Forget epidurals and gas and air for a second. Decades ago, some women were given a cocktail of drugs to knock them into a state between sleep and wakefulness while they gave birth.

When they came to, often their baby wasn’t even there.

Dubbed ‘twilight sleep’, the little-spoken-about technique involved offering two drugs, scopolamine and morphine, which acted together to remove the memory of labour and also the pain of it, according to an analysis of old newspaper clippings on the topic.

It was a big deal for women, as birth is extremely painful and this was a way to reduce pain and help them forget the trauma. It was also seen, at the time, as a better option to anaesthetics ether and chloroform, whose safety was contested.

The pain relief option came at a cost for some. There are several anecdotes on the internet about what giving birth while in a ‘twilight sleep’ was like – and while it was supposed to be liberating for women (and in some cases, it was), it sounded equally distressing.

In serious cases, if doses weren’t issued correctly, women and babies died.

What was giving birth under ‘twilight sleep’ like?

One person recalled how their grandmother had given birth twice under twilight sleep. “She said it was horrifying, they wouldn’t let her husband or mother go with her. She was 19 with her first child,”........

© HuffPost