How Childbirth Went Industrial

Childbirth is truly a miraculous thing. I don’t know how my mom, or any woman, did it. While I have never undergone anything like it, I can imagine that this article covered the basics, as well as the grittiest details, pretty well. While I was aware of the complications that go along with childbirth and how dangerous it can be, I never knew how many different things could go wrong. The part of this article that discusses how to move the child to the correct birthing position while it is still in the mother’s uterus was very interesting and completely new information to me. The medical progress that has been made in relation to creating safer childbirth is extremely impressive. I think the creation of the Apgar score is a very interesting advancement made in obstetrics. While it gave the concept of childbirth a more tangible study, it also spurred the competitiveness of doctors that I had a hard time accepting. While competition is needed to produce the best results in all aspects of society, it makes it seem like childbirth and women’s health was an afterthought in the medical profession. The author of this article even references that obstetricians are hard to produce because many medical students are not interested in this type of science. They see it as boring and unsophisticated.

While reading this article, I couldn’t help but refer back to the articles from Tuesday’s class about abortion. I kept thinking that maybe some of the women who died during childbirth or whose children died did not want to have the child in the first place. I cannot imagine getting pregnant, not being able to get an abortion because it was not legal, and then having to carry a child to term and it still not surviving. It cannot be easy to lose a child under any circumstance, but losing a child through a pregnancy you could have avoided in the first place, could only make the situation more difficult. But another thing to keep in mind is that abortions are not completely risk-free either. Then again, if abortion was federally legalized, then maybe more technology and medical attention would be focused on making it as safe as possible. There are so many ways to approach abortion and it seems impossible that everyone shares the exact same positions on all of the factors involved.