6 ms·

Women were never meant to give birth on their backs

83 points by ilt 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
sdfjkhdfjkdhs 5mo ago
[flagged]
ViktorRay 5mo ago
I wonder what it would take to get hospitals to change how women give birth based on this scientific evidence.
- msephton 5mo ago
  The hospital my wife first gave birth at were very accommodating with her request. I think education of the individuals is a bigger issue than the hospitals (who have probably send and done all different ways.)
- conception 5mo ago
  Hospitals are starting to bring midwives and doulas back. Of course, educating women and families about their options and pushing back on inducing labor and c sections would help as well.
  - setopt 5mo ago
    If the water actually broke, inducing labor can be important to reduce the risk of infection though, since bacteria can easily get into the amniotic fluid. If the water didn’t break yet, then at least where I live they don’t induce unless you go so much over the expected birth date that there is a high risk you’ll need C-section if you wait more (in Northern Europe they generally don’t offer C-sections unless medically required).
    - Andrex 5mo ago
      Yes. Parent comment lacks context for why induced labor and c-sections are supposedly bad.
  - graemep 5mo ago
    Midwives provide most of the care for most births in hospitals in the UK AFAIK and have done so for decades (certainly where my older daughter was born).
  - scratcheee 5mo ago
    They already tried pushing back against c-sections, turns out giving overly opinionated options to women that discourages things that are medically beneficial in a large portion of cases is not helpful and caused a lot of unnecessary suffering and some deaths, now that policy is thankfully long gone, though the opinionated attitude it generated in some continues on sadly. my wife had a particularly large first baby, natural birth might have worked, but would have been risky, rather than being given unbiased options, she was pressured towards induction over c-section since it was “more natural” (I suspect mostly because it would have looked better in the hospitals stats to keep the c-sections down). The early induction failed after days of suffering (as early inductions usually do, turns out), and then she had a c-section anyway (which having reviewed the options was her original preference, but was pressured out by the doctor), the c-section was vastly more successful, as you’d expect from the statistics (and a lot less suffering, which doesn’t show up in the stats but is obvious once you concider the process). Im willing to agree neither should be recommended in most cases, natural births are safer in most births, but the best thing anyone can do is give the facts as they apply to the person giving birth (and keep their opinions well out of it). I fully admit that personal experience has biased me strongly in favour of c-sections, but only when the stats support them, which they often do.
    - dctoedt 5mo ago
      Dr. Atul Gawande† reported 20 years ago how obstetricians standardized on c-sections because the suppposedly-better alternative, forceps, (i) was very difficult to teach and supervise, and (ii) used incorrectly, could result in horrible injuries to both baby and mother: <QUOTE> The question facing obstetrics was this: Is medicine a craft or an industry? If medicine is a craft, then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills—the Woods corkscrew maneuver for the baby with a shoulder stuck, the Lovset maneuver for the breech baby, the feel of a forceps for a baby whose head is too big. You do research to find new techniques. You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands. But if medicine is an industry, responsible for the safest possible delivery of millions of babies each year, then the focus shifts. You seek reliability. You begin to wonder whether forty-two thousand obstetricians in the U.S. could really master all these techniques. You notice the steady reports of terrible forceps injuries to babies and mothers, despite the training that clinicians have received. After Apgar, obstetricians decided that they needed a simpler, more predictable way to intervene when a laboring mother ran into trouble. They found it in the Cesarean section. [0] </QUOTE> (Formatting edited.) † Surgeon, Rhodes scholar, MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient, professor at Harvard Medical School, author of The Checklist Manifesto among many other things. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score
- bl4kers 5mo ago
  In the U.S. at least the incentives are perverse. Probably what would actually move the needle is a test trial with results showing it's more cost and resource effective
  - Dazzler5648 5mo ago
    Mmmm… when they see their profits from medical interventions go down when women start trusting their bodies, they’ll nix that trial STAT.
adityamwagh 5mo ago
> It's usually more dangerous for women to give birth lying down, so why do they? It's all because of a Frenchman who decided it was more convenient – for men. The first paragraph itself makes me not want to read further.
lookoutwhoa 5mo ago
[flagged]
aaron695 5mo ago
[dead]
thomassmith65 5mo ago
