I’ve been taking a lot of time to process this, and I wanted to share something with you. I wanted to let you know that I have never complained about and will never complain about the pain of childbirth.
There are plenty of reasons, of course. When I was laboring at home, in and out of the pool, I didn’t experience anything more painful than period cramps. The natural sensation of laboring is much more intense than period cramps, but I didn’t experience any pain worse than those I’d experienced before on a monthly basis.
Some women labor very painfully, and I acknowledge that. I’m not diminishing your experience if you had an extremely painful childbirth. I’m just saying that my birth experience has never been about pain.
That is a good reason not to complain about the pain of labor, but that is not the reason I choose conscientiously to abstain from that verbal jockeying.
Labor and “contractions” can actually be wonderful sensations. If a woman is supported physically, mentally, and emotionally, labor can feel like rushes and expansions. Labor can be pleasurable, interesting, empowering, satisfying, and, for some women, orgasmic. Knowing that I could have tried to re-frame my experience to be “a most interesting sensation to which I owe my full attention” as Ina May Gaskin suggests, is a good enough reason to avoid complaining about the “pain” of childbirth. Again, that is not my reason.
The fear and terror that our culture has instilled in us regarding the pain of childbirth NEEDS to be addressed. Grantly Dick-Read found the social expectation of pain during labor to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Uneducated women associated with the poor classes during his time showed him that childbirth can be matter-of-fact, calm, and safer without an overwhelming fear which, according to Dick-Read, has negative physiological effects which cause and reinforce pain in the uterus. The upper class women “knew” that childbirth hurt and that they were ill suited to the activity on the merit of their delicacy. Unsurprisingly, Dick-Read’s observations showed upper class women in hysterics and great amounts of resulting pain, often needing chloroform.
Reassuring young women (and actually ANYONE) that labor does not have to be mindlessly painful and frightening is a worthy cause, but it is not the reason I will never complain about the pain of childbirth.
Complaint itself is a negative form of communication, but it’s a time-honored tradition. How else would we let off some steam, tell our best friends about our frustrations, or get to hear how ridiculous our own complaints are once they are voiced? Sometimes complaining is the beginning of necessary change. Unfortunately, complaint is addictive and oftentimes just reinforces the negative thought patterns, excacerbates the situation, and lets us goad ourselves into acting in unwise ways.
Is it a distinction of classification that I am making when I say that I will never complain about the pain of childbirth? Unfortunately, I wish that were true, but it is not. I want the right to complain about childbirth if I so choose. I’m not saying that I just don’t like to complain.
I will never complain about the pain of childbirth — Are you ready? — because it was STOLEN from me.
That’s right. Someone took that option from me. Everything was fine and dandy when we transferred. Then things started happening, spiraling out of control. It’s true that I made the call to start the Pitocin on the advice of my midwife. It was my choice, and thus I have never regretted it or had nightmares about it.
We went in to the hospital, having labored for days, and my midwife was met with such hostility and suspicion that she broke our signed contract and left the hospital instead of supporting me as a doula in that setting. She advised me not to allow the observation period and to ask for the Pitocin as soon as possible.
The nurse who was assigned to us was heavily pregnant herself. She was kind and chatty, and absolutely amazed at how well I handled contractions as far along as I was. She couldn’t believe how my husband and I held hands, looked into each other’s eyes, and breathed through each contraction. She asked if we had taken classes or something. In almost the same breath she’d used to praise my ability to cope, she began to sing the praises of epidurals. She said, “I would never go through this without an epidural. Lots of women come to the hospital wanting a natural birth, but they’re so glad to have the epidural when it gets bad. Sometimes it’s too late to get it, or we have to hunt the doctor down to write up the script and that takes too long. Why don’t I just have him write it up now, so you can have it immediately when you need it?”
I just nodded at her and let her do what she wanted. It was easier than arguing with her. In fact, before my midwife left, the last advice she gave me was to ask for an epidural. I just nodded at her too. I think she was more frightened at that point than I was, and NO WAY IN HELL was I getting a needle shoved into my back. I was in labor, and thus unable to verbalize my extreme aversion to pain “relief.” It didn’t seem to matter then, because I knew that I wasn’t going to ask for an epidural.
I appreciate the sensations which occur in my body. I have never just sought to escape from the useful feedback of my sensory network. I do not take pain pills for headaches, cramps, or anything. I work through it. I love my body, care for the temple which houses my soul, and (like a mother who understands that her baby’s crying has significance) attend my body’s needs, using the information that pain provides. I believe that I have a healthy relationship to my body and the idea of pain.
It is my right to say no to an epidural. It is my right to say no to sex. It is my right to say no to anything that anyone wants to do to me. I am my own person. As I respect myself and others, so should they respect themselves and me. I have as much right to say no to pain relief as you have right to ask for yours. To believe that my “no” means less than your “yes” is a gross injustice.
