People in lockdown are no longer trying to use technology to get their old lives back and that’s a good thing, says Annalee Newitz
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https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24632810-700-its-time-to-retreat-from-the-tyranny-of-lockdown-tech/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home
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Each pregnancy is unique and clinical needs can change across the pregnancy, childbirth and postnatal periods. One thing that never changes is the right to a positive experience at every stage.
Achieving the best possible physical, emotional, and psychological outcomes for every individual and newborn requires health systems to take a human rights-based approach: not only preventing maternal death and morbidity, but prioritising person-centred
care and well-being.
WHO is developing new guidelines for a positive experience of postnatal care, due to be published next year. To inform these guidelines and ensure that postnatal services can better meet the needs of women and their babies, WHO undertook a qualitative
systematic review on what matters to women in the postnatal period.
There is limited research about values and preferences in the postnatal period, defined by WHO as the first six weeks after childbirth. Studies have often focused on the results of specific postnatal interventions, rather than on the individuals who use
them.
‘What matters to women in the postnatal period: A meta-synthesis of qualitative studies,’ published in PLOS ONE, gives long-overdue respect to the authority of women’s own experiences. The authors review first-hand data from 15 countries
and 36 studies published after the year 2000 relating to women’s beliefs, expectations and values at this significant time of life.
These studies affirm that a positive postnatal experience can result in joy, self-confidence and enhanced capacity to thrive as both a person and a parent.
They are also vocal about the potential challenges of adjusting to a ‘new normal’ following childbirth, including changes in self-identity, relationships, and sexual behaviour.
A positive postnatal experience for a woman will be one that responds to her specific context and preferences.
It will provide the confidence, knowledge and skills women need in the weeks following childbirth, supporting them to adjust to any changes in their intimate relationships and build new family ones. Women will be better equipped to navigate physical and
emotional challenges and to experience the dynamic achievement of personal growth.
This should be a shared responsibility, not a solitary one. Community has a critical role in enabling a positive postnatal experience, including partners, family and elders.
It is crucial that healthcare providers meet each woman’s needs, as well as those of their babies.
There are an estimated 303 000 maternal deaths annually, according to recent WHO figures. Most of these deaths occur postnatally.
The postnatal period is therefore a vital opportunity to improve both maternal and neonatal health and wellbeing: supporting healthy behaviors, providing life-skills education, facilitating breastfeeding, counselling women about family planning options,
supporting good mental health, preventing and treating childbirth-related complications.
Health care systems that empower individuals by supporting their values, preferences and rights are fundamental to improving maternal and newborn health outcomes.
WHO has recently released recommendations on antenatal care for a positive pregnancy experience, and on intrapartum care for a positive childbirth experience.
These publications made important clinical updates, including an increase from four to eight recommended antenatal contacts, and a revision to the decision-making process for interventions to accelerate labour.
They also uphold every woman’s right to a positive maternity care experience: one where her pregnancy does not erase her competency, autonomy and right to participate in decision-making for her own care and the care of her newborn.
Women’s choices and rights to sexual and reproductive health care, including maternity care, should be respected at every stage of the continuum of maternal and newborn care. This is true across all income settings, as well as in humanitarian settings
and during public health emergencies.
When WHO’s postnatal guidelines are released next year, they will complete the maternity care series built around what matters to women.
Rather than dividing care into three periods of antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal, these publications can be used to establish a model in which health systems support women, their baby and wider network physically, psychologically, socially and emotionally
through this significant life event.
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https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/22-04-2020-what-matters-to-women-in-the-postnatal-period
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In this book the writer thereof seeks to convey to women—particularly to young wives and women expecting to be married—certain important facts of knowledge, certain necessary information, which all such women should possess, but which few are given the opportunity to acquire.
It would seem to require no argument to convince a rational individual that before a woman is capable of intelligent motherhood she should be made acquainted with the physiological processes which are involved in the sexual functions leading to the state of motherhood; but we are confronted by the fact that few young women are given such instruction.
It is a strange thing that while even the ordinary school child is made acquainted with the physiological processes concerned with the processes of digestion, respiration, circulation, elimination, etc., and while such education is highly commended, yet at the same time not only are the young of both sexes reared as if there was no such thing as sexual functions in existence, but even full-grown adults are left to pick up their instruction on sexual subjects from chance sources—often polluted sources.
Even those about to enter into the important offices of matrimony and parenthood are permitted to assume those duties and responsibilities without intelligent and scientific information or knowledge being given them. What would we think of expecting a woman to cook, without previous experience and without even the most elementary instruction on the subject? What would we think of expecting any person to undertake any important task or duty without experience or instruction regarding the same? And yet we seem content to allow young women to enter into the important relationship of marriage, and to undertake the important office of motherhood, often in absolute ignorance of the physiological processes involved, and the physical laws governing the same.
All this absurd practice and custom results simply from the antiquated notion that it is “not nice” to speak or think of the subject of the sex functions. The subject has been considered “taboo” by our particular section of the human race since the Middle Ages, because the ascetic ideals of that dark period of human history brought forward a totally false and unnatural conception of sex as fundamentally impure. If the results were not so deplorable and often tragic, this condition of affairs would be a fit subject for laughter and scornful ridicule. But, alas! on the part of the thoughtful observer of this state of things there is rather great wonder and amazement accompanied by the feeling of deep sorrow.
