Reply to Why are some people so bothered by unmedicated birth?

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[quote=Anonymous]Personally I “thought” I should want one because that is what my midwives said would be best for me and the baby. I did all the correct preparation they told me to do, and was wildly unprepared for the staggering level of agony I experienced with a long unmedicated labor. Like, wildly unprepared. It was like torture—I kept thinking that this must be what waterboarding was like or what victims of wartime torture feel. When I caved after 24 hours of needless suffering and got an epidural, the midwives blamed me for my fear causing the pain, and then for the cascade of interventions that followed.

So for me, I don’t like that much of the dominant messaging around it from certain provider groups is frankly, a bunch of lies. Things like: pain is because you are scared or it’s not pain, you need to reframe your thinking and experience it as a rush which is just a lot of pressure and is not painful (ha!) or that you can experience birth as one big giant orgasm (ha ha ha!).

I don’t care if you have pain relief or not, but I personally don’t think women should be sold a bill of lies around the superiority of unmedicated childbirth and the supposedly better outcomes it has. If anything, having pain relief in labor can be protective against PPD and PTSD, not the other way around. And many in the unmedicated group love to brag about their strength and superiority and shame women with C sections or who had difficult births that needed intervention, and to me it’s so offensive.

Like, my older sister had two straightforward unmedicated births with minimal tearing. One was like 8 hours and the other was 6. She will be the first to tell you that her experience was easy compared to me and my sister’s births, which both exceeded 24 hours and involved interventions (pitocin, vacuum, C-section, etc) and far worse tearing and recoveries. But she’s the exception to the rule.

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