History
In Western countries, medical services used during labor and delivery have increased since the 1930s. Starting in the 1950s, with the natural childbirth movement gaining strength, concern increased over typical hospital practices during childbirth. These medical services included medications and procedures that were not always necessary, some of which had potential to harm the mother, the baby, or both. Various health-related and consumer organizations groups began to advocate for a pregnant woman's right to be informed about medical services related to pregnancy and childbirth and for her right to refuse such services.
In the United States, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) acknowledged the legal obligation of physicians to obtain informed consent for procedures related to pregnancy and childbirth in 1974.
Read more about this topic: Pregnant Patients' Rights In The United States
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)