An article in the Times has finally gotten me to write on a subject that has bugged me for a long time: our sexist denial of the pain of childbirth.
The Times reports that some advanced thinkers are suggesting that not only should women be able to have relatively pain-free natural childbirth but that they should be able to have orgasms during childbirth. You see, if putting something into a woman’s vagina in the right circumstances—soft lights, relaxation, appropriate other forms of stimulation—cause orgasms, then why shouldn’t something coming out of the vagina do as well?
Considering that it has only been in the last thirty years that we have gotten over the sexist notion that the only “mature” orgasm is one that results from vaginal stimulation, I am already suspicious of the notion that child birth should be a source of pleasure for women
But not only does this advice reflect anti-female understandings of sex, I think it is another example of a long standing inability of our sexist culture to understand that that human childbirth is a painful human experience and should be understood as such.
And the natural human response to painful experience is not relaxation exercises, nor mood music, nor attempts to have an orgasm, but painkillers. Natural childbirth for women is medicated childbirth.
Fifteen years ago when my wife was pregnant with our daughter, we attended natural childbirth classes. We learned all the relaxation techniques. We took them very seriously. We practiced and practiced. And then when the day came, none of it worked. And, when we reunited with our class mates a months later, we found that natural childbirth classes had not really worked for any of us.
Not long after, I figured out why. I was talking with a friend about our experience and he told me how cats give birth. The female cat goes someplace hidden, quiet and safe and does her best to relax. And while there is some straining while the mother gives birth to kittens, it does not seem like a terribly painful experience.
That discussion reminded me that when our cat Theo (short for Theory) had been seriously injured, his natural reaction was to find some place hidden, quite, and safe and to relax and lick his wounds and wait either to get better or to die.
That was actually a frustrating reaction for me, since having seen Theo get hurt and bolt inside the house, I went looking for him so I could take him to the vet. It took hours to find him. And then it was very difficult to pull him from his hiding place and get him in the cat carrier. (I still have a scar that shows how difficult it was.)
On reflection, however, the reaction of Theo to being injured made sense to me. After all, out in the wild, what can a cat do when he is injured? He can’t go to a vet. The best he can do is stay safe and relax and let the body’s natural healing process go to work.
Much the same is true when kittens are born. What can a female cat do except relax her muscles and let kittens emerge?
But when human beings are injured or hurt, our reaction is totally different. We don’t relax. We tense up and get ready for action. And that makes perfect sense for us because there are things we can do in our natural state to deal with our wounds. To begin with, not being fairly solitary creatures like cats, we can go for help. We can seek protection from others while we are injured. And we can also seek help with our wounds. We can bind them. We can clean them. We can treat them with medicines. In extreme cases we can have surgery. And so our first reaction to injury and pain is totally appropriate to the kinds of creatures we are, creatures who have evolved to become by our very nature inventors of solutions to our problems not least the problems created by bodily injury.
And that is exactly why natural child birth doesn’t work. There is absolutely nothing natural about human beings relaxing when in pain. Our first instinct is to do exactly the opposite of relax. It is to cry out for help and find someone or something that can relieve our pain.
And what human beings who care for other human beings should do when we find them in pain is to relieve it. Natural childbirth for human beings is childbirth in which our pain is relieved by the most human of inventions, our technology.
It is only a set of sexist expectations—that mothers should be transcendentally powerful and able, among other things, to give birth without pain; that the pain of women can and should be discounted and many others—that lead us to forget this.
And of the notion that an ideal birth is one in which a woman has an orgasm is, frankly, idiocy precisely because orgasms are, as we all know, most likely to happen when we are relaxed and yet focused on the immediate moment, precisely the condition we are never in when we are in pain and trying to do our best to figure out how to end it.