While I labored at home, I felt nothing worse than period cramps. When I got to the hospital, the nurse was AMAZED at how well I coped. My answer to that is that I didn’t have much to cope with. I was laboring naturally, except for the long delay in progress. I asked for the Pitocin drip, and I still felt at least a little in control of the situation.
As the drip was started in my IV, I turned to the nurse and said, “I’ve read that Pitocin contractions are much more painful than normal labor contractions? Is that true?” She couldn’t answer me, and in hindsight, I realize that she probably did not know the answer to that question. She had likely never seen a woman labor without Pit streaming through her veins. It took a little while, but my body answered my question. Pitocin contractions have nothing to do with labor.
Pitocin is not a natural product in your body. Your brain cannot regulate the levels of Pitocin in your body, as it can oxytocin. Yes, it hurts more. It hurts worse. There’s a huge difference between a good kind of pain, like the burn and tingle associated with exercise, and bad pain, like when someone is enraged and hitting you with a baseball bat. Normal labor is like an orchestrated crescendo, each wave cresting and receding, all leading up to a peak when you crown and birth. I had experienced labor that made sense, and pitocin was like being elbowed in the face in a mosh pit.
Let’s make this clear. I owned this pain. I am not complaining about it. I am explaining, as clearly as I can, the difference between laboring naturally and laboring augmented with Pitocin as I experienced it. Pitocin contractions were one on top of the next, sometimes there would be a small rest, then three contractions all on top of one another. There was no time to get a breath. There was no resting and getting ready for the next wave. There was no use in breathing, holding hands, or eye contact. There was nothing but force upon force.
I had asked for Pitocin, but I didn’t know at the time that I could have asked them to start it, then lower the levels to see if my labor could pick up on it’s own. I wasn’t prepared to deal with the beauracracy and hardships associated with being “allowed” to walk around, or get into other positions to labor, so the pain was intensified by lithotomy position. I lay on my back, tied down with fetal monitors, rolling back and forth and writhing like an over-turned turtle.
I had back labor. The nurse and my mother took turns applying pressure on my back, and I thanked them. I don’t remember if I was making noises, or how I was dealing with those contractions, but I did NOT want an epidural. My mother and the nurse started trying to talk me into an one. The doctor’s order was already written up. All I had to do was say the word, and someone would come shove a needle into my spine to thread a plastic tube of numbing solution into my dural tube.
Who would this have helped, I wonder? Me, who was just focused on the moment, living second by second, vocalizing naturally as an aid (the only one at my disposal) to labor . . . or the two women who were getting more and more stressed out by their lack of control over the situation? One, a mother who doesn’t know the first thing about being a birth assistant, and the other a nurse used to an almost 100 percent epidural rate in the women she is paid to attend?
They started rationalizing. They asked me why I didn’t want an epidural. The nurse said it was safe, normal. It would help. My mom was saying, “You can’t do this any more! You’re too tired! You won’t be able to push when the time comes!” The nurse interjected that there were other alternatives like IV pain medications. She started spouting technical information about how safe and wonderful, etc. My mom began yelling at me again.
My poor shell-shocked husband had been sent to the couch to sleep, and after a period of several consecutive days up, he slept like the dead. I sweated and moaned through Pitocin-augmented back labor, twisting the sheets with my legs as I tried to find a comfortable position, and their voices continued. My mother became increasingly desperate, and the nurse stuck close with quietly voiced suggestions.
I kept shaking trying to ignore them. Then I started to shake my head, no. Then I started to SAY, “No.” And I had to keep saying it. Even as the senseless onslaught of synthetic hormone caused my uterus to contract painfully over and over without rest, battering my poor unborn child, I had to keep saying, “No!”
Fentanyl. It’s harmless. A step down from an epidural. Do it. You can’t any more. You can do this anymore. You’re too tired. You’re in too much pain. You will be too tired to push. To be fair, the nurse had brought up the suggestion of the Fentanyl, but my mother was the cheerleader determined to bring the suggestion home. The nurse watched as my mother continued to harangue me into submission.
I remember her screaming in my face, and I interruped her by saying, “I DON’T WANT IT –” and she interrupted me again. “– BUT! But, I’ll DO IT. Just stop screaming! I’ll take it!”
I gave in.
I had so carefully prepared the way for my child. I thoroughly researched birth and birth interventions. I had chosen Pitocin with a clear conscience, having researched it. I knew what Pitocin was, what it could do, and how it worked. As a college grad with a passion for biology and health issues, I had absorbed a good deal of information about birth.
Fentanyl was not on the list. Neither was violation of informed consent or how to counter coercion techniques used on a laboring woman. It’s something so very simple, isn’t it? You know the meaning of the word. Am I talking about the word “pain?” Guess again.
I’m talking about the word, “No.”
I will never complain about the pain of childbirth because it was stolen from me. I don’t remember much after that moment of capitulation. The world becomes hazy. I lose time. Someone took my glasses. Upped levels on Pit. Topped off my Fentanyl. I have nightmares in which I ask my mommy to tell them that “It’s wearing off . . .” and I can feel the pain coming back, and I get sick and disgusted with myself.
Every time I read a certain book with my son, and we hit the page “I’m as weak as a kitten.” . . . that’s what I think about. Me, tied to a hospital bed, weak as a kitten, mewling for more IV pain relief so that my mommy can save me again. I’m sure she loved being the savior. Did I imagine these scenarios? I don’t know. I NEVER want to ask, because I’m afraid that they’re true. The world faded away, and I lost myself.
All of a sudden, it was time to push. (In fact, many hours had passed before he crowned.) Welcome to the world, dear son. Your mother was drugged against her will, but she probably liked it and needed it. The nurse thought so, and so did your grandma. You were born with your mother’s blood pouring over your crown from her episiotomy (another procedure to which she did not consent).
I could have had a good birth. I DID have a good birth, at least the first part. It wasn’t spectacular, but up until the point that certain individuals failed to respect my right to say no, it wasn’t anything I would have had nightmares about. I have no intrusive memories of laboring at home, or being admitted to the hospital, or saying good bye to my midwife.
Beginning after a honeymoon period of a few months, I had flashbacks, couldn’t relax, startled way too easily, insomnia, and volleyed back and forth between extreme obsession and extreme aversion to all things birth related. Added to the struggle of being a new mother was the struggle of being a survivor. A week living like a ghost at the mercy of the NICU, waiting and waiting to finally meet my son could only solidify the Stockholm Syndrome.
I became a traitor to everything I knew. Only hours after the birth, I cried and shook hands with the neonatologist my mother said saved my baby. He scolded me for attempting a home birth, and asked “What were you thinking?” in a South African accent, his dark face hovering in my hazy memories, the remembrance of a stranger staring at me as I pushed my son into the world amidst raised voices. I cried on his hands as I shook them.
I deferred to the doctors, the nurses, and the system to such an extreme degree that I didn’t even THINK to ask to hold my son. I just visited him endlessly at his little plastic incubator and dared only to touch him the way the nurses instructed us. On the third day of his life, while I sat there looking at him, a NICU nurse asked, “Oh, have you held him yet?” as if it were an after-thought! I just shook my head no, and she scooped him up carefully, wires and all, and placed him into my arms, a moment that I will never forget.
So, I have not complained about the pain of childbirth. Unless I earn the right to complain or abstain from complaint by trial of labor, I can not complain about the pain of childbirth because someone took my choice away. I experienced pain during my labor. Then I experienced an artificial pain on top of that.
My RIGHT TO CHOOSE was taken from me . . . and because of that, I cannot ever complain about the pain of labor. I can’t claim to know what it truly feels like to birth my son, the moment of crowning (the so called “ring of fire”) or the intense expulsion reflex which comes in a trembling rush of adrenaline . . . I can’t claim to know these things. I wouldn’t have chosen to birth this way just like I wouldn’t have chosen to lose my virginity drugged or stoned out of my mind.
We are supposed to be rewarded by the physical activities which help keep us alive and propagate our species: eating, having sex, eliminating, labor and birth, breastfeeding. All of these things are miraculously designed with positive biological feedback systems. Unless there is something WRONG, these things are supposed to feel good. A fully engaged, active birth which is pleasurable for the mother is ultimately the healthiest scenario for mother an baby.
This is not an issue of some women thinking they deserve a certain “experience” of childbirth. This is about sexual and reproductive rights, evidence based medicine, and most of all, it is about basic human respect.
It’s an unfortunate situation when pregnant women have to discuss informed consent (which translates practically to informed refusal) with their OB’s, brief their husbands on their wishes, and hire labor guards in the form of doulas. It’s an even worse situation when none of these precautions can guarantee that everyone you come in contact with will make the right choice at the critical moment.
From something as simple as trying to massage a woman in labor without her permission, to internal exams or surgical procedures, the best thing to do is to ask gently and listen patiently at every step. The KEY to avoiding childbirth-triggered PTSD is to make sure that the laboring mother feels in control. Make sure she gets a choice in the matter, and she won’t have nightmares which prevent her from being the best mother she can be.
Even if there’s a time crunch, give as much information as possible and wait for the OK. Tell her, “This is what I think would be the best thing to do right now. What do you think?”
You know the meaning of the word “no.” Why should it mean less when a laboring mother says it? No means NO. Silence is NOT consent. Always ask permission at every step, listen to, and respect the answer to your receive. If you’re not prepared to do that, you have no place in the birth room, and I surely hope that you are not a health care professional.
And for God’s Sake, never just assume that anyone is a good choice to lend labor support! Choose your labor assistants very carefully and make sure you’re all on the same wave length!
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Time to use your critical thinking skills. What’s wrong with THIS article? Discuss.
