From 1915 up until the 1970s, many American women gave birth in a state called “Twilight Sleep,” which offered them the alluring but misleading promise of a painless birth. Hailed at first as a miracle of modern medicine, twilight sleep was induced by an injection of a morphine- and-scopolamine cocktail. The mixture caused a sort of amnesia; women would not remember the process of labor and delivery, and so would have no recollection of pain during birth. But laboring mothers were in fact experiencing pain as well as the effects of narcotics. Many women thrashed about and standard procedure was to strap them to the delivery bed.
The practice initially gained popularity with wealthy women, who formed Twilight Sleep societies and praised the procedure, believing it was more humane and even aspirational. It was promoted by an overwhelmingly male obstetrics profession, which described birth as a “pathological process” from which “only a small minority of women escape damage during labor.”
Then a Ladies’ Home Journal article published in May of 1958 blew the lid off of what was really happening in delivery rooms. Spurred by an anonymous letter from a registered nurse, other women submitted letters of their personal stories to the magazine, and the shocking procedure was finally out in the open, leading to the eventual demise of the practice.