I was curious about the claim so I did a web search for "Roman depiction of birth" and this is the first result: https://www.worldhistory.org/img/c/p/1200x627/18720.jpg https://www.worldhistory.org/img/c/p/1200x627/18720.jpg The mother appears to be sedentary, rather than supine. I doubt I would have noticed that detail had I not read the article.
downboots 5mo ago
Might one suggest the Blonsky device https://allthatsinteresting.com/blonsky-device https://allthatsinteresting.com/blonsky-device (ianad)
- nineteen999 5mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFNmwFpyB3E&t=7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFNmwFpyB3E&t=7s
stavros 5mo ago
This article mixes the science with unnecessarily gendered language. It turns "a lying down position helps the doctor" to "men decided women should be on their backs" and "one pervert king liked watching women give birth, therefore somehow that's why". Can't we just focus on the scientific advantages and not try to shoehorn sexism into everything?
- torlok 5mo ago
  I think it's useful to drive the point home that there is no good reason to give birth lying down. Otherwise you make it sound like "scientists say you should try this", and not "this was a stupid idea in the first place".
  - stavros 5mo ago
    My issue with the article in general is that it undermines its own persuasiveness. It doesn't seem to say "giving birth sitting is better", or even "doctors wanted to have better visibility", but tries to cast it as a story of deliberate male oppression. It's just unnecessarily divisive to try to turn this into a case of sexism, and I feel it takes away from the scientific angle of the article. Someone might very well dismiss the valid scientific findings as more about gender politics than science. It just doesn't seem to me like there's a need for the gendered slant.
    - ekjhgkejhgk 5mo ago
      I agree with you. Whenever anyone says "oh this is actually the males doing XYZ" it reduces the persuasiveness. It reminded me, I'm in an activist parents group and the other day a mom there was arguing that when the media uses the word "parenting" in the context of our focus subject, it's really a manifestation of the patriarchy keeping women oppressed (the implication that dads don't really parent, they just help the moms). There's loonies everywhere.
      - Terr_ 5mo ago
        I can imagine these two inverse outrages being deployed almost simultaneously: * "When you call that parenting, you give unearned credit to men who aren't contributing, call it mothering." * "When you call that mothering, you're letting men escape their duty to contribute, call it parenting." Some sort of... prescriptive versus descriptive paradox, I bet it can be found in other contexts too.
rappatic 5mo ago
> meant We're not meant to do anything. It's not like we were consciously designed with a purpose in mind. Do whatever you want.
- octopoc 5mo ago
  I have a first responder friend who helped a guy who wanted to have sex with his cousin, but she wouldn’t unless he got a circumcision, so he chopped his dick off. I personally think he was not using it the way it was meant to be used at two distinct levels: - you shouldn’t have sex with relatives - you shouldn’t chop your dick off The emergency room doctors sewed it back on. Not sure what to think about that.
fxtentacle 5mo ago
Maybe this is a UK problem? Or the author just doesn't have kids? (and has no experience?) German hospital beds for giving birth are at a 45 degree angle, which to me looked like a good compromise between "the mother can safely take a nap when she is tired" and "gravity will help you". Also, they have these thingys to put your legs up, so the overall posture is pretty close to squatting. (But with a back rest to prevent you from falling over if you're sleepy.) And modern German hospitals also have a bathtub with handrails to hang from above. And they have chairs with a hole in them. There's like a lot of options to choose from. But the nurses said that, statistically, most women choose the 45-degree-bed anyway. My guess would be because it looks the most comfortable.
- Dazzler5648 5mo ago
  Keep guessing. There are other reasons most women end up in the beds. (I’ve worked L&D and am a woman.)
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
Dazzler5648 5mo ago
As a woman it will be neat/cute to watch YC men discuss this one. If anyone is really curious how this happened in American (and spread) I highly recommend the book “Born in the USA” by Marsden Wagner. TL;DR men saw money/opportunity in stealing women’s confidence in their natural and intuitive ability to give birth, built up tools and laws around it, and now we are stuck with a high caesarean AND fatality rate even despite this “progress.” I went to school to be a hospital midwife until I discovered what a sad racket it is. No wonder we also have high rates of postpartum depression.
bentt 5mo ago
https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2024/09/19/childbirth-in-the-past/ https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2024/09/19/childbirth... Childbirth was extraordinaly dangerous. 6-8 births per woman and a 1-2% chance of dying per birth for the majority of history. We have no idea what that was like. Rates today are ~0.013%.

