Image: iStock
Imagine yourself on the due date when your contractions become strong and painful. It’s a moment when you feel so alone because nobody can take that pain off you. All the breathing techniques and birthing lessons might skip your mind. Or if they still are pretty much handy, you couldn’t care less about them now. When it comes to the increasing pain, everything else and everyone seems evil – and that includes your husband who had fallen asleep when your contractions were getting increasingly painful. Here’s when you want to give up and seek the savior called epidural. But does this sound any less exotic than natural birthing?
Natural childbirth or epidural? It’s either a choice or something that is totally determined by how well you are progressing through labor. Natural childbirth is something most women would desire, but for the fear that accompanies it. You might brace up yourself really well for natural birthing, but you might give up pretty soon and plead with the doctors for an epidural! Sounds anything close?
Well, every woman has a different birthing experience. What seemed like an easy delivery to one might turn out to be pretty difficult for the other. We all have different bodies, mechanisms, and endurance levels. So to judge someone’s birthing experience by what you have been through does not quite validate the birthing approach she takes.
I was friends with this lady who thought her second delivery was going to be easier than the first. Her first was a natