Essay On A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

Sissy made the decision to deliver her eleventh child in a hospital. This decision saved her baby because the doctor gave Stephen Aaron oxygen to revive him. The reason Sissy decided to deliver in a hospital was because she would be examined by expert medical attention for the sake of her child. Doctors have medical degrees and will know the proper medical procedures in a time of crisis. Sissy would have heard that doctors prescribed pain relief during a delivery. “Doctors could only administer it because it contained dangerous substances ether and chloroform” (Manning 10). Hospitals also carried anesthetics such as epidurals. Epidurals made it easier during childbirth because it had a “safer approach and the mother could witness her child being born” (Lace 65). Episiotomies, a tool for making incisions, and forceps, a tool for holding the baby’s head during childbirth, were also invented to make birth more efficient. Sissy and other women chose hospitals because it put them in safer position because of medical

Infant mortality is a major issue the world struggles with. Today, with advances in medicine and technology, the infant mortality rate decreases every year. However, in the past and in other developing countries, access to resources necessary to having and raising a healthy child are not available. In the article “Death Without Weeping”, the author, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, discusses about her time spent at Alto do Cruzeiro, Brazil. Hughes goes on to explain why the infant mortality rate was high in Alto do Cruzeiro. She also discusses how the women and children are treated in the community.

Betty Smith’s classic tale A Tree Grows in Brooklyn utilizes an assortment of intriguing, relatable characters to tell the emotional tale of a young girl, born into the depths of poverty, and to detail the traumatic life events that occur that shape her into her future self. Set in impoverished Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1912, this story centers around the Nolan family: hardworking, tough mother Katie, impractical and romantic father Johnny, momma’s boy Cornelius “Neeley”, and the protagonist, eleven-year old Mary Frances “Francie”, a sharp-witted, loyal daydreamer through whom the reader sees life occur throughout the book. Francie’s ability to daydream about a greater life for her and her family help her to escape

Motherhood was an expected part of the wife’s life. Woman would have a large number of babies right after each other although some babies would not survive. “High mortality rates must have overshadowed the experience of motherhood in ways difficult to

Robin Yates’s paper, “Pregnancy and Childbirth, The 1800’s vs. Now: What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting,” was filled with many clear points on the advancement of labor and medicine since the 1800s. This essay was filled with interesting and grabbing facts; however, the structure of the essay needs more support.

Dreams of being a mother during the 19th century were demolished when the birth rate of babies increased dramatically, for the only way to “care” for a child, was to abandon them. A mother’s instincts are loving, protecting and caring unconditionally for their child. Through the early times, the birth rate of newborns was insignificantly high, due to many reasons, one being the lack of a way to avoid pregnancies. The consequence of mothers was having to "get rid" of their babies, for their dreams of becoming future mothers were "smothered by poverty and want" (p.68). Therefore, thousands of helpless unwanted infants were left out in the dangerous slums of New York City

The first issue that the Children’s Bureau focused on was infant and maternal death. This was a problem because there were not any standards for how a baby was supposed to be delivered. Prenatal and postnatal care were also not well-known; therefore, many mothers did not receive the care that they needed to make sure they were doing well before and after birthing a child. There are not many statistics that show how many infants and mothers died each year due to the little to no standards that were in place at the time, but about one in ten infants died within the first year of their life (“The story of..”). Julia Lathrop was the director of the Children’s Bureau. She was the person who brought the infant and maternal deaths issue to light.

Something I learned from Chapter 18 in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is that Ona didn’t have the proper prenatal care during her pregnancy and during the premature labor. Prenatal care is a type of HealthCare that helps expectant mothers have a healthy pregnancy which will help deliver their baby with no health complications. It provides expectant mothers frequent check-ups with doctors, insight on the baby’s development, nutritional information, and information on what to expect during labor. With this care, many mothers will have a lower risk of health complications than those who don’t have the care. Although prenatal care benefits the mother and baby to build a healthy life, there are many pregnant women that go through a lot like Ona did with abuse, neglect, and hunger which prevents them from having the care they need.

