The Relief Society's Legacy of Maternal Care - Guest Post by HeatherLady

This guest post comes to you from my collaborator, Heatherlady, who writes Women in the Scriptures.

I’ve been doing a lot of delving into LDS church history, especially women's history, for this book. It has been such an incredible experience for me. Recently when reading “Women of Covenant”, the unofficial “official” history of the Relief Society, I discovered an interesting piece of Relief Society history that I was unaware of.

Clarrissa Williams

In October Conference 1921 Relief Society President Clarissa Williams announced a plan “to establish a maternity home in Salt Lake as a sort of experiment, and later, if this is successful, to extend the work by establishing similar homes in various centers.” She wanted “to encourage motherhood and to make it possible for women in child-birth to have good care at reasonable rates.”

The Relief Society, in a sense, started opening Birthing Centers. These maternity homes were generally houses that were converted into places where women could come to give birth. The one that opened in the Salt Lake Area, called the Cottonwood Maternity Hospital, had 10 beds and was furnished, run and maintained by the Cottonwood Relief Society. Relief Society sisters volunteered their time as nurses, laundresses and anything else that needed to be done. The hospital fee was $40 for the standard two-week stay. Additionally the doctor’s fee was $35, which was $5 less than the doctor fee for home deliveries. The center was dedicated on December 10, 1924 by Elder Melvin J. Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Initially the hospital struggled for acceptance and didn’t have many clients. Home deliveries were still the norm and women either didn’t see the need to deliver at a center or were hesitant of the idea. In fact, when the Relief Society in Snowflake, Arizona opened their own small maternity hospital the stake Relief Society board had to go on a speaking tour through the wards trying to convert mothers to hospital deliveries, which as they later remembered turned out not to be an easy task.

Since the majority of women gave birth at home until around World War II, many stakes and wards responded to President Williams' plea for “a movement in the interest of maternity and motherhood through the church” by preparing maternity loan chests that included bedding and other supplies needed for home deliveries. They also put together layettes and other items for new mothers. President Williams allocated the interest money from the Relief Society’s wheat trust fund (nearly $412,000) for such projects as these throughout the church. In the fall 1921 Relief Society conference Lucy Woodruff Smith reported that in the European Missions almost every branch had a “maternity chest”.

In addition to the “birth centers” and the “maternity chests” Relief Society sisters also participated in a variety of public health events, conferences and campaigns to increase the number of breastfeeding mothers, to educate women on the proper ways to clean baby bottles, hand washing, and proper infant care. In 1924, Johns Wells of the Presiding Bishopric credited the Relief Society for a decreased death rate among LDS children under the age of five—500 lives saved in one year. Historian Thomas G. Alexander also stated that, “Cooperation between the Relief Society and public agencies produced in Utah the greatest reduction in the maternal death and infant mortality rates in the nation. By 1931 Utah ranked with five other states in the lowest group.”

Relief Society Leadership in 1916

It is also interesting to note that by 1959 the demand at the Cottonwood Relief Society’s maternity hospital had grown so much that the LDS church, still under the direction of the Relief Society, built a 2 million dollar hospital with 120 beds on the same site as the original maternity hospital. The LDS church eventually opened other hospitals, including Primary Children’s Hospital, and by 1974 the church was operating 15 hospitals and was one of the largest major hospital operators in the US. (Divett, 174-176) Yet, in September 1974 the First Presidency announced that “After a through study and consideration, the Council of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve have decided to divert the full efforts of the Health Services of the Church to the health needs of the worldwide church membership.” (Divett, 179) In April of 1975 the church transferred all 15 hospitals to Intermountain Health Care, Inc., a non-profit corporation they had established to operate the hospitals. The board of directors consisted of both Mormons and non-Mormons. With the membership of the church increasingly becoming less and less centralized in Utah the church could not longer justify the allocation of resources to run hospitals. Saying that, “ the operation of hospitals is not central to mission of the church.” (Jones, 1992) Instead they chose to expand the number of Health Service Missionaries and to focus on ways to improve the health of all Saints through the world. Today a good portion of these health service missions are being filled by young women missionaries (270 in 1990)-- a fitting way to continue on the Relief Society legacy of improving maternal and child health (Walters, 1992)

Today the original hospital system started by the Relief Society is still run by Intermountain Health Care (IHC) and recently has been recognized as one of the best hospitals systems in the United States. It is also interesting to note that in 2007 the Cottonwood Hospital was closed down and replaced with a new hospital, Intermountain Medical. What a great legacy to those early Relief Society sisters to see what there little maternity hospital had grown into.

Intermountain Medical Hospital, in Murray, Utah.

As I read through all this history I was so impressed by the Relief Society’s success in improving maternal and child health in Utah and surrounding areas. President William’s initiative came at a time when she wanted to ““to encourage motherhood” amongst the women of the church by making sure that they were receiving good care and support during pregnancy and that the support originated from the women around them. The image of these Relief Society sisters banding together to support each other in pregnancy and birth is so inspiring to me.

I can’t help but feel that if President Williams was living in our day she would look at the needs of our mothers and see that there is still a great need for women of the church to “encourage motherhood” amongst themselves. Many of the childbirth “maladies" facing women today are spiritual, emotional and mental rather than physical. There are the young women who postpone motherhood because they are unprepared or misinformed about childbirth, breastfeeding and motherhood and are terrified of it. There are women who have already given birth to children but who had traumatic or negative experiences that makes them scared or unwilling to have more children. There are women, more than most of us realize, who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after giving birth or have moderate to sever post-partum depression, much of which goes undiagnosed and untreated for years. We might not have women and babies dying in our Wards or in our neighborhoods, but we still have mothers who need the same sort of support and care that Relief Society sisters at the turn of the century provided for each other.

What ways do you see that women in the church could emulate our sisters of the past and “encourage motherhood” and improve the care new mothers receive?

Side Note:

As I was reading through historical documents I discovered that the State Health report in 1912 is the first accurate statement of maternal and child deaths in Utah and it showed that the maternal mortality rate in Utah was 14 deaths per 100,000 births and that the infant mortality rate was 110 deaths per 100,000 live births (Divett, 197). I was curious to know what the maternal mortality rate is today and was a bit shocked when I saw that, a hundred years later, the US's overall maternal mortality rate is 17 per 100,000 and places like Washington D.C. have a maternal mortality rate of 34.9 per 100,000 and the State of Georgia has a 20.5 per 100,000 maternal mortality rate. Utah currently has a 8.9 per 100,000 maternal mortality rate, and is ranked 20^th in the nation in terms of maternal safety during childbirth. It is always hard to compare statistics across generations because of the different ways in which numbers were gathered and counted, but those numbers were still a bit shocking to me.

Sources:

Derr, Jill Mulvay, Cannon, Janath Russell, Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach. (1992). Women of the Covenant: The Story of the Relief Society. Deseret Book: Salt Lake City, Utah.

Divett, Robert T. (1981). Medicine and the Mormons: An Introduction to the History of Later-day Saint Health Care. Horizon Publishers & Distributors: Bountiful, Utah

Jones, William N. (1992). “Hospitals” in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism: Volume 2. Edited by Daniel H. Ludlow. Macmillian Publishing Company: New York, pg. 660.

Walters, Christine Croft. (1992). “Maternity and Child Health Care” in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism: Volume 2. Edited by Daniel H. Ludlow. Macmillian Publishing Company: New York, pg. 867-68

Learning Lessons From the Past

As part of the book, The Gift of Giving Life, we plan to include a chapter about our legacy—specifically, our legacy in regards to pregnancy and birth. In my mind, this legacy logically starts with our Heavenly Mother, then Eve, and some other Biblical greats like Mary. After that, we plan to include information about our early LDS legacy, which will include much of the cool info that Heatherlady wrote up in her guest post, Midwifery as a Calling. If we continue moving through time this way, it naturally leads us to our own legacy—our ancestors, of whatever faith or origins, our mothers, and our own birth and personal history.

