Safe, Painless Birth?

Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. -- Genesis 3:16.

Ever since the discovery of anesthesia, men have been trying to defy God's word to Eve. In 1941, Drs. Robert Hingson and Waldo Edwards of the U.S. Public Health Service started experimenting with continuous caudal analgesia--slow injection of a pain-killing drug into the nerve canal at the base of the spine--during labor. Among their first subjects: Coast-guardsmen's wives at Staten Island's Stapleton Marine Hospital.

Last week at the International Congress of Anesthetists in Manhattan, Dr. Hingson was ready to talk statistics. In more than 2,000 childbirths under caudal analgesia, said he, more than 90% of the mothers had complete relief from pain; the death rate was less than half that of a group of mothers who did not get the treatment. Furthermore, the death rate of babies in the first week of life was 11.5 per 1,000 as opposed to 20.8 in the other group. Reason: continuous caudal analgesia relaxes the mother's muscles so that the baby does not take such a beating in being born. Dr. Hingson's conclusion: if his method could be applied to all U.S. deliveries with the same results he has obtained to date, it would save half of the annual 125,000 babies who are stillborn or die in the first week of life.

The caudal technique may be dangerous in inexperienced hands. But Dr. Hingson, who is teaching 20 doctors at a time in two-week courses, says any trained general practitioner can use it in a properly equipped hospital.

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