Germany vs. the USA - the Maternity Ward Edition

The main difference is the screaming. There's more of it in Germany.

Let me explain. My first daughter was born back in the good ol' US of A, while the second was born here in Deutschland, so I've gotten a front row seat to the birthing philosophies and practices of both medical systems.

In the United States, we pay good money for medical services, and for that reason, these medical services should be as painless as possible. This is, of course, the purpose of medical services, to painlessly prop up our bodies, regardless of condition, so that we can fulfil our purpose by getting back to work as soon as possible. Americans agree with classical economists with this purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love profit and work hard according to its service. For this reason, Americans put great trust in profitable technologies to solve all our problems. Take, for instance, genetically modified food. Americans understand, and have seen irrefutable scientific evidence, that the only way to feed the ever-growing world population is to invest heavily in genetically modified foods, because what's natural has no way of keeping up with our industrial ways. This philosophy is also applied to birth. My German wife wanted to have a natural birth (we'll contrast the key German philosophy later), which was a novelty for all the midwives in the hospital. ("midwives" themselves were a novelty - what will those hipsters think of next?) Sure, the midwives were trained in the advantages of doing things naturally, but to actually have a woman in a hospital in America who wanted to be natural (and wasn't forced due to a speedy labor in the taxi cab) was exciting! Now, our daughter would be born on New Year's Day, and the hospital was full, perhaps because a number of families wanted their children to be the first born in the New Year (we didn't win that competition). But, there wasn't the kind of screaming you see in the movies. All the other moms sat placidly in their beds with needles in their spines, awaiting the child emerge with minimal resistance. From the silence, you'd think they were all waiting in those transport capsules from Alien. The screams from our end of the maternity ward must have been disconcerting.

Of course, for all our technology, no one noticed that our daughter was "sunny-side-up", i.E. facing the wrong way, until she was almost out. Moreover, and this is serious, a huge hole in America's healthcare system is postpartum care for mothers. Sure, we have all the appropriate vaccines and follow-up visits for the baby, good on-sight training and support groups for those who have trouble breast feeding... But rebuilding the woman's body through support and exercise is foreign to our system, yet it's such a boon to a woman's health, family, and happiness. Postpartum exercises is nothing but yoga for the yuppies who can afford it. Changing this seems like a pro-woman, pro-family, pro-life kind of policy we could all agree on.

Superior mother-care aside, Germany still has its own quirks. In Germany, medical service is almost an embarrassing necessity, sort of a sell-out. We have friends who send their daughter in our local "forest" kindergarten, where the little tikes forage around in the freezing rain and all the crafts involve tying sticks and leaves together with twine, and this is much more natural and therefore better than doing anything in a building. I'm surprised that they don't have forest hospitals, where patients lay on piles of leaves and surgery is performed with sharpened sticks, because it's natürlich. The word natürlich has a deeper, richer meaning than the English word "natural." It harkens back to a nobler time where we weren't so reliant on tablets and mobiles and shots and clothes, and people weren't so obsessed with bourgeois notions like pain avoidance or morality rates. Natürlich is better. Take, for instance, genetically modified food. Germans understand, and have seen irrefutable scientific evidence, that the only way to feed the ever-growing world population is to stop any and all investment in genetically modified food and go back to doing food the natürliche way that has fed mankind through the ages. Nonetheless, Germans, like everyone else, want to live and be comfortable, so they begrudgingly accept medical technology to keep us alive and warm and comfortable (gemütlich, which is almost as an important natürlich over here - if you have a product that can manage to be gemütlich and natürlich, believe me, it'll sell well here - but many things in Germany seem to be a struggle between Natürlichkeit and Gemütlichkeit). As having a baby is a natural process, however, Natürlichkeit trumps Gemütlichkeit, as we could tell during our hospital visit when the midwives (standard-issue over here) bragged about their hospital's low rate of epidurals. They went on to cite statistics about the horrifyingly high rate of epidurals by those snaggle-tooth, hill-billy American women who, for some backwards reason (probably involving fast food and a general lack of discipine), are reluctant to embrace the immense, natürlich, pain Mother Nature has ordained for them. Hence the screams. When we were waiting for my wife's labor pains to get going (no drugs, of course, only the help of the cocktail, which was sehr natürlich), we heard the mom ahead of us screaming like she was going through an exorcism. Oh, but in Germany, my wife got a hot tub to sit in during the process, so I guess there was a little Gemütlichkeit after all.

After the birth, however, the advantages of Natürlichkeit are clear. Our basic insurance covered standard midwife visits and, as I write this, my wife is at her postpartum gymnastics class, rebuilding and restrengthening her body with peer and professional support. Both systems, of course, helped bring a beautiful little girl each into the world and so for them, through all the quirks, I give thanks.