We have talked a lot about what is a natural birth, a normal birth, a vaginal birth ... and today we give a new twist to the subject with a related concept.
Elisabeth Bing He was a pioneering physiotherapist in the defense of natural childbirth in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. But, unlike the natural childbirth gurus in Europe, he did not share the term "natural childbirth" and preferred that of "Delivery ready" or "ready delivery".
For her, "natural" would be a delivery that does not occur in the hospital, for which the woman would not have attended preparation classes or reported. A natural birth would be like that of centuries ago, unattended, or as it continues to occur today in places in the third world.
The adjective "prepared" was probably less "loud", less "commercial, but referred to the woman was informed, prepared for childbirth, and among its objectives was not to completely eliminate pain relievers, but to give women the opportunity to make informed decisions.
In order to enlighten the future, parents, Elisabeth Bing had the slogan "Wake up and alert", referring to the woman during childbirth. No barbiturates and drugs that will leave the mother unable to feel and live her birth, that would not allow her to catch her baby at birth.
His ideas influenced different circles of women and became popular, for example among the wives of Yale medical students. There they, familiar with the medical practice, called on the hospital and the Yale doctors to change their methods of delivery care.
Soon they would organize prenatal classes with relaxation techniques, and the hospital would modify its infrastructure to facilitate cohabitation between different mothers and their babies.
And all this impregnated with a halo of feminism, in the sense of feeling free to claim what they wanted and want to decide for themselves. Something that was not simple in a context in which the medicalized and "over-anesthetized" birth, as well as the separation of the baby in the nests or cribs was the usual thing.
In 1960, Marjorie Karmel and Elizabeth Bing founded ASPO / Lamaze (now Lamaze International), a nonprofit organization made up of parents, birth educators, health care providers and other health professionals in order to Generalize the Lamaze method for a natural birth.
Paradoxically, Elisabeth Bing He went through everything he fought against, after years of preaching "prepared motherhood," which would be equivalent to another concept that we often handle in our pages, that of "conscious motherhood." But in her birth she gave birth in a way that was not too "natural": she was sedated with nitrous oxide or "laughing gas" and then insisted that she be given epidural anesthesia.
She wouldn't remember much about how her birth went, but she kept preaching the prepared childbirth, a fearless, conscious birth, in which the informed woman can decide on how she wants her child to be born. And today, decades later, we are still on the road to achieve that purpose.
