forceps delivery
1
5.1
- noun
- /ˈfɔrsɛps dɪˈlɪvəri/
- Specialized
:
parto con fórceps
- During the complicated birth, the midwife recommended a forceps delivery to assist with the baby's exit.
Examples
-
At age 14, her eldest daughter (my grandmother) held the 2nd of the 4 as it died following a botched forceps delivery.
Blog text (24) -
After several hours of labor, the mother needed a forceps delivery to ensure the safe arrival of her child.
-
Either a high-forceps delivery, which can tear and is dangerous... ...besides being bad for the child, or a cesarean.
-
The doctor successfully performed a forceps delivery to help the baby out safely.
Antonyms
4
4.0
Giving birth with little medical help and no drugs to reduce pain or help the birth
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is directly compositional: 'forceps' names the grasping instrument and 'delivery' names the act of giving birth, so the combined meaning is clearly 'a delivery assisted with forceps.' This instrument+action construction is cross-linguistically common and follows straightforward English noun-noun modification, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents can reliably infer the meaning.
Etymology
Forceps delivery comes from the metal tool forceps, which look like large tongs a doctor uses to hold a baby's head and gently guide it out during birth. So the phrase means 'a birth helped by using forceps'.