Technology In Birthing Essay

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In modern day America, many doctors believe that technology is necessary to control the birthing process. However, technology often causes more problems than there would be otherwise. As a result, a growing number of women opt to give birth in birthing centers attended by midwives or at home attended by midwives or without outside birthing assistance. This alternative method has the possibility of being safer, as hospital births often result in a high infant and mother mortality rate, and laboring women are often lied to and coerced into doing what the medical staff wants. The least natural way for a woman to give birth is to lie flat on the back, yet that is almost the exact position a woman will be put in when she goes to the hospital to …show more content…
Up until the past sixty or seventy years women were having babies without technological help, without all of the fancy machinery that is used in modern birthing, and somehow the human race was able to thrive without assistance. There are many people that truly believe that technology is the answer for anything and everything, and in the birthing field a perfect example is a machine known as “The Blonsky.” In her book Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care Jennifer Block bemoans about George Blonsky, a retired engineer and his wife came up with a machine in the mid-sixties, and were granted a patent by the U.S. Patent Office to build this machine to assist laboring women give birth. The Blonsky was basically a flat disk table that the laboring woman would get strapped down on, and the table would start to spin subjecting the woman’s body to seven G’s of force (seven times the force of gravity), and the centrifugal force would “assist” the baby out of the womb. From this example it is painfully obvious that all technology is not necessarily for the best, in point of fact, it can quite often do more harm than anything else. Although the Blonsky never ended up being built, there are other pieces of technology that are very active in a labor and delivery room which bring

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