40 Years Hard Labour

I'm sorry to say that there's hardly a word that is research based in this " 40 years hard labour " , but what surprises me is that my observation and experience is sometimes supported by subsequent research. This is an anecdotal account which I hope you will enjoy and find peppered with controversy, pearls of wisdom, and food for thought, but I expect it will not add one jot to the body of your knowledge, and most of you have probably not heard a lecture like this for some time. Not for my generation the PowerPoint lecture, but one written in longhand, which the author then performs. It is based on a chapter I was asked to write last year on essentially the same theme for a textbook for midwives. Here goes! The bell rang and I and three other new pupil Midwives, trying to master the art of palpation, left the antenatal clinic and rushed to labour ward to witness our first delivery. It was 1964 when childbirth was not viewed as the normal life changing event, which it is today, but a frightening painful experience, which women had to endure in order to become mothers. It was a time when antenatal education was almost non-existent and women came to childbirth hardly knowing what to expect. Many were forced to deliver at home because there were not enough maternity beds for them to have their baby in hospital, which is what women then aspired to do. Hospital birth was becoming all the rage! Labours were longer and experienced without the support of husbands and family, who generally left them at the labour ward door, coming back later to see mother and baby. Women laboured in Nightingale wards with only a curtain in between them. They often laboured with inadequate pain relief. 50 or 100mg of pethidine was the standard analgesia for labour, topped up by gas and air towards the second stage. However the women in Liverpool were very well treated in this respect, because they were given the Liverpool cocktail. A primigravida would be given 10mg of morphine, 100mg of pethidine, and 200mg of butobarbitone at two fingers dilated; topped up later in the labour by 100mg of pethidine and gas and air. They often woke up three days later and exclaim, " Did I have the baby!!? " So much for bonding, but at least they …