From Sheila Stubbs, author of “Birthing the Easy Way”:
I bought a copy of a 1958 Ladies Home Journal on eBay last week. This magazine contains an article called Cruelty in Maternity Wards that had an enormous impact on women and began the movement to allow husbands into maternity wards.
A bit of history: An anonymous letter from someone who signed herself ‘Registered Nurse’ was published in which she begged the editor to ‘investigate the tortures that go on in modern delivery rooms.’ ‘You of the JOURNAL have long been a champion of women’s rights.’ she wrote, ‘[Exposing] this type of medical practice would go a long way to aid child-bearing women.’ What resulted from that letter was such a flood of letters from angry women that the JOURNAL did a full article revealing the reality of what women had experienced in hospitals. This was peppered with comments from an obstetrician who AGREED that the treatment had been cruel, and also comments from frustrated nurses who hated what they saw happening but would lose their jobs if they spoke up.
Here are some of the things women complained about in May 1958: ‘They give you drugs, whether you want them or not, and strap you down like an animal”. ”I’ve seen patients with no skin on their wrists from fighting the straps”. “My baby arrived after I had lain on the table in delivery position nearly four hours.” When I asked why I couldn’t be put into a bed the nurse told me to quit bothering her so much. ”with leather cuffs strapped around my wrists and legs, I was left alone for nearly eight hours, until the actual delivery” My doctor had not arrived and the nurses held my legs together. She was born while he was washing his hands. I do not believe the treatment I received was intentionally cruel – just hospital routine’.
From a nurse: So often a delivery seems to be ‘job-centered’ – that is, get the job done the easiest, quickest way possible with no thought to the patient’s feelings. In too many cases doctors and nurses lose sight of their primary concern – the patient. ”I remember screaming… [the nurse] ignored me. … the doctor said at one point, ‘Stop your crying at me. I’m not the one who made you pregnant!’ My third baby will be born at home, despite the sterile advantages of a hospital confinement; for I feel the accompanying emotional disadvantages are just not worth it.”
From a nurse: ‘I have heard such unthinking remarks as ‘You had your fun, now you can suffer’ made by a nurse to a mother in great distress, damaging the spiritual nature of the childbirth experience and showing the nurse’s ignorance of the sacramental nature of sex in marriage.” “I reached the point where I wouldn’t have been surprised if the man who was washing the windows had suddenly laid down his sponge and come over to ‘take a peek.’ It seemed that everyone else connected with the hospital was doing it!” “I know of many instances of cruelty, stupidity and harm done to mothers by obstetricians who are callous or completely indifferent to the welfare of their patients. …Obstetricians today are businessmen who run baby factories. Modern painkillers and methods are used for the convenience of the doctor, not to spare the mother. There is so much that can be done to make childbirth the easy natural thing it should be, but most of the time the mother is terrified, unhappy, and foiled in every attempt to follow her own wishes about having the baby or breast feeding…”
Doesn’t that sound like it could have been written TODAY instead of FIFTY TWO YEARS AGO!! What do you say they get a flood of letters TODAY, marking the 52nd anniversary of this article! Let’s tell them that we still see Cruelty in Maternity Wards, it’s just taken a different form!
their website: http://www.lhj.com/
Sheila Stubbs www.birthingtheeasyway.com
From: Gloria Lemay to the Ladies Home Journal
Dear Women:
I was an 11 year old girl in 1958 when you published the article “Cruelty in the Maternity Wards”. I only know about the article that was published back then because I hear about it from time to time in my job as a Midwifery Teacher.
I think it’s time that this subject was investigated thoroughly again. Women are giving birth in the worst obstetrical time in history. Major abdominal surgery is the fate of 30% of childbearing women in North America. Cesarean section has lasting effects on women’s health and sexual lives. Modern hospitals are more factory-like than ever before. Even very well educated, well armed women find it impossible to “strike a deal” to get a decent hospital birth. Childbirth educators must tell women that going to a hospital and expecting an inspiring birth is like going to MacDonald’s and ordering a steak. No matter how you wheel and deal, MacDonald’s will never prepare a steak for you, right? Unfortunately, too many women find out too late that the system is rigged against them.
