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Increasing numbers of women opt for
delivery in a
birthing suite or LDR (labor-delivery-recovery room), where they can
wear their own clothes, do without the IV,
walk around during labor, and where the options of side-lying, squatting, or even standing for birth are increasingly available.
(The fact that many standard
procedures
can be instrumentally omitted underscores my point that they are
rituals.)
Yet in spite of these concessions to consumer
demand for more "natural" birth, a basic pattern of high-technological
intervention remains: most
hospitals now require at least periodic electronic monitoring of all laboring women; analgesics, pitocin, and epidurals are widely
administered; and one woman in four is delivered by Cesarean section. Thus,
although some medical procedures drop away, the use of the most powerful
signifiers of the woman's dependence on
science and technology intensifies.
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Of course, there are many variations on this theme in
hospitals around the United States. Some procedures that used to be standard in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s
such as handstrapping, the
exclusion of fathers, and the use of "twilight sleep" for labor seem part
of the Dark Ages now. Other major changes since then have
involved the incorporation of increasingly sophisticated
machines and drugs,and
of the ideas that it is good for the father to be present and for women to be
conscious during birth. In recent years many younger doctors have begun to drop
shaves and
enemas from their standard
orders (although several complained to me that the nurses, also strongly socialized
into the technocratic model,
frequently administer them anyway).