'Twilight Sleep' Is The Historical Birthing Method That Will Keep You Up At Night

Forget epidurals and gas and air for a second. Decades ago, some women were given a cocktail of drugs to knock them into a state between sleep and wakefulness while they gave birth.When they came to, often their baby wasn’t even there. Dubbed ‘twilight sleep’, the little-spoken-about technique involved offering two drugs, scopolamine and morphine, which acted together to remove the memory of labour and also the pain of it, according to an analysis of old newspaper clippings on the topic.It was a big deal for women, as birth is extremely painful and this was a way to reduce pain and help them forget the trauma. It was also seen, at the time, as a better option to anaesthetics ether and chloroform, whose safety was contested.The pain relief option came at a cost for some. There are several anecdotes on the internet about what giving birth while in a ‘twilight sleep’ was like – and while it was supposed to be liberating for women (and in some cases, it was), it sounded equally distressing.In serious cases, if doses weren’t issued correctly, women and babies died. What was giving birth under ‘twilight sleep’ like?One person recalled how their grandmother had given birth twice under twilight sleep. “She said it was horrifying, they wouldn’t let her husband or mother go with her. She was 19 with her first child,” they said.“She woke up in a panic, looking for her babies and there was no one around her both times to reassure her that her babies were born healthy since she had complications with both pregnancies. She had unexplained bruises on her body with her first.”In a more recent forum discussion on what it was like to give birth in the 1960s, another person said their mother gave birth under twilight sleep in New Jersey. “When my dad dropped her off at the hospital, they took her back and knocked her out,” they recalled.“When she woke up at 6am, she was in a room with another woman. She asked where her baby was, and they told her that [she] was in the nursery. When she asked to see me, they told her that they’d bring me to her at 9am. That was the policy.“An obedient woman, she spent 3 hours lying in bed and wondering how I was. They discouraged her from breastfeeding when things got tough. It was also easier for them to feed me at night if I was bottle fed. My dad got to see me through the glass, but didn’t get to hold me until they got home.”Yet not everyone had a negative experience. One person said their grandmother had six children and was “knocked out for every birth”. But they added: “Grandma had no regrets, said she didn’t want to be awake for it.” The technique gained popularity between 1900 and the early 1910s, research suggests. Some reports suggest Queen Elizabeth II was put into a twilight sleep during the birth of her first three children – something you might’ve seen depicted in TV series, The Crown.According to the Maternity and Midwifery Forum, “in the UK it would have been the wealthy who would have paid for this form of extreme pain relief, or within certain hospitals, though in the 1930s onwards it was more common in the US”.But there were several risks attachedDue to the passive nature of this type of birth, babies would often need to be pulled out using forceps, an intervention which can come with its own risks – namely vaginal tearing and incontinence in birthing mothers, and bruising on the baby’s head.This delivery method was also associated with a longer birth time and increased risk of infant suffocation, according to the Embryo Project Encyclopedia.The use of scopolamine would “disorient” pregnant women, apparently “causing them to scream and thrash”. Some labouring women would be strapped to beds, with gauze over their eyes and oil-soaked cotton in their ears so they couldn’t hear. In the sixties, physicians started to move away from inducing a ‘twilight sleep’ due to increased reporting of the negative side effects which paved the way for the popularity of epidurals, which started to boom in the late ’60s and into the ’70s – and are still used today.Related...When I Was 7, I Stopped Feeling Any Kind Of Pain – Now I Know WhyA Nurse Did The Unthinkable To My Mum As She Gave Birth To My Brother. No One Believed Her, But I'm Here To Warn You.Do Dads Sleep Through Their Babies' Cries At Night?

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