It cannot be honestly denied that in our present age, and period of modern civilization, and particularly among the Anglo-Saxon branch of the race, the question of the sex functions is associated with impurity, at least so far as the popular mind is concerned. In previous civilizations the subject was accorded its proper place, and was discussed sanely and thoughtfully, without any sense of shame or impurity. The Middle Age ideals of celibacy and asceticism brought about the public conception of the human body as a thing impure—something to be modified, tortured, subdued and reviled; and a corresponding conception of sex as a vile, impure thing above which the pure in heart rose entirely and completely, and which those of a lesser spiritual ideal were permitted to indulge with a due sense of their degradation and weakness. It was considered a most worthy thing to lead an ascetic life with its accompaniment of disdain and punishment of the body. It was considered most pious and spiritual to forego the ordinary human relations of sex, marriage and parenthood. From these distorted conceptions naturally evolved the idea that sex, and all connected with it, was a subject unclean and impure in itself, and to be avoided in thought, conversation and writing. Not only the ordinary sex relations of human life were placed under this taboo, but also the phenomena of birth and parenthood. Not only did these incidents of life grow to be considered impure, but they became that which to many was still worse, that is to say, they became to be regarded as “not respectable.”
Ignorance regarding the plain elementary facts of sexual physiology is undoubtedly the cause not only of much immorality among young people of both sexes, but also of many unhappy and inharmonious marriages. The intelligent portion of our race is now beginning to realize very keenly the fact that the first requisite of sane marital relations and intelligent parenthood is a practical and clear knowledge of the physiology of sex; education concerning the sexual organism, its laws, its functions, its normal and healthy conditions, its anatomy, its physiology and hygiene.
The average physician of experience in general or special practice can tell tales of almost incredible ignorance on the part of young women who have recently entered into the relationship of marriage. In some cases the ignorance is more than a mere absence of knowledge—it consists too often of false-knowledge, untruthful ideas concerning matters of the most serious import. It is sad enough to think how such persons may work results harmful to themselves, but it is even sadder still to realize that these same ignorant young women must eventually gain their real knowledge through sad experience—experience paid for not only by themselves but also by their children. It is a hard saying, but a true one, that the knowledge of many young wives and mothers is to be gained by experience paid for by their (as yet) unborn children.
The writer of the present work is one of the rapidly growing number of thinking persons who believe that the time has come to educate the race concerning the importance of sane instruction concerning the functions of sex. He, and those who think as he does, believe that the time has come to “Turn on the Light!” They believe that the importance of the subject will be realized by all intelligent persons, once that their attention is directed to the subject, and once they have considered it apart from the old prejudices and distorted customs. When public opinion on this subject is reformed, then will the taboo fall away from the body of truth; then will the subject take its place among the “respectable” topics which may be considered, discussed, and taught, without loss of caste or prestige.
In a few decades, perhaps even much sooner, it will be regarded as quite reprehensible to permit young persons to enter into the relationship of marriage without a sane, practical knowledge of their own reproductive organism and the functions thereof, and of their physiological duties to themselves, to their companions in marriage, and to their children born or to be born. We may even see the practical application of the somewhat startling prophecy of Newell Dwight Hillis, D. D., who said: “The State that makes a man study two years before a license as druggist is given; that makes a young lawyer or doctor study three years before being permitted to practice; ought to ask the young man or young woman to pass an equally rigid examination before license is given to found an American home, and set up an American family.”
While the information above alluded to should be given alike to the young husband and the young wife, it cannot be doubted that the latter is the one of the pair who is most in need of this kind of instruction. While both the young man and the young woman require this instruction, the need is the greater in the case of the young woman, by the very nature of the case. The sex functions and processes play a much more important part in the life of the woman than in that of the man, the protests of some of the modern feminists to the contrary notwithstanding. The careful student of the sex life of men and women frankly confesses that in both the physical and the psychical realm the sex offices make a greater demand upon the time and attention of the woman than of the man.
The love-life of the woman is far fuller and more absorbing than is that of the man. Unhappiness concerning her love-life renders the remainder of the life of the average woman of comparatively little account; while, with a happy love-life she will put up cheerfully with the absence of many other things which are usually regarded as necessities for happiness. As a writer has said: “Essentially, a woman is made for love—not exclusively, but essentially; and a woman who has had no love in her life has been a failure.”
The same rule operates on the physical plane. As the same writer has said: “Physically, the woman is also much more cognizant of her sex and much more hampered by the manifestation of her sex nature than man is.” The manifestation of the incidents of menstruation is a constant reminder to the woman that she is a creature of sex. The phenomenon of pregnancy is, likewise, something from which the man is free. And, finally, the menopause, or “change of life,” with its incidents greatly influencing the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of the woman, is Nature’s final word to the woman that she is the active pole of sex-life. As the above-quoted writer has said: “Altogether it cannot be denied that woman is much more a slave of her sex-nature than man is of his. Nature has handicapped woman much more heavily than she has man.”
And so, in this book, the young woman—the young wife—is directly addressed, her companion and mate being referred to only indirectly.
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