I met a woman who was so influenced by your 1958 article that she gave birth all alone to her third baby in a small Canadian town. It was her most satisfying, fulfilling birth experience. That daughter grew up and gave birth at home to her two babies with the assistance of a midwife. Your publication makes a difference in women’s lives. It would be wonderful to see a new expose of the sad state of American obstetrics.
Gloria Lemay, Vancouver BC Canada
Advisory Board Member International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN)
Write your letter to the Ladies Home Journal (owned by Meredith Corp.) and send it to:
julie.pinkwater@meredith.com
Wow. Thanks so much for re-publishing that. Very eye opening.
Gloria… Wow! This was written probably 5 or 6 months before I was born that year. I think this is just stop-me-dead-in-my-tracks important stuff. Thank you so much for sharing.
As a new doula trainer for Birth Arts International, I’d love to share this with my students. May I print this out?
I’ll also be sharing the link to this on facebook. I’m just blown away.
Thank you, thank you for sharing. It’s VERY important to me since that was the year I was born.
Where can I read the original Ladies Home Journal article? Can it be ordered from LHJ, or do you think the local library might be able to get it?
If you want to get a copy of the original article, I think the first place to start is your local public library. Sometimes they can search these things down.
There are copies for sale on E Bay for $12 if you want to purchase it.
Gloria
I totally disagree with you Gloria. I think that the hospital setting for birth has completely changed. I think that more and more women are educated about birth and understand that they have choices and are allowed to make them. I think that you apply horror tactics to the idea of hospital birth in order to support yourself and give yourself more credit.
Instead of casting such a negative vision of women who choose hospital birth, and the care providers who work with them in the hospital, it would be more powerful and supportive to try and educate and support those registered nurses and care providers about understanding the womens birth experience. Education is power.
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Gail, thanks for your comment. Have you looked at the cesarean and induction statistics in the U.S. and Canada recently? Birth is safe, interference is risky. Gloria
Gail, I’ve been slipped drugs while unable to consent, been physically held down while I tried to push, been threatened with having my perfectly healthy baby taken by force, been left lying in my own urine for an hour. This was 2002, 2003, and 2004. I’ve heard stories of women having episiotomies cut while they were in the middle of saying, “Don’t cut me.” And what about news reports of mothers having court-ordered c-sections?
While I am thrilled to have found a supportive OB for this pregnancy, and fully intend to have a hospital birth, I’m inclined to agree with Gloria that many hospitals and doctors are, in fact, practicing cruelty in the maternity wards.
In response to Gail:
Have you attended many hospital births lately?
It is too bad you could not have been present at my hospital birth at Chilliwack General in Feb.2008.
If you had witnessed the abuse and trauma that was forcefully and purposefully inflicted upon me by the so- called -”health care professionals” you would eat your words.
And yes,I am an educated and responsible woman.Like Michelle,I,too,have had drugs given to me in an IV without my knowlege or consent.Birth plans are not worth the paper they are written on.Trust me!!! Gloria is right.You will never be able to have an empowering birth when you submit to the red tape and bureaucratic BS in the Canadian Hospital System.
By the way,when you complain/and/or voice concern,it is all covered up with lies and then stated that “standards of care were met”
If this is the standard of care woman can expect to receive when going to a hospital to give birth,they had better run the other way…and fast!!
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Given this ugly background, routine neonatal circumcision without any local anesthesia is less surprising.
I was especially moved to read this:
‘I have heard such unthinking remarks as ‘You had your fun, now you can suffer’ made by a nurse to a mother in great distress, damaging the spiritual nature of the childbirth experience and showing the nurse’s ignorance of the sacramental nature of sex in marriage.’’
When a man is callous and brutal to a woman, that is despicable, but not totally surprising. Often such men behave in the same way to other men. But that a woman could talk like that to another woman leaves me staring at a stark possibility: some women have a Dark Side.