Originally Posted by
Bikerpunk
I've seen women give birth naturally by her own choice, and known quite a few women who've given birth. I've also known women who have made the choice not to have kids, and others who've had to make the heart-wrenching decision to end life growing inside them. And yet others who have watched those lives inside them die, but not by their choice.
Childbirth is something interesting to see, in terms of attitudes. I know one girl who was sterilised in her early 20s... as soon as she could say "cut these tubes dammit." and had the medical access.
The childbirths I've assisted in, the women were not only pregnant totally by choice, but had the most positive attitudes about it I'd ever seen. They were treating the birth process as an event which they trained for, I don't mean simply taking the classes, but by exercising, moisturizing and stretching the skin in the area just before the birth and bathing their cervix in semen in the week before birth to soften it.
From a male perspective, it can be highly traumatic to see someone you care about hurting and be unable to interpose yourself, hurt the person responsible, etc. and yet it can also be extraordinarily life-affirming to see someone conquer a challenge and come out the other side sore and exhausted but also triumphant and exuberant.
I've also seen highly scared, unprepared women with no clue what's happening out of touch with what's going on, with the drugs not touching the pain, wanting to be anywhere but in the bodies they're in and suchlike. I've also seen highly motivated women tap out and get the epidural and hate themselves for it (but be the only ones who did... noone else thought any less).
Paradoxically, the ones who went for the natural childbirth did so to endure LESS childbirth and LESS physical damage. Medical intervention, even anaesthesia, CAN cause problems. Pain is the biofeedback loop to tell the uterus to contract. Stop the pain, and often times labour stops. This means drugs into the cervix, it starts to contract unnaturally and can tear. Either that or she can't feel the pushing muscles and the child has to be extracted. Or she pushes, but unaware of the angle and tears something.
I'm not judging anyone who chooses to have kids/not have kids/go natural/not go natural... I'm saying watching the process of planning things out e,g. a water birth (being underwater apparently halves the pain for the mother) and watching the difference attitude makes is fascinating.
I was thinking about that recently. Few of my generation had kids, and the attitudes of the men were far more interesting to discuss than the women.
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