Reply to how common is it for the anesthesiologist to refuse to give an epidural?

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Reply to "how common is it for the anesthesiologist to refuse to give an epidural?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
A person who understands biology, and was prepared for (and had) an unmedicated birth.  I think its much more sexist to say "women cannot do the thing they were designed to do without medical intervention."  Don't we trust women a little more than that?  I have no problem with a woman who wants pain meds, getting pain meds.  But to assume it should be the default, or is necessary, because women just can't handle it -- nope, that's sexist.[/quote]
Until about 100 years ago, women also died at incredibly high rates during childbirth. It's not sexist to point out that biology didn't make us the most efficient birthers of our large-headed progeny. Luckily, biology did give us big brains to enable us to solve problems that evolution did not by using tools and interventions...and it's not sexist to take advantage of medical advances.

Knowing that an epidural enabled me to sustain 2 very difficult labors without needing a c-section, I would absolutely argue that epidurals have contributed to reductions in maternal mortality rates. Also, it's more-or-less guaranteed that I and my babies would have died in childbirth without modern medicine...so talking about "what bodes are designed to do without medical intervention" is meaningless to me. Like many women throughout all of human history, my body wasn't properly designed to birth babies...and it's sexist to somehow imply I'm a defective human because of that.[/quote]
No one is implying you're defective for having an epidural.  But to OP's point-the anesthesiologist, who presumably had a medically appropriate reason for denying the epidural, isn't defective either.[/quote]
Yes, when you talk about unmedicated birth being "what [women's bodies] were designed to do", it does imply that someone who can't birth a child without medical intervention is defective. In my case, an epidural allowed me to give birth without surgery...

That said, I defended, above, the fact that an anesthesiologist has medically sound reasons for denying an epidural. For both of my pregnancies, a pregnancy-related immune response to my platelets created the possibility that I couldn't get an epidural...and in that case I would almost certainly have ended up in surgery.

The point of my post was to simply shut down all of the "it's sexist to act like pregnancy and childbirth are medical events because women gave birth before modern medicine". My point is that women also died in childbirth, often, before modern medicine. And epidurals are one of the developments of modern medicine that, I believe, have contributed to lower rates of maternal mortality by enabling less risky and invasive interventions than c-sections.[/quote]

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