My wife is in labor. Soon we will welcome our second child into the world. The strange dance of modern childbirth begins. Will this be a home birth or in a hospital? Will there be an epidural or not? Will there be a pool or a bed? A midwife or a doctor? A c-section or not? So many differences then centuries and millineea before. So “unnatural,” but also more safe.
My wife and child, most likely, will return home entirely safe and healthy in a few days. This luxury is one of the gifts of the modern world, at least for some of us. I wonder how many great minds of the past, mothers and children, were lost in childbirth. The progress of modern medicine.
One of the most fun books for my wife to read her last pregnancy was Get Me Out, a history of childbirth. It is a good book. Check it out.
My mother was a few months short of 40 years old when I was born. And this was over half a century ago. My understanding is that both patients almost died. It was C section. I do think that having parents who were older than usual (and aunts and uncles who were older) gave me a different perspective on things.
Congratulations! The Lord has blessed me in many ways, but my wife and children (aged 21 and 18 now) are at the very top of the list!
My oldest inherited what my wife refers to as the “Henderson head”, which has nothing to do with intelligence, but everything to do with a large circumference! She became stuck in the birth canal and required an emergency C-section. A planned C-section with the second was as simple and stress-free as we could have possibly hoped.
(Unfortunately, @swamidass, working on a large monitor with very magnified type sometimes can be like reading a book through a keyhole or a microscope—so I can miss new threads sometimes. I was tied up much of the day on Sunday and I suppose this thread was pushed off my first page before I noticed it.)