83 points by ilt 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

sdfjkhdfjkdhs 5mo ago

[flagged]

ViktorRay 5mo ago

I wonder what it would take to get hospitals to change how women give birth based on this scientific evidence.

msephton 5mo ago
The hospital my wife first gave birth at were very accommodating with her request. I think education of the individuals is a bigger issue than the hospitals (who have probably send and done all different ways.)
conception 5mo ago
Hospitals are starting to bring midwives and doulas back. Of course, educating women and families about their options and pushing back on inducing labor and c sections would help as well.
- setopt 5mo ago
  If the water actually broke, inducing labor can be important to reduce the risk of infection though, since bacteria can easily get into the amniotic fluid. If the water didn’t break yet, then at least where I live they don’t induce unless you go so much over the expected birth date that there is a high risk you’ll need C-section if you wait more (in Northern Europe they generally don’t offer C-sections unless medically required).
  - Andrex 5mo ago
    Yes. Parent comment lacks context for why induced labor and c-sections are supposedly bad.
- graemep 5mo ago
  Midwives provide most of the care for most births in hospitals in the UK AFAIK and have done so for decades (certainly where my older daughter was born).
- scratcheee 5mo ago
  They already tried pushing back against c-sections, turns out giving overly opinionated options to women that discourages things that are medically beneficial in a large portion of cases is not helpful and caused a lot of unnecessary suffering and some deaths, now that policy is thankfully long gone, though the opinionated attitude it generated in some continues on sadly. my wife had a particularly large first baby, natural birth might have worked, but would have been risky, rather than being given unbiased options, she was pressured towards induction over c-section since it was “more natural” (I suspect mostly because it would have looked better in the hospitals stats to keep the c-sections down). The early induction failed after days of suffering (as early inductions usually do, turns out), and then she had a c-section anyway (which having reviewed the options was her original preference, but was pressured out by the doctor), the c-section was vastly more successful, as you’d expect from the statistics (and a lot less suffering, which doesn’t show up in the stats but is obvious once you concider the process). Im willing to agree neither should be recommended in most cases, natural births are safer in most births, but the best thing anyone can do is give the facts as they apply to the person giving birth (and keep their opinions well out of it). I fully admit that personal experience has biased me strongly in favour of c-sections, but only when the stats support them, which they often do.
  - dctoedt 5mo ago
    Dr. Atul Gawande† reported 20 years ago how obstetricians standardized on c-sections because the suppposedly-better alternative, forceps, (i) was very difficult to teach and supervise, and (ii) used incorrectly, could result in horrible injuries to both baby and mother: <QUOTE> The question facing obstetrics was this: Is medicine a craft or an industry? If medicine is a craft, then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills—the Woods corkscrew maneuver for the baby with a shoulder stuck, the Lovset maneuver for the breech baby, the feel of a forceps for a baby whose head is too big. You do research to find new techniques. You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands. But if medicine is an industry, responsible for the safest possible delivery of millions of babies each year, then the focus shifts. You seek reliability. You begin to wonder whether forty-two thousand obstetricians in the U.S. could really master all these techniques. You notice the steady reports of terrible forceps injuries to babies and mothers, despite the training that clinicians have received. After Apgar, obstetricians decided that they needed a simpler, more predictable way to intervene when a laboring mother ran into trouble. They found it in the Cesarean section. [0] </QUOTE> (Formatting edited.) † Surgeon, Rhodes scholar, MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient, professor at Harvard Medical School, author of The Checklist Manifesto among many other things. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score
bl4kers 5mo ago
In the U.S. at least the incentives are perverse. Probably what would actually move the needle is a test trial with results showing it's more cost and resource effective
- Dazzler5648 5mo ago
  Mmmm… when they see their profits from medical interventions go down when women start trusting their bodies, they’ll nix that trial STAT.

adityamwagh 5mo ago

> It's usually more dangerous for women to give birth lying down, so why do they? It's all because of a Frenchman who decided it was more convenient – for men. The first paragraph itself makes me not want to read further.

lookoutwhoa 5mo ago

[flagged]

aaron695 5mo ago

[dead]

thomassmith65 5mo ago

I was curious about the claim so I did a web search for "Roman depiction of birth" and this is the first result: https://www.worldhistory.org/img/c/p/1200x627/18720.jpg https://www.worldhistory.org/img/c/p/1200x627/18720.jpg The mother appears to be sedentary, rather than supine. I doubt I would have noticed that detail had I not read the article.

