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Two weeks ago my fiancée was giving birth to our daughter, and we went through an experience common to many first-time parents: we showed up too early at the hospital and were sent packing.
The second time this happened Alice had been in very considerable pain, for which a blast of gas and air had provided welcome relief.
"I was thinking: how much worse can it get?" she asked the midwife.
"Oh," said the midwife with every appearance of relish, "it gets much, much worse than that. I've had several women say to me that they feel like they're going to die."
I have no reason to doubt the truth of what she said. Nor, to a distressed woman looking for reassurance and encouragement, do I doubt its cruelty. It left me with a hard nugget of anger.
That anger dug in again this weekend when I read that a senior midwife, Dr Denis Walsh of the University of Nottingham, has attacked the "epidural epidemic" with flip assonance in the pages of Evidence-Based Midwifery.
"More women should be prepared to withstand pain," he was yesterday quoted as saying.
"Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby."
He also said: "Over recent decades there has been a loss of 'rites of passage' meaning to childbirth, so that pain and stress are viewed negatively."
I wouldn't presume to impugn Dr Walsh's medical qualifications. A lecture he delivered last month comes with three pages of scholarly references.
But what in his professional area of expertise equips him to quantify the "rite of passage" value of pain, or decide that spending 72 hours weeping with agony "prepares you for the responsibility of nurturing"?
This sort of anthropological speculation is about as "evidence-based" as Victorian convictions that cold showers would toughen children up, being bullied builds character and masturbation leads to moral degeneracy.
They sound less like concrete proposals for clinical practice than moral judgments.
We all know anaesthesia carries risks, and that if a mother can breathe through the pain, and is given the unceasing support of a fantastic midwife, doing things naturally is the ideal.
But every mother is entitled to judge her own pain threshold and to make an informed decision about her own labour, free of natural-birth bullying.
I can't think Dr Walsh is proposing the NHS make natural birth compulsory.
So the effect of his pronouncement, at least as reported, is simply to add to the quasi-moral stigma felt by women who use pain relief in labour.
And is there not evidence that by making those women feel like failures, and implying they've undermined their bond with their child, you do harm also?
Undercooked entertainment
All hail Jayne Middlemiss, Celebrity Masterchef champ 2009. I was rooting for Wendi Peters - the way her face transforms from bulldoggy disgruntlement to radiant loveliness when she smiles! - but Jayne earned her prize.
Celebrity Masterchef was fun to watch, but gosh it was irritatingly directed. Here was yet another food programme that did as much as possible to avoid being about food.
Half of each show consisted of interviews in which the contestants spouted motivational guff about how much winning meant to them, or the judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace repeating in artificially booming voices that “X is really going to have to cook something delicious, now”.
“I'm really hoping to cook something delicious,” X confirmed.
Yet they had here two shrewd judges and, in the finalists, three great cooks. Why not talk about technique, rather than reduce the actual cooking to a montage of chopping, searing and liquidising over pounding techno beats?
In food programming, as in food: take the best possible ingredients, and do as little to them as possible.
Works buried for good reason
“New works”, by which is generally meant disavowed or abandoned pieces scraped from bottom drawers, are being published by Graham Greene, Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov and JRR Tolkien.
Great publishing propositions, sure: but do these books belong in their authors' canons?
The reader in me loves it when writers' wishes are trampled over. We'd not have read Virgil or Kafka or Emily Dickinson had those authors got their way.
But a little human sympathy is in order for writers who in life only published when they were good and ready - and who in death suffer Prometheus's curse.
• To make the contrast with his sun-loving predecessor, Gordon Brown has let it be known that this summer he'll be taking a short UK holiday and keeping control of the Government even while building sandcastles.
With a thump of his clunking fist on the Cabinet table, he has warned his colleagues against long foreign breaks too.
All this is intended to give the impression of strength and seriousness of purpose, but seems to me to bespeak the opposite: a fear of the cheapest sort of silly-season newspaper story.
