Rađanje bez ičije pomoći u nekim južnoslavenskim krajevima
Delivery Without Assistance in Some South Slavic Areas

Summary/Abstract: Traditionally giving birth was not a public family event, an event known by everybody and talked about by everybody. Rather, it was confined to narrow circles of women from which a woman was chosen to assist in it. If the woman bearing a child happened to be at home or somewhere in the village, an assistant would always be found; only those women who had given birth several times, frequently did not ask for assistance. Women knew from experience how to cut the umbilical cord and clean the child and themselves. This is how data from northwestern parts of South Slavic territories testify to the way children were delivered and to the attitude towards assistance in delivery. Southeast of the rivers Una and Sava we find a considerably different understanding of assistance in delivery. Also in these areas it is more difficult to explain the relationship of data concerning delivery. One group of data show that a woman gave birth alone in a room, while the assistant was waiting behind closed door and entered the room only to cut the umbilical cord and clean the child and the woman. It seems that these data can be linked (but further research might show that these are unconnected phenomena) to examples which tell us that the assistant was alongside the child-bearing woman only if the woman gave birth for the first time, or if the woman had difficulties in childbearing. One should also bear in mind, as certain examples from mountain, typically Dinaric region suggest, that women bearing child for the first time, and especially them, had to give birth alone, that is without assistance from another woman.

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