Right……. 

In the Telegraph paper today there is an article on how a male midwife from Nottingham university thinks “Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby.”

Hmmm a benefit…..i can’t really say that my experience of being in labour for 24 hours with very little pain relief was of a benefit for me. Although the site in my back where i had an epidural does cause me a lot of grief now! Perhaps he would have thought it beneficial for me to have my C-section without pain reliedf too, just to bring the message home even more. I mean we have only gone through 9 months of pregnancy, which may include morning sickness, bad back, HUGE tummy, stretch marks, variscose veins, piles just to name a few, i think we generally got the idea that we are having a baby!

I’m sorry but i am going to fall into the category of this sounds totally something like a man would say. He is never going to have to go through the pain of labour, along with the total lack of dignity involved. When people start putting their hands up his privates with a room full of people perhaps i will pay some attention.

OK OK i.m not saying everything he has said is rubbish, of course if you can have the baby naturally without pain relief then hey all the better. I’m sure hypnosis works along with massage etc, but  thought of making someone go through pain is a bit back in the dark age.  What do you think?

Here is the whole article:

The pain involved in childbirth serves a purpose and more women should go through it in order to prepare themselves for the responsibility of bringing up a baby, according to Dr Denis Walsh.

Dr Walsh, a senior midwife and associate professor in midwifery at Nottingham University, said: “A large number of women want to avoid pain. Some just don’t fancy the pain [of childbirth]. More women should be prepared to withstand pain.

“Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby.”

Celebrity births, TV programmes and films such as Knocked Up, give the impression that childbirth is a highly medical process, when in fact the pain is natural, healthy and temporary, according to Dr Walsh.

“In the west it has never been safer to have a baby, yet it appears that women have never been more frightened of the processes,” he said.

In an article for the journal Evidence Based Midwifery, published by the Royal College of Midwives, Dr Walsh argues that normal birth is in danger of being “effectively anaesthetised by the epidural epidemic.”

He says a widespread “antipathy to childbirth pain” has emerged in the past 20 years which has combined with increased patient rights and risk-averse doctors to create a situation where almost all hospitals now offer epidurals on demand.

Instead the NHS should take a “working with pain” approach which would encourage women to use yoga, hypnosis, massage, support from their partners, hydrotherapy and birthing pools as natural ways of alleviating their pain, he said.

“Over recent decades there has been a loss of ‘rites of passage’ meaning to childbirth, so that pain and stress are viewed negatively,” he added, arguing that patients should be told labour pain is a timeless component of the “rites of passage” transition to motherhood.

He says that said epidurals are also associated with medical risks such as a prolonged first and second stage of labour, a heightened chance of the baby’s head being in the wrong place and lower rates of breastfeeding.

In addition, an epidural makes a mother more likely to need help during the birth, for exampled by using forceps, which can be traumatic for both mother and child.

Official figures show that the number of mothers receiving an epidural has soared from 17 per cent in 1989 to 1990 to 33 per cent in 2007 to 2008.

Dr Walsh said 20 per cent of epidurals are given to women who do not need them and that “Emerging evidence [shows] that normal labour and birth primes the bonding areas of a mother’s brain better than caesarean or pain-free birth”

But Dr Justin Clark, a senior obstetrician and gynaecologist at Birmingham Women’s Hospital, rejected Dr Walsh’s claims, adding: “He’s exaggerating the risks of epidurals. They aren’t overused. In the main they’re a good thing and almost always necessary, for example when there are complications, like a breech delivery or a prolonged induction, where the woman will get tired. It would be wrong to suggest that modern women are somehow less stoical than in the past.”

Revealing divided opinions, Mary Newburn of the National Childbirth Trust, said Walsh’s comments were timely and important and blamed inadequate antenatal education, lack of midwife-run birth centres and the fact that 93 per cent of births happened in hospital for creating an “epidural culture.”

Cathy Warwick, the RCM’s general secretary, said mothers-to-be were demanding pain relief due to anxiety at not getting one-to-one personal care from a midwife, creating an “unnecessarily high” incidence of epidurals.