You know the sort: photographs of a minister drinking something with an umbrella in it are juxtaposed with images of prison riot, battered tot or recently killed soldier; headline childishly implies he's skiving. Blair was right to resist this.
MPs already do jobs that eat into their family lives. They can't predict when crises will come. They are entitled to holidays, and we'll all benefit from them taking them.
Reader views (5)
Iam a hypnotherapist. Like countless other hypno's, I teach women the perspective on birth which prepares you for birthing without *pain* or epidurals.
Feeling "pain" requires fear. It's not painful unless its scary or unwanted. This is how hypno's teach pain management: it's called reframing. If you're frightened, you clamp up your muscles. Orgasm and fertility issues usually include this factor. Some mumstobe are on autopilot trying to be sexy and ladylike in a social act where sexy excludes mothering. The vagina locks!
Fear + tensed muscles = rip and snip. With no fear, you have a significantly shorter labour, less need for episiotomy, extremely lower rates of post-birth depression or non-bonding. Darius, current obstetric practise has arguably created childbirth pain.
By neglecting this obvious area, Doctor Dennis (and the Leith's midwife) harms his patients by omission. His unresearched research causes unnecessary pain, and unnecessary surgery. Great expert. Try Marie Mongan's book "Hypno-birthing". And the childbearing gender (NOT yours) will choose our OWN rites of passage, thank you!
Preparing to withstand birth pain physically requires women remain scared of giving birth, and we keep our social conception of female orgasm and sexuality separate from birth.
No amount of scholastic footnotes matter if a counterexample exists, and your logic is faulty.
- Jen, London, 15/07/2009 23:30
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The carriage of my children was the bond, certainly not the pain! I had a caesarean for my 2nd so maybe I shouldn’t have pain relief and enjoy the pleasure of the knife entering across my bikini line.
I wish they stop making mothers feel guilty in wanting pain relief. I'm also fed up with those mothers boasting about not having pain relief… Good for you if you enjoyed the pain & that burning sensation, but it don’t make you a better mother than me or anyone else!
This is a modern era and if pain relief is available, why not use it? Surely when you have a bad headache you source a form of pain relief.
Overall I feel it’s the whole process of carrying, giving birth & finally delivering a healthy joyous bundle that should be main thing…not being a Saint in the pain threshold!
- Jade, London, England, 15/07/2009 22:30
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I am a midwife and have 3 children myself.
Every woman in childbirth SHOULD have painrelief and sufficient support during labour.
If you can do without, good for you!! But please stop looking down on women who have low pain thresholds and suffer absolute agony.
I have seen women who suffered such traumatic pain they were not interested in seeing their baby straight after birth, this happens too!!
As for the midwife who told a mother that some mothers want to die because of labour pain she needs to read the book of Michel Odent " Childbirth without fear" She might become a more encouraging midwife.
Hennie
- Hennie Nijman,, Pembury, England, 15/07/2009 22:30
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With reference to the article "It doesn't take a pain marathon to make a mum" I would like to add my comment. When I was in labour with my first child I was screaming for an epidural after about three hours of severe pain in labour. The midwives put me off saying the room was occupied, the doctor was not available to adminitser the injection or that I should sit in the bath and see if I still wish to have one then. I soon realised I was not going to get my epidural as the midwives did not want me to have one, for this I am totally grateful! Going through the pain did make bonding with my baby boy a much more magical experience as the complete switch from absolute agony to an irrefutable and overpowering sense of love and achievement is one that I will remember for the rest of my life. I do actually believe that too many women opt for a C-section or epidural as an easy way out. Surely something that is going to fill your life with such immense pleasure is worth working hard for? I am now pregnant again and am due in just over five weeks, this time I am hoping to not even take pain relief. I am not saying that this is the best choice for every woman out there, but if there are no complications with mother or baby I strongly suggest that they try to do everything as natural as possible. It is worth it in the end.
- Leanne Darby, burnley, 15/07/2009 22:30
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Thank God for scientists, engineers and modern medicine, eh ladies?
- Darius Midwinter, London UK, 15/07/2009 22:30
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