downboots 5mo ago

Might one suggest the Blonsky device https://allthatsinteresting.com/blonsky-device https://allthatsinteresting.com/blonsky-device (ianad)

nineteen999 5mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFNmwFpyB3E&t=7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFNmwFpyB3E&t=7s

stavros 5mo ago

This article mixes the science with unnecessarily gendered language. It turns "a lying down position helps the doctor" to "men decided women should be on their backs" and "one pervert king liked watching women give birth, therefore somehow that's why". Can't we just focus on the scientific advantages and not try to shoehorn sexism into everything?

torlok 5mo ago
I think it's useful to drive the point home that there is no good reason to give birth lying down. Otherwise you make it sound like "scientists say you should try this", and not "this was a stupid idea in the first place".
- stavros 5mo ago
  My issue with the article in general is that it undermines its own persuasiveness. It doesn't seem to say "giving birth sitting is better", or even "doctors wanted to have better visibility", but tries to cast it as a story of deliberate male oppression. It's just unnecessarily divisive to try to turn this into a case of sexism, and I feel it takes away from the scientific angle of the article. Someone might very well dismiss the valid scientific findings as more about gender politics than science. It just doesn't seem to me like there's a need for the gendered slant.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 5mo ago
    I agree with you. Whenever anyone says "oh this is actually the males doing XYZ" it reduces the persuasiveness. It reminded me, I'm in an activist parents group and the other day a mom there was arguing that when the media uses the word "parenting" in the context of our focus subject, it's really a manifestation of the patriarchy keeping women oppressed (the implication that dads don't really parent, they just help the moms). There's loonies everywhere.
    - Terr_ 5mo ago
      I can imagine these two inverse outrages being deployed almost simultaneously: * "When you call that parenting, you give unearned credit to men who aren't contributing, call it mothering." * "When you call that mothering, you're letting men escape their duty to contribute, call it parenting." Some sort of... prescriptive versus descriptive paradox, I bet it can be found in other contexts too.

rappatic 5mo ago

> meant We're not meant to do anything. It's not like we were consciously designed with a purpose in mind. Do whatever you want.

octopoc 5mo ago
I have a first responder friend who helped a guy who wanted to have sex with his cousin, but she wouldn’t unless he got a circumcision, so he chopped his dick off. I personally think he was not using it the way it was meant to be used at two distinct levels: - you shouldn’t have sex with relatives - you shouldn’t chop your dick off The emergency room doctors sewed it back on. Not sure what to think about that.

fxtentacle 5mo ago

Maybe this is a UK problem? Or the author just doesn't have kids? (and has no experience?) German hospital beds for giving birth are at a 45 degree angle, which to me looked like a good compromise between "the mother can safely take a nap when she is tired" and "gravity will help you". Also, they have these thingys to put your legs up, so the overall posture is pretty close to squatting. (But with a back rest to prevent you from falling over if you're sleepy.) And modern German hospitals also have a bathtub with handrails to hang from above. And they have chairs with a hole in them. There's like a lot of options to choose from. But the nurses said that, statistically, most women choose the 45-degree-bed anyway. My guess would be because it looks the most comfortable.

Dazzler5648 5mo ago
Keep guessing. There are other reasons most women end up in the beds. (I’ve worked L&D and am a woman.)
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]

Dazzler5648 5mo ago

As a woman it will be neat/cute to watch YC men discuss this one. If anyone is really curious how this happened in American (and spread) I highly recommend the book “Born in the USA” by Marsden Wagner. TL;DR men saw money/opportunity in stealing women’s confidence in their natural and intuitive ability to give birth, built up tools and laws around it, and now we are stuck with a high caesarean AND fatality rate even despite this “progress.” I went to school to be a hospital midwife until I discovered what a sad racket it is. No wonder we also have high rates of postpartum depression.

bentt 5mo ago

https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2024/09/19/childbirth-in-the-past/ https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2024/09/19/childbirth... Childbirth was extraordinaly dangerous. 6-8 births per woman and a 1-2% chance of dying per birth for the majority of history. We have no idea what that was like. Rates today are ~0.013%.