I think it was Louis the XIV (1638 - 1715) that first proposed that women birth in a lithotomy position; on their backs, because he was curious about how babies were born. Marcel Mauriceau, the attending doctor, obliged Louis XIV's request and recommended that women lie on their backs during childbirth. Prior to that, women used various methods for delivering children that included birthing stools, birthing poles, walking, squating and so on. Two centuries later, women on both sides of the ocean (Europe and North America) routinely birthed in the lithotomy position.
This was not the only reason that women birthed on their backs. Eventually this position became necessary because of the high mortality rates of birthing women. Between 1850 - 1900, mortality rates during childbirth were sometimes as high as 23% per month due to puerperal fever, which is usually fatal for mother and child. This death rate gave support to the intervention from medical doctors as the purveyors of health and well being. What was not understood, at the time, was that doctors were routinely transferring illnesses, such as typhoid fever, to birthing women because of performiing autopsies in the morgue and then performing gynecological examinations on birthing women. Hygiene was not understood until Louis Pastuer formalized the relationship bewteen transferred germs and puerperal fever in 1879, so prior to that, medical professionals did not change clothes or wash up between the examinations.
You're probably wondering where I'm going with this. My point is that women, for centuries, birthed in natural positions (such as squatting) until cuirous men and medical doctors interferred. Due to that interference, the mortality rates of women and infants skyrocketed. It was believed that childbirth normally resulted in death and that there was a high mortality rate that should be associated with childbirth. That was incorrect. It has taken another 150 years to start the education process of having women return to birthing in natural position (not the lithotomy position), but that reversal - to what occurred for centuries prior to medical interference - has not yet fully occurred (and may never fully occur).
Women have strongly advocated for childbirth to be viewed as a normal part of life in order to birth in natural positions rather than those that are convenient for medical practitioners. It seems like these women are finally finding a stronger voice, and all of a sudden we have a new consequence of childbirth (a 20th century event) where women become psychotic due to childbirth.
I really have to question whether this concept is as bumbled as we have seen in the history of childbirth, with medical practitioners being ignorant of their responsibility for the high mortality rates in birthing women (for more than two centuries), or whether this is something real. If it is real, and childbirth results in psychosis, the I'm very curious when this relationship was first identified and why. Until I understand this new problem (new in the sense of contemporary), I am absolutely not prepared to believe that childbirth can result in psychosis. Out of curiousity, have pharmaceutical companies developed a cure for this psychosis?
Please don't misunderstand ... I am not discussing post-partum depression, I am strictly referring to the hypothesis that childbirth, with the exclusion of all other factors, can result in psychosis.