I have been thinking a lot about this more recent legacy (our mothers and us) and wondering what it is I am supposed to write about it. There is so much about our own stories that influences the way we birth. There is our own birth story--most of us tend to birth how we were born, whether we know it or not. There is our own history, such as sexual abuse, how past pregnancies and births went, and so much more.

Last Sunday in Relief Society we studied Elder L. Tom Perry's talk, The Past Way of Facing the Future. I think that the story of the early saints who built the Manti temple is fascinating. They knew nothing about building a roof, but they used their shipbuilding knowledge (they were immigrants from the Netherlands) to make a watertight roof. This is the kind of story that I love. It is a great example of how God gives us things to do that seem totally not congruent with our talents or abilities, but when we examine all that we know and have learned from or for other sources, we often find that we have the exact skills necessary--they just need to be turned upside down.

I wish I had a cool picture of the roof blueprints here.

The lady who taught our R.S. lesson is an older woman who likes to marvel about how things have changed. She gave this example:

“In 1916 every female over age 14 was a Beehive girl until she entered Relief Society. A Beehive girl had a possible 374 requirements to earn her individual award. Some of them were:

1. “Care successfully for a hive of bees for one season [and] know their habits.”
2. “Cover 25 miles on snowshoes on any six days.”
3. “During two weeks keep the house free from flies, or destroy at least 25 flies daily.”
4. “Without help or advice care for and harness a team at least five times [and] drive 50 miles during one season.”
5. “Clear sage-brush, etc., off of one-half acre of land.” (1)

She chuckled about how silly these things were, but I think, because we ran out of time, we missed the whole point of the lesson, which was, what we can learn and use today. While this list seems crazy to us 100 years later, it would be comparable to asking a girl to learn how to change a car tire, change her own oil, or participate in a 16-mile hike at girl’s camp (all of which I did as a young woman). All of the activities on this list from 1916 required intense commitment, physical stamina, and mental focus. These are the lessons that these women would need to draw on in the future when they had children and raised them.

It is the same for us. We have all learned lessons from the past that, whether you know it or not, have prepared you, or are preparing you, to birth and nurture children. Hiking for more than 12 hours and climbing the sheer face of a granite mountain when I was 15 years old certainly taught me about labor and delivery, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Just last year, I went back and climbed Half-Dome again, and the whole way, I found myself comparing it to labor. There was a point, right before I reached the top, where I felt I couldn’t do any more. I took a video diary of myself at that point and I look just like I did in labor. I even said to the camera, “this is like the point of every woman’s labor when she says, I can’t do this—and that is usually when she is crowning.” And sure enough, the top was in sight as I rounded the next bend.

Yes those are people climbing up the side...

Here's a close up.


I made it.

I still had to climb all the way back down. I made that, too. Though there were casualties. I lost two toenails which took about 9 months to grow back.

Another simple example of lessons learned from the past are the keep-up exercises we do in pregnancy yoga. We do an exercise with our arms for 3 minutes (like holding them out straight or flapping or rotating the wrists in a figure 8). Three minutes is a long time, and the sensation in the arms starts to feel very intense by the end. But by tuning into our breath or a mantra, we can get through them powerfully, even smiling. This gives the mind a "known" for power and grace through intense physical sensations. The lesson being, if you can do a 3-minute keep-up, you can do labor—because no surge, or contraction, will last longer than one minute.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are so many lessons from our past that we can draw upon during this critical time, and they are all just as unique as you are.

What is really cool, though, is that on the other side of this experience, after a woman has an empowering victorious birth, it then becomes her lesson for the future--because she now knows she can do anything. And you can! You are doing great things. Along my journey to birth this book, I have been connected to so many amazing women who, as I like to say, don’t take impossible for an answer.

I would love to collect and hear other examples of from of lessons you have learned from the past, or what you have been empowered to do since having that victorious birth.


Sources:

1. Martha A. Tingey, Hand Book for the Bee-Hive Girls of the Y.L.M.I.A. (1916), 36–46.