In her day, women in labor were put into a drug-induced trance, a procedure known as twilight sleep. With the help of a drug called scopolamine (also known as the date rape drug, “the Devil’s Breath”), women felt the pain of giving birth; they just couldn’t remember it. If she was too loopy to push, my mother would lie on the table like a stunned cow before the slaughter while the doctor grabbed a pair of forceps and yanked out one or the other of us. Eventually, she would “come to,” to find yet another frantic, cone-headed newborn in her arms and stitches in her perineum, clueless of how
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