DISGRACE TO U.S.A.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20310, 21 May 1934, Page 1

DISGRACE TO U.S.A.

Childbirth Death Rate Too High. CHICAGO, May 12. Efforts to secure painless childbirth are costing too many mothers’ lives in the United States, which now has the highest death rate from childbirth of any civilised nation, according to Dr Ray Lyman Wilbur, of Stanford University. Dr Wilbur, who is also chairman of the council on medical education and hospitals of the American Medical Association, made the statement at a conference called to improve the standards of medical practice in hospitals anJ medical schools. American womanhood, he said, was paying the penalty of self-indulgence. The world had been 100 kind to mothers for their own good. “ I think that the high American death rate can be traced directly to the widespread use of methods to ease the pain of Nature’s process,” he said. “ Instead of allowing birth to take its course we interfere too often, usually at the derire of the women. Women pay with their lives for this comfort. I do not believe the fault is primarily with the. medical schools, whose training in obstetrics is far superior to that of previous generations.”

Similar views were expressed by Dean Elias P. Lyon, of the medical school of the University of Minnesota. '* The childbirth death rate in the Un : ted States is disgraceful,” he said. “ There are two schools in obstetrics technique. “One believes in allowing Nature to *’ake its course with the least possible interference. The other interferes at the least excuse. I cannot help feeling that if the conservative technique were more generally followed the death-rate would be sharply lower.”