Second - I think that even in most non-modern cultures few, if any,
women expect childbirth to be pain-free. What they do expect is that
it is a rite of passage that they are capable of enduring. And, if
you're mentally prepared, it's really not that horrific (speaking as
someone who went through 42 hours of labor with no epidural).
On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 22:30:30 -0400, S. Isaac Dealey wrote:
> I've read that with women who are prepared for natural childbirth to
> be a positive experience it can be, and can even be painless without
> medication. My ex was not one of those women -- would have been
> incapable, even though she read and believed the same literature,
> because she's too mired in the modern western belief that childbirth
> is (must be) a painful, torturous, hellish experience (without
> horribly invasive drugs). That being said, a good ley-midwife located
> near (a couple blocks) but not in a hospital made a night-and-day
> difference between the birth of our first child (which was hellish in
> "the best" hospital to give birth in Dallas if not TX -- where the
> cesarean rate was only ~3x what the CDC says is reasonable (although
> the name of the org. indicates basically how we treat pregnancy &
> birth -- as a disease)) and the birth of our second child, who never
> cried once (only wanted to sleep really) after 20 minutes or so of
> moderately painful labor.
>
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