Black midwives were common, and carried the responsibility of delivering infants from both slave mothers and white mothers. Due to the lack of sterilization and knowledge of pathogens, the infant mortality rate was high, and physicians blamed black midwives for purposefully killing children, even though the practices of physicians were not any healthier (Kiple 2). Having the responsibility of a midwife in the Antebellum South was not an easy process since many children would die, but the process was even more difficult for the mother delivering the child. Typically, the birth of a child is seen as a wonderful occasion, however, in the South, pregnancy and childbirth caused fear, not only for the mother, but for her family as well. Many complications such as puerperal(a deadly infection in the uterus), the inability to breastfeed the child, and prolapse of the uterus were symptoms a mother could experience after childbirth, which would ultimately end with her death, or her child’s death (Sullivan 24). The medical practices in the South were inadequate and inefficient to support prenatal and birthing needs, therefore, it caused a sufficient amount of deaths between mothers and children during this period of

The early twentieth century was a turning point in American history-especially in regards to the acquisition of women's rights. While the era was considered to be prosperous and later thought to be a happy-go-lucky time, in actuality, it was a time of grave social conflict and human suffering (Parish, 110). Among those who endured much suffering were women. As Margaret Sanger found out, women, especially those who were poor, had no choice regarding pregnancy. The only way not to get pregnant was by not having sex- a choice that was almost always the husband's. This was even more true in the case of lower-class men for whom, 'sex was the poor man's only luxury' (Douglas, 31). As a nurse who assisted in delivering

As a young, uneducated teenager, her mother was very poorly equipped to raise a baby. Without knowledge of the human body, pregnancy, child-rearing, or of community resources that may assist with caring for a child, I am unsurprised that Jubilee’s family believed that a diet of mashed potatoes, iced tea, and sugar water was sufficient nutrition. Although Jubilee’s mother lived with her own mother, it is likely that she also did not have the necessary knowledge on how to care for a newborn. This

In the mid 1930’s childbirth was extremely dangerous and high percentages of women and their babies died sooner or later after birth. As people took notice, medicine took a lot of steps to lower the mortality rates. A lot of deliveries moved from the homes of people to the hospitals with more safer conditions of birth. Throughout the years, hosptials worked on getting their public sanitation, public nutrition and better control of some deadly chronic diseases. By the 1940s medicines surgical techniques and antibodies improved so much that it made the hospital that much more safer for people to deliver children. Medical Doctor, Elizabeth Eden, stated “By the 1950s, routine maternity care, originally designed to improve safety, had become almost too rigid. For example, the fear of infection, a major killer of mothers and babies, led to such practices as taking away all a woman's personal belongings when she entered the hospital; administering large, uncomfortable enemas; prohibiting fathers and other loved ones from entering the maternity area; keeping babies in nurseries, away from their mothers; and handling babies as little as possible. At the time, bottle-feeding was believed to be more sanitary and superior in almost every way to breast-feeding.” Medical Doctor, Elizabeth Eden also stated “The 1960s was a time when national and international organizations were founded to

In the United States, the process of childbirth is far more dangerous for African American women than it is for White women. For African American women, the path to a healthy birth is riddled with barriers. There are many health disparities between the two races. African American women face much higher low-birth and infant mortality rates; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has published that although infant mortality rates in the U.S. have dropped by over 10% in the past ten years, a large gap continues to exist between the health of the races during the entire childbirth process. (World Health Organization, 2010) In the United States, Black infants are more than twice as likely to die within the first year of life as a White infant, and this disparity has not seen advancements in the last century. Many of these deaths can be attributed to low birth weight, and preterm birth among black infants.

For hundred of years, women have wrestled with their womanhood, bodies, and what it means to be a woman in our society. Being a woman comes with a wonderful and empowering responsibility--giving birth. What sets us aside from other countries is that the process and expectations of giving birth has changed in our society; coming from midwifery, as it has always been since the early times, to hospitals where it is now expected to give birth at. Midwifery was a common practice in delivering babies in

The author is a nurse in a level two trauma facility in a community of approximately fifty thousand people in Oregon. The community is a college-town surrounded by a large agricultural area. There is a minimal ethnic diversity within the community. The diversity present occurs mainly from internationally students and faculty from the college. There is a growing population of women who desire low interventional births in the community. The author has worked on the labor and delivery unit of the hospital for the last 14 years. The hospital is the only one in the area to offer trial of labor services to women who have previously undergone a cesarean section. The unit on average experiences around 1000 deliveries annually.