The lying-in woman’s name is put down for admission some time beforehand.
Lying-in hospitals differ as to their rules whether or no to admit women any time before labour is imminent. If they are not so admitted, they often have to be sent back again home.
It is now believed to be the soundest principle that the fewer days a lying-in woman spends in a lying-in institution, beyond the time she is actually under treatment, the better; and this involves that she should not be admitted till labour is imminent—even at the risk of the infant being born in cab or lift (which has happened).
Lying-in institutions must (unfortunately) be, therefore, in the immediate neighbourhood of great towns or centres of population.
[Even those London Boards which are building their excellent new workhouse infirmaries in the country, are forced to keep their lying-in wards in the old workhouses in the town.]
The difference, however, as has been shown by our statistics, is not so great between the mortality of women lying-in at home in the country and in the town as should make us pronounce against lying-in institutions in great centres of population—provided they have a large and entirely isolated area completely to themselves, perhaps a proportion of two acres to fifty beds.
But this involves another question.
A large proportion, alas! of workhouse lying-in women (we have seen two-thirds at Liverpool[[21]]) are unmarried. Of these many have no home.
It is difficult to send these women back again, even if labour is not actually imminent. And it is impossible to send them out after delivery, till recovery is fairly confirmed.
In workhouses the question is solved by women being admitted into the body of the house during pregnancy, and discharged into the body of the house, if not to their own homes, when quite convalescent.