Comrades in the Labor Room: The Lamaze Method of Childbirth Preparation and France's Cold War Home Front, 1951–1957
TL;DR: Departing from the Western trend toward obstetric anesthetics and analgesics, PPM sought to eliminate or alleviate the pain of childbirth through psychological conditioning, physical training, and education.
Abstract: IN JUNE 1951, SOVIET PROFESSOR A. P. Nikolaev traveled to Paris from Leningrad to participate in the International Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology, where he gave a presentation on the work that he and others had been doing on the psychoprophylactic method (PPM) of childbirth. Departing from the Western trend toward obstetric anesthetics and analgesics, PPM sought to eliminate or alleviate the pain of childbirth through psychological conditioning, physical training, and education. PPM proponents believed the pain almost universally experienced in normal labor to be psychogenic in origin, the product of social conditioning that led women to anticipate and thereby preordain pain. Women studied patterned breathing techniques to conquer labor pain in two ways. First, building on six weeks of prior training, the use of patterned breathing at the onset of active labor triggered a conditional response of relaxation. Second, a focus on the breath occupied the laboring woman’s attention, distracting her from pain and interfering with the reception and interpretation in the cerebral cortex of potentially painful sensations originating in the uterus. Expectant Soviet mothers mastered several breathing patterns, from slow and
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03 Mar 2020
TL;DR: In this paper, a social and cultural history of how Yugoslav communists wielded reproductive regulation in Yugoslavia during its socialist period, 1945-1989, in an effort to build the third way to socialism and to position the country as a conduit between the global North and South.
Abstract: This is a social and cultural history of how Yugoslav communists wielded reproductive regulation in Yugoslavia during its socialist period, 1945-1989, in an effort to build the third way to socialism – self-management – and to position the country as a conduit between the global North and South. Throughout this time period, the state energetically invested in the construction of a medico-legal infrastructure to regulate reproductive matters. It tackled catastrophic population health across the newly-formed socialist country, initiated a science-fuelled modernisation and industrialisation project designed to unify the citizenry under a new national identity, and expressed its commitment to socialist gender equality.
63 citations
TL;DR: The study results showed that the use of breathing patterns during the first period of labour were not effective to control anxiety, pain, fatigue and maternal satisfaction.
Abstract: Objective Assess the efficacy of the breathing patterns during the active phase of the first stage of labor for maternal anxiety. Desing Randomised trial with two treatment arms and intention-to-treat analysis. Participants One Hundred and forty patient in active labour, age between 12 and 40 years old and gestational age between 37 and 41 weeks. The breathing patterns waere made depending on the dilation phase and intensity of contraction, while the control group received routine care service. Results There was no difference between groups two hours after the first evaluation regarding to anxiety (MD 0.3 CI95% −4.2 to 4.8), pain (MD 0.0 CI95% −0.8 to 0.7), fatigue (MD -0.5 CI95% −1.4 to 2.5) and maternal satisfaction (MD 0.9 CI95% −0.1 to 2.0). Conclusions The study results showed that the use of breathing patterns during the first period of labour were not effective to control anxiety, pain, fatigue and maternal satisfaction.
27 citations
TL;DR: The border between France and Britain was more porous than is typically apparent from nationally-focused studies: ideas, people and devices travelled in both directions; communication strategies were always able to evade the rule of law and religion loomed large in debates on both sides of the channel.
Abstract: This special issue adopts a comparative approach to the politics of reproduction in twentieth-century France and Britain. The articles investigate the flow of information, practices and tools across national boundaries and between groups of experts, activists and laypeople. Empirically grounded in medical, news media and feminist sources, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, they reveal the practical similarities that existed between countries with officially different political regimes as well as local differences within the two countries. Taken as a whole, the special issue shows that the border between France and Britain was more porous than is typically apparent from nationally-focused studies: ideas, people and devices travelled in both directions; communication strategies were always able to evade the rule of law; contraceptive practices were surprisingly similar in both countries; and religion loomed large in debates on both sides of the channel.
27 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines state-sponsored tourism for Soviet adolescents during the post-World War II years of Stalin's rule, 1945-1953, a topic not explored in any depth within scholarship on the USSR, despite the surprising degree of importance ascribed to this area by the authorities.
Abstract: This article examines state-sponsored tourism for Soviet adolescents during the post-World War II years of Stalin’s rule, 1945–1953, a topic not explored in any depth within scholarship on the USSR, despite the surprising degree of importance ascribed to this area by the authorities. Through adopting the lens of tourism studies and childhood and youth studies, the essay enriches our understanding of Soviet postwar society, particularly the overt official endeavors to forge model young citizens and the covert efforts to legitimize the political system, encourage natalism, and spread the Soviet model throughout the world via Cold War public diplomacy. Finding striking convergences and illuminating disparities between the approaches of different political and social structures to young people and their leisure time, this piece advances our understanding of the ways that modern societies maintain and reproduce themselves, or fail to do so. Furthermore, the essay considers matters of broader humanistic relevance, such as the mobilization of emotions for government purposes and the politicization of childhood and youthhood. It compares the Soviet case study to authoritarian and democratic western states and uses the socialist context of the postwar Soviet Union to enrich and add nuance to current scholarly models, based overwhelmingly on case studies of western settings that undercount the importance of state organs.
23 citations
TL;DR: The history of the ‘psychoprophylactic method of painless childbirth’ in socialist Czechoslovakia, in particular, in the Czech and Moravian regions of the country is explored, showing that it substantially differs from the course that the method took in other countries.
Abstract: This paper explores the history of the ‘psychoprophylactic method of painless childbirth’ in socialist Czechoslovakia, in particular, in the Czech and Moravian regions of the country, showing that it substantially differs from the course that the method took in other countries. This non-pharmacological method of pain relief originated in the USSR and became well known as the Lamaze method in western English-speaking countries. Use of the method in Czechoslovakia, however, followed a very different path from both the West, where its use was refined mainly outside the biomedical frame, and the USSR, where it ceased to be pursued as a scientific method in the 1950s after Stalin’s death. The method was imported to Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s and it was politically promoted as Soviet science’s gift to women. In the 1960s the method became widespread in practice but research on it diminished and, in the 1970s, its use declined too. However, in the 1980s, in the last decade of the Communist regime, the method resurfaced in the pages of Czechoslovak medical journals and underwent an exciting renaissance, having been reintroduced by a few enthusiastic individuals, most of them women. This article explores the background to the renewed interest in the method while providing insight into the wider social and political context that shaped socialist maternity and birth care in different periods.
11 citations