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  • Essay / Midwife's First Trial - 735

    Twilight sleep was introduced with the combination of morphine, for pain relief, scopolamine and amnestic which prevented women from remembering the birthing process. Upper-class women initially welcomed it as a symbol of the medical process, although its negative effects were later publicized. “Dr. Joseph Lee describes childbirth as a pathological process that harms both mothers and babies “often and seriously.” He said that if birth were rightly seen as a destructive pathology rather than a normal function, "midwifery would be impossible even to mention." In the first issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, DeLee proposed a sequence of interventions designed to save women from the "natural evils of labor." Interventions included routine use of sedatives, ether, episiotomies, and forceps. (Put quote) As the years went by, more and more midwives were not used in the middle and upper classes, the lower class was the one who used the midwife the most because they did not have cannot afford to go to the hospital and pay them and a doctor to help with the delivery. Midwifery began a slow uprising in the United States in the form of nurse midwifery, when the Frontier Nursing Service was founded in a poor rural county in Kentucky in 1925. It was founded by Mary Breckinridge, who worked as a public health nurse for the Red Cross in France at the End of the World