Medicine: New Goal

When the Maternity Center Association was founded 30 years ago, it had one aim: lowering the U.S. maternal death rate. M.C.A. urged editors of general magazines to drop their priggish taboos against discussing the problems of pregnancy; it advised women to get medical care early in pregnancy—and hospitals to give it.

M.C.A. representatives traveled all over the U.S. preaching pre-natal care, and founded institutes in which 25,000 nurses learned better techniques of caring for women in childbirth; in 1932 a school was established for training nurse-midwives to replace ignorant midwives. The association is proud of the part it played in lowering the maternal death rate from 9.2 per 1,000 in 1918 to 3.7 (including diseases of pregnancy) in 1946.

One night last week the association held an anniversary dinner in Manhattan's Cosmopolitan Club. Miss Hazel Corbin, who joined the association as a trained nurse in 1919 and became its general director in 1923, announced a new goal. The association would now like to see the principles of psychosomatic medicine applied to childbirth. Said Miss Corbin, a vigorous, greying 53: "The emergency death-preventing job which has been done in maternity care has exacted a price in emotional coinage and human dignity. When the obstetric care of the mother was moved from the home to the hospital to save life, childbearing was transported from the natural, intimate .human atmosphere of the family to the atmosphere of sickness, abnormality and death which permeate hospital care."

What to do about it? Childbirth must be made safer at home through more nurse-midwives who can work with doctors and recognize quickly any sign of abnormality that requires an expert obstetrician. Hospitals must be redesigned to remove "the redolence of pathology" found in present maternity wards; doctors must be trained to care for the emotional well-being of mothers, babies—and fathers, too.