Deliver Me from Pain: Anesthesia and Birth in America

"Ultimately, the normalization of obstetric anesthesia has taught women to view themselves as helpless victims of a bodily process rather than as the most important participants in the process... The widespread promotion and acceptance of anesthesia can be linked directly to the normalization of many controversial obstetric practices: forceps use, labor induction, labor augmentation, episiotomy, electronic fetal monitoring, and a high cesarean section rate. Indeed, anesthesia during childbirth is so inextricably connected to these treatments that the more popular obstetric anesthesia has become, the less women and their doctors have been able to tolerate the mere notion of physiological birth. The history of obstetric anesthesia is thus a tale of how some medical treatments have come to be defined as 'necessary' and, concomitantly, how both the medical and lay communities have come to view potentially dangerous treatments as beneficial."(196)