In 1907, researchers Bernhardt Kronig and Carl Gauss combined the drugs morphine and scopolamine to induce twilight sleep in women during childbirth. Physicians in the early twentieth century in Germany used twilight sleep, Dammerschlaf, to cause women to enter a state of consciousness in which they felt no pain and did not remember giving birth. Twilight sleep was associated with increased use of forceps during delivery, prolonged labor, and increased risk of infant suffocation. Because of those disadvantages, physicians stopped using morphine and scopolamine to prevent pain during childbirth. Morphine and scopolamine were among the first anesthetics to be used during childbirth, and after physicians stopped using them, researchers searched for safer alternatives.

William Smellie helped to incorporate scientific medicine into the process of childbirth in eighteenth century Britain. As a male physician practicing in childbirth and female reproductive health (man-midwife), Smellie developed and taught procedures to treat breech fetuses, which occur when a fetus fails to rotate its head towards the birth canal during delivery. Throughout his career, Smellie compiled a wealth of information about female anatomy in his writings. He modified medical technology such as the obstetrical forceps, an instrument used to maneuver the fetus during childbirth. Smellie's techniques and improvements on forceps alleviated pain in women giving birth, mitigated complications during birth, and reduced infant mortality rates.

A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery is a three volume collection of patient accounts that William Smellie published from 1752 to 1764. Smellie, a physician and instructor in obstetrics in Great Britain, published these compilations to share his expertise in reproductive medicine, while also providing his students and colleagues with a source of reference in their own medical practices. Smellie wrote these books to shift obstetrics from a discipline practiced by midwives with limited medical training to one practiced in a medical context by physicians. Throughout his books, Smellie describes effective and ineffective treatments, tools, and interventions for complications during pregnancy. Due to the popularity of Smellie's writings, access to Smellie's work expanded beyond his students, allowing obstetricians, man-midwives, and physicians to refer to scientific literature and apply Smellie's teachings to their own practice.

James Young Simpson was one of the first obstetricians to administer anesthesia during childbirth in nineteenth century Scotland. Before his work in the 1800s, physicians had few ways to reduce the pain of childbirth. Simpson experimented with the use of ether and chloroform, both gaseous chemicals, to temporarily relieve pain. He found that those chemicals both successfully inhibited the pain women felt during childbirth and pain during other surgeries. Patients under the influence of chloroform fell asleep and were unaware of the intense pain of childbirth. Simpson’s work was not popular for a variety of reasons, and the major claim against his practice being that pregnant women should not receive a form of pain relief during labor and childbirth. Against common beliefs at the time, Simpson advocated in favor of using anesthetics for pain-free labor, which later became the standard for surgical procedures and childbirth.

In July 2015, Ana J. Torvie, Lisa S. Callegari, Melissa A. Schiff, and Katherine E. Debiec published “Labor and Delivery Outcomes Among Young Adolescents,” hereafter “Labor and Delivery Outcomes,” in the American Journal for Obstetrics and Gynecology. The authors conducted a study using birth certificate data and hospital records in the state of Washington to compare the frequency and outcomes of cesarean and surgically assisted vaginal births among different age groups of pregnant people. They found that adolescents aged eleven to fourteen years are less likely to require cesarean or surgically assisted births but that their neonates were more likely to have birth-related complications than those of adults aged twenty to twenty-four years. While previous studies had yielded conflicting results, “Labor and Delivery Outcomes” reports generalized trends about young adolescents in labor and delivery. The researchers’ findings support future physicians in making more informed considerations for the care of pregnant patients under the age of fifteen.

In 2008, Barranca Productions released a documentary called The Business of Being Born, detailing the topic of childbirth. Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein produced and directed the documentary. The documentary explores pregnancy related healthcare in the US, including the history of midwives and obstetrics. The film also discusses potential consequences of medicalized childbirth common in the twenty-first century. The Business of Being Born provides viewers with information about home-births, midwives, and the positive and negative aspects of going to the hospital for childbirth.

In 1916 Edwin B. Cragin in the United States published Conservatism in Obstetrics in which he discussed medical practices and techniques to preserve the vitality of pregnant women and their fetuses. Cragin argued that women who give birth via cesarean section, the surgical act of making an incision through both the abdomen and uterus to remove the fetus from a pregnant woman's womb, must rely on that method for future births. That claim was later coined the Dictum of Cragin. In Conservatism in Obstetrics, Cragin described obstetric techniques to maintain healthy births for women and fetuses. Cragin's article outlined the best practices for obstetricians in the early twentieth century, and publicized the claim that if a woman delivers a newborn via cesarean section, she should deliver any future newborn via the same method, a theory that persisted throughout the century.

A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery is a three volume collection of patient accounts that William Smellie published from 1752 to 1764. Smellie, a physician and instructor in obstetrics in Great Britain, published these compilations to share his expertise in reproductive medicine, while also providing his students and colleagues with a source of reference in their own medical practices. Smellie wrote these books to shift obstetrics from a discipline practiced by midwives with limited medical training to one practiced in a medical context by physicians. Throughout his books, Smellie describes effective and ineffective treatments, tools, and interventions for complications during pregnancy. Due to the popularity of Smellie's writings, access to Smellie's work expanded beyond his students, allowing obstetricians, man-midwives, and physicians to refer to scientific literature and apply Smellie's teachings to their own practice.

An intrauterine pressure catheter (IUPC) is a device placed inside a pregnant woman’s uterus to monitor uterine contractions during labor. During labor, a woman’s uterus contracts to dilate, or open, the cervix and push the fetus into the birth canal. The catheter measures the pressure within the amniotic space during contractions and allows physicians to evaluate the strength, frequency, and duration of contractions. Those measurements enable physicians to evaluate the progression of labor and intervene when contractions are too weak to properly dilate a laboring woman’s cervix to successfully deliver a fetus. Though IUPCs are not used routinely, they are important in cases where external fetal monitoring is not sufficient to monitor a difficult labor. Intrauterine pressure catheters give physicians an extremely accurate measurement of intrauterine pressure, making it possible to determine whether intervention is needed to progress the labor.