Forget epidurals and gas and air for a moment. Decades ago, some women were given a cocktail of drugs to knock them into a state between sleep and wakefulness while they gave birth.
When they arrived, often their baby wasn’t even there.
Called “Twilight Sleep,” the little-talked-about technique involved the administration of two drugs, scopolamine and morphine, which acted together to remove the memory of childbirth and also the pain associated with it, based on an analysis of old newspaper clippings on the subject.
This was a big deal for women, as childbirth is extremely painful, and it was a way to ease the pain and help them forget the trauma. At the time, it was also seen as a better alternative to the anesthetics ether and chloroform, the safety of which was disputed.
For some, the chance for pain relief paid off. There are several anecdotes online about what being in labor while in “Twilight Sleep” was like — and while it was supposed to be liberating for women (and in some cases, it was), it sounded equally unsettling.
In serious cases, if doses were not administered correctly, women and babies died.
Who gave birth under “twilight sleep,” for example?
One person recalled how their grandmother had given birth to a breech baby twice. “She said it was horrible, they wouldn’t let her husband or mother go with her. She was 19 with her first child,” they said.
“She woke up in a panic looking for her babies, and both times there was no one to reassure her that her babies were born healthy, as she had complications with both pregnancies. She first had unexplained bruises on her body.”
In a recent forum discussion about what it was like to give birth in the 1960s, another person said their mother gave birth in a twilight sleep in New Jersey. “When my dad dropped her off at the hospital, they took her away and knocked her out,” they recalled.
“When she woke up at [she] was in kindergarten. When she asked to see me, they told her they would take me to her at 9:00. That was the policy.
“A docile woman, she spent 3 hours lying in bed wondering how I was doing. They stopped her from breastfeeding when things got tough. They also found it easier to feed me at night if I was bottle-fed. My dad could see me through the glass but had no luck holding me until they got home.”
Not everyone had a negative experience, though. One person said their grandmother had six children and was “beaten up for every birth.” But they added: “My grandmother had no regrets, she said she didn’t want to wake up to it.”
The study suggests that the technique gained popularity between 1900 and the early 1910s. Some reports suggest that Queen Elizabeth II was put into a twilight sleep during the birth of her first three children – something you might see depicted in the TV series The Crown.
According to the Maternity and Midwifery Forum, “In the UK, it would have been the wealthy who would have paid for this form of emergency pain relief or in certain hospitals, although it was more common in the US in the 1930s.”
But there were several risks attached
Due to the passive nature of this type of birth, babies often have to be extracted using forceps intervention, which can come with its own risks, namely vaginal tearing and incontinence in the laboring mother and bruising on the baby’s head.
This delivery method was also associated with longer birth times and an increased risk of infant asphyxiation, according to the Embryo Project Encyclopedia.
Scopolamine use “disorientated” pregnant women, apparently “causing them to scream and thrash.” Some laboring women would be strapped to beds, with gauze over their eyes and oil-soaked cotton in their ears to prevent them from hearing.
In the 1960s, doctors began to move away from suggesting “twilight sleep” due to increased reporting of negative side effects, which paved the way for the popularity of epidurals, which began to boom in the late 1960s and 1970s — and are still used today.
