Fictional childbirth

Once again I have started to read an account of a birth in fiction written by a man.  As a man I feel for these fictional women who are written of by men who think they are giving a realistic account of what fantasy women would feel and they are using modern experience to judge what it must have been like.

Modern birthing experiences are horrible, ask any doctor or maternity nurse.  But they are happy that they have huge needles filled with powerful pain ending drugs that will make giving birth bearable.  Certainly if you talk to enough women, mothers, you will hear about her 24 hour long experience, or her 48 hour long experience, or about her week long experience of three 24 hour periods spaced out and then being induced through another horrible experience.  And the best part, they seem happy and glad to tell this all to third trimester expecting mothers.  Imagine how bad it must have been without drugs, eh?

I mean the idea of passing a football through a hole barely big enough to put a penis in, of course it is going to hurt right, and tear and the will be blood and if it was not for doctors, most women would die.  Pure bull shit!  I mean that is why humans are filling every habitat on the planet, because when we birth out side a hospital the mothers die half the time . . ..  Okay sometimes they die, but most of the time they live.  But what about the pain?

I like to look at a time before there were doctors.  I like to look back when there was humans no different than ourselves, but without any technology.  I always say on the plains of Africa.  Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!  Truthfully if you were a predator, and you wanted to eat, would you not stalk humans?  No natural weapons, slow moving, no natural camouflage and when they give birth, the screams of pain are so intense it attracts everything from a hundred miles away, add that when it is finished the mother is so tired and drained they are easy to pick off.  Yup, if that was the way of it, humanity would have been dead end.  

So what gives?  Let us look at the equipment.  The womb is a big elastic muscle.  Muscle fibers are wrapped in two directions to provide push and contraptions that move the baby to exit.  The exit can dilate as it is another muscle, a muscle that is meant to hold everything in the womb, but when it relaxes it dilates to allow exit.  

In a natural birth, like those recorded hundreds of times in the slave fields or by uneducated backward women, the woman stands or squats in a relaxing position and let's the baby come in its own time, calmly and well relaxed.  They achieve this relaxed state that mothers in hospitals all feel  when they are about to give birth, after all it is a natural process that has occurred for thousands of years on the plains of Africa.  Oh wait, hospital births are not relaxed and there is a lot of pain

If I told you that is was going to break your nose and that I was going to break all you bones in your chest by punching them very hard repeatedly.  If I told you that for me that would be easy because I am a giant of a man with an evil disposition, you might well believe me and be frightened.  Two things happen when you are really frightened.  The first is your blood is sent preferentially to the limbs, so you can run faster or fight me off better, and secondly your muscles tense up, so I can cause less damage to you.  Neither of theses things is good for childbirth.

Blood away from vital organs means no food or oxygen to the womb, meaning it is harder for these muscles to do their work and that means they are less effective.  The second effect is worse, the muscles of the core including the womb become rigid and the birthing process becomes painful as the muscles a forced apart to deliver the child, the muscles tear and rend making the process more difficult, and there is a positive feedback reaction it hurts  which increases the fear which make the birth more difficult which increases the pain and so on.  

The birthing process should start with relaxation months earlier.  Positive messages should be in coming like, I had a wonderful birth, I did not feel any pain, it was almost pleasurable.  The birth was so relaxing and it was nice to have my partner there the entire time.  Meditation should help this as with other techniques.  If the mother is relaxed, the womb gets the right amount of blood and the muscles relax, the child should be born easily, quickly with little pain beyond pressure.  Naturally, just like in the plains of Africa, with no bears, tigers or lions aware of anything.