays they usually do) or if there was clinical risk.

Sorry my mistake- was it she wanted the op but not that her husband had to sign?

Could the fact women were slimmer, and more active then be a factor?

I watched a documentary about maternity care ( or lack thereof) in developing countries and plenty of women there had extremely long labours that resulted in the death of their babies and potentially the mother too. Maternal death rates varied between one in thirty to one in fifty women by country.

(You don't have or need a D&C for many many miscarriages particularly early ones. I never did and there was not loads of blood over long periods.

Yes I think one reason my labours were fine was I was fairly active in pregnancy worked etc as women always used to. I even cycled from the tube station from work when nearly 9 months pregnant and in the early stages of labour (short journey). Be rest is not recommended. Keep moving. In fact if you want a shorter labour walk around).

Not for everyone, GreenGrow. I ran around, went to the gym, cycled and generally cavorted as usual while pg with DC4 and my joint packed in so dramatically I actually lost the ability to walk for a year, and was only partially mobile for the next four. My advice to pg women would be do what you like, but LISTEN TO YOUR JOINTS! And yes, people should rest a bit rather than all try to be like professional athletes during pg.

I thought there was some evidence that babies are generally getting a bit bigger and that makes labour more difficult?

My grandmother gave birth at home with a midwife who turned up on a bike to help her, she said it was painful but the midwife was wonderful and it sounded fairly straight forward.

My mum said all 3 of her labours were awful and agony, she was in hospital and I required forceps to come out!

My labour was with dd was horrific, lasted 4 days and both of could have died

Green I was very active during pregnancy, swam, walked everywhere and worked in a demanding job up until 8 months. I think it may have helped you to have easy labours but a lot of it is down to luck.

Green Please don't tell me about what is 'needed' for MC.
One of my earliest losses in terms of weeks was a partial molar: definitely needed surgical management (almost needed 2 and a course of chemo).
For all my others, 'luckily' I bled naturally but if your one of those women unlucky enough to have a missed or delayed MC surgical management is often the kindest option even though you 'could' wait for agonising weeks before going through the horrific cramps.
Nature may not mean you 'need' it, but humane common sense is why it is offered.

Thankfully surgical management is now a vacuum ERPC not a 'scraping' D&C in the UK so the risks are slashed.

Girlie I thought that but I did some research (only into the last century in my ethnic groups out of pure selfishness after a growth scan ) and found that whilst diagnosed GD means there are bigger babies more often now, they weren't actually very rare in the past. I say diagnosed GD because I wonder if some women had huge babies undiagnosed?

Also some very small babies can be slow to birth - we have fewer of those now and can intervene.

My great grandmother had 13 live babies, sadly 7 of them died either as babies or in early infancy, i was told that it was because of the serious childhood illnesses but when researching my family tree and looking at the death certificates it seemed obvious that it was due to poverty - this was pre-nhs days in scotland and by the time the doctor was called it was to late, for instance one of my great aunts died as a baby from infected eczema. Sadly my great grandmother died of Cirrhosis at i think 54 - i have a couple of letters that she wrote whilst dying.

births were all home births

1944girl I wonder when they routinely changed to bikini line incisions for c-sections? DM is in her late 70s now and has always hated her scar. DM had me & my brother just a few years before you had your children. It sounds like her experiences & yours were quite similar, especially the 'wait and see' approach to the second birth after a c-section rather than an ELCS. DM says she was induced with DB two days before her due date because they didn't want him to get too big - I'm not sure two days would've made much of a difference! Congrats on becoming a great-grandmother, btw, .

The other big difference between our generations is that my GM breastfed all her children in the late 20s and early 30s. I breastfed mine in the 1990s. In the mid-60s it wouldn't have entered DM's head to breastfeed - in fact she finds the whole idea quite disgusting and was very uncomfortable about me doing it. She couldn't be in the same room when I was feeding, which I found quite sad.

To anyone who tries to tell me that women in developing nations don't have long difficult labours, I have only one word - fistula.

Squizita, yes, my Mum wanted the procedure, but didn't want my Dad's permission to be sought. SHE wanted to sign for it!

My great grandmother on one side and my grandmother on another both had c sections and that was the end of child bearing for both of them. I don't know about the length of time, but both came from middle class families, my DGM's DF was s doctor, so I assume they had the best of contemporary care. And that it will have taken a long time, because it usually put paid to more children. My DGM was incredibly fit, rode daily, hunted over tough ground in season. So I doubt fitness had much to do with it.

I'm just grateful for modern care, though. Ok, it took 33+ hours before they decided to.go for an emc, as I was not dilated beyond 2 cm, but Ds was in distress. But in the past, say 150 years before, one of us would not have survived.

And thank God too for Semmelweiss that we don't die of puerpural fever.

My grandmothers both bf, again it was only those of us born in the 1960s and 1970s that weren't bf AFAIK, even though many of our mothers didn't work either so presumably had time and energy to do so if they wanted to.

My MIL had a VBAC in 1958, which I thought was quite brave. In fact DH was almost born in the ambulance so I don't think there was a choice.

Edam Good for her: how dare they put such a personal and tragic choice in the hands of someone else (of course people will say "most husbands would listen to their wives" but that is only well and good if you're married to one of the kind men!).