Women ‘unprepared for pain’
By Danell Swim
March 25, 2008
Many women are going into labor vastly underestimating how painful it can be and overly optimistic that they will be able to manage without drugs, a study suggests. How has this happened?
Researchers at the University of Newcastle who looked at evidence from the UK and beyond found significant discrepancies between women’s expectations of labor and their actual experience.
In England around a quarter of women who give birth end up having an epidural, the spinal analgesia which eliminates the pain of contractions, although many did not plan on having one.
Growing emphasis on birth as an entirely natural process - which may be better carried out in your front-room than in a labor ward - also means many women feel they have somehow failed if they end up rapidly making their way through every form of pain relief available.
Campaigners fought hard for many years to “demedicalise” childbirth and reduce the number of unpleasant, invasive, and potentially unnecessary procedures many women were subjected to in the course of delivering their child.
But there are fears the pendulum may now have swung too far the other way, with the many advantages of modern medicine forgotten in the desire to take the process back to basics.
After all, you wouldn’t have your teeth pulled without an anesthetic, so why would you embark on something as major as childbirth simply preparing to grit them?
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