Friedman’s Curve
A study published in 1955 by Dr. Emanuel Friedman gave obstetricians a guideline for how a typical labor should progress (14 hours for first time births) by measuring the average amount of time it took a laboring person to dilate by each centimeter. Known as Friedman’s Curve, this study informed birth outcomes for decades, even though the study was done on only 500 caucasian women from one hospital. If a person’s labor does not follow this progression they often get diagnosed with “failure to progress” and are often given medically unnecessary interventions. In 1965, only four percent of babies in the United states were born via c-section. Today, c-sections account for over thirty percent of the babies born in the United States.
In the past decade, Friedman’s study was discredited, after attempts to lower cesarian rates caused doctors to notice that too many people giving birth were diagnosed with failure to progress, due to adhering to Friedman’s Curve.
The pink print behind the stopwatches are tiny drawings of Claviceps purpurea, a rye fungus, and the plant derivative of ergot, which was used to speed up a person’s labor for several centuries until it was deemed unsafe for laboring people and their babies.
