Bing helped pioneer Lamaze approach to childbirth

NEW YORK — When Elisabeth Bing became interested in childbirth techniques in the 1950s, women were often heavily medicated and dads were generally nowhere near the delivery room.

Bing, the Lamaze International co-founder who popularized what was known as natural childbirth and helped change how women and doctors approached the delivery room, died recently at age 100 in her New York apartment.

Trained as a physical therapist, Bing taught breathing and relaxation techniques to generations of expectant mothers, wrote several books about birth and pregnancy and encouraged women, and men, to be more prepared, active and inquisitive participants in the arrival of their babies.

“I was certainly considered a radical,” she wrote in Lamaze’s magazine in 1990. By then, she noted, childbirth education had become common: “This so-called fad has been proven not to be a fad.”

Born July 8, 1914, in Berlin, Bing fled Nazi Germany with her family for England, where she got her physical therapy training. Working with new mothers got her thinking about delivery approaches, an interest she brought with her to the United States in 1949.

She learned about ideas advanced by some doctors, including French obstetrician Dr. Fernand Lamaze, for using breathing and mental preparation to manage labour pain without medication. She and the late Marjorie Karmel established what is now Lamaze International in 1960 to spread the strategies.

Bing gave birth herself at 40, going into a fast labour during which she was given spinal anesthesia and nitric oxide.

Lamaze became a household word, woven into pop culture. Its signature classes involved both women and men, with the idea that fathers could provide emotional and mental support in the delivery room.