Have you ever wondered how our traditions around childbirth developed?  Why did we start having babies in hospitals?  Why are laboring women placed on their backs?  How did the consummately feminine domain of childbirth become the territory of (mostly) male physicians?  

Dr. Robbie Davis-Floyd, Cultural Anthropologist, provides some fascinating insight into issues such as these in her book, BIRTH AS AN AMERICAN RITE OF PASSAGE.  Following are excerpts from this work:       

• [In the 1600s] Western philosophers such as Descartes and Bacon...established the conceptual separation of mind and body...  This idea meant that the superior cultural essence of man - his mind - could remain unaffected while the body, as a mere part of mechanical nature, could be taken apart, studied and repaired...[They] assumed that the universe was mechanistic, following predictable laws that those enlightened enough to free themselves from the limitation of medieval superstition could discover through science and manipulate through technology.  These ideas fit so well with our already ancient cultural belief in our right to dominate nature (chartered in Genesis) that by the end of the seventeenth century they had already become the philosophical cornerstones on which rested the belief system of Western society.
  

•  ...the more technology the hospital has to offer, the better it is considered to be.  As an institution, it constitutes a more significant social unit than the individual or the family, so the birth process should conform more to institutional needs than personal needs.  As one physician put it, "There was a set, established routine for doing things, and the laboring woman was someone you worked around, rather than with."

• Roberto Caldeyro-Barcia, past president of the International Federation of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, states unequivocally, "Except for being hanged by the feet, the supine position [on the back] is the worst conceivable position for labor and delivery." (1975:11).  There are a number of problems generated in this position: (1) it focuses most of the woman's body weight squarely on her tailbone, forcing it forward and thereby narrowing the pelvic outlet, which both increases the length of labor and makes delivery more difficult (Balaskas and Balaskas 1983:8); (2) it compresses major blood vessels, interfering with circulation and decreasing blood pressure, which in turn lowers the oxygen supply to the fetus...(3) contractions tend to be weaker, less frequent and more irregular...and pushing is harder to do because increased force is needed to work against gravity...

• Placing the infant in a separate room to sleep is characteristic only of technocratic society.  In the vast majority of human societies...the infant sleeps in a social environment with direct, skin-to-skin contact between infant and caretaker (Laughlin 1990:43).  James McKenna and his colleagues have demonstrated through sleep research that the breathing patterns of mothers and babies who sleep together synchronize, and have found evidence to suggest that nocturnal separation may contribute to the problems of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) (McKenna 1987,1988; McKenna et al. 1990).

• As increasing evidence of the unnecessary and often harmful nature of obstetrical procedures accumulates and is published by the medical, psychological, anthropological, and lay presses, many individuals involved with birth are asking how it is possible that a medical specialty that purports to be scientific can appear to be so irrational.