Page 67 - Summer 2017 Journal

osteomalacia has great relevance for the young girls of today, because Vaughan believed that weak bones were entirely preventable. Vaughan reached the conclusion that the “crumpled” pelvic shape characteristic of osteomalacia was “entirely attributable to factors operative in the patient’s own lifetime”—and especially to “conditions prevailing before puberty” [emphasis in original].
Given that many people are currently returning to an awareness of the pivotal importance of sunlight for good health,15,16 Vaughan’s prescrip- tion for heliotherapy and her beliefs about sunlight’s central role are quite intriguing. In short, Vaughan believed that “difficult childbirth either in the East or the West is caused by faulty pelvic development due to want of sufficient light on the skin during the years preceding puberty.”
NEW CHALLENGES
In recent years, there has been an appalling increase in maternal
mortality in the US, making it an outlier among rich nations.17 Over the eighteen-year period from 1990 to 2008, maternal mortality doubled, giving the US the unimpressive rank of fiftieth in the world.18 According to Ina May Gaskin, famed author of Spiritual Midwifery, the maternal death ratio (number of maternal deaths per hundred thousand births) “is almost five times as high as it should be” for all American women, and “more than ten times what it should be” for African American women.19
In purely economic terms, women’s health advocates note that “for a country that spends more than any other country on health care and more on childbirth-related care than any other area of hospitalization... this is a shockingly poor return on investment.”18 The trend also gives special meaning to Vaughan’s macro-level observation that “the number of women who die in childbirth [is] a rough index to the rate at which any nation is going downhill.”
The increase in maternal mortality has been driven, in part, by the explosion of chronic medical conditions such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease.20 The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Preven-
tion’s Maternal and Infant Health Branch has commented, “The really scary thing to us is all the deaths from cardiovascular disease and heart failure,” noting that these represent fully one-fourth of all maternal deaths.20
Many of these chronic ailments also in- crease a woman’s chances of ending up with a c-section. For example, obesity is a known risk factor for surgical delivery.21 Given that failure to progress and CPD are among the top indica- tions for cesarean deliveries in young women under the age of twenty-five,11 it is discouraging to note that c-section rates for both of these two indications also increase markedly with level of obesity.22
Further, c-sections increase the risk of life-threatening complications in and of them- selves.23 For example, cesarean delivery nearly doubles a pregnant woman’s risk for thrombo- embolism (blood clots), another leading cause of maternal deaths in the US.24 A Scandinavian study found that c-sections were associated with an elevated risk of a thromboembolic event for as long as one hundred and eighty days post- partum, which is well beyond the six weeks typically defined as the postpartum period.25
RECLAIMING CHILDBIRTH
Overall, the Vienna researchers’ claims
seem strangely oblivious to the role of nutrient- dense diets and other important lifestyle factors that powerfully shape the health and childbirth
CAN THIS BE NORMAL?
The dismal childbirth trends that we observe today were already well under way in Dr. Vaughan’s time. Vaughan quoted a leading work on obstetrics from the 1930s by Joseph De Lee: “Is labor in the woman of today a normal function? I say it should be, but it is not. Can a function so perilous that, in spite of the best care, it kills thousands of women every year, that leaves a quarter of the women more or less invalided, and the majority with permanent anatomic changes of structure, that is always attended by severe pain and tearing of tissues, and that kills 3 to 5 percent of children—can such a function be called normal?”13 Vaughan herself described the “bruising and tearing of soft parts, the exhaustion of the mother, the risk of sepsis and of puerperal fever, all conditions directly due to this primary failure of adaptation between mother and child which lengthens out the natural process of birth into many hours, or even days.”
Vaughan’s book offers numerous descriptions of uncomplicated childbirth taking place in natural settings without distress. In contrast, modern hospital-based birth has become a highly controlled and frequently disempowering experi- ence: “The intravenous [IV] drips commonly attached to the hands or arms of birthing women make a powerful symbolic statement: [the drips] are umbilical cords to the hospital. By making her dependent on the institution for her life, the IV conveys to her one of the most profound messages of her initiation experience: in the contemporary American technoc- racy, we are all dependent on institutions for our lives, ‘umbilically’ linked to them through the water and sewer pipes, electrical wires, and TVs that pervade our homes, through our banking accounts and credit cards, and increasingly through our laptops, cell phones, iPads, and the like. The rituals of hospital birth are not accidental—they are profound symbolic and metaphoric expressions of technocratic life.”26
SUMMER 2017
Wise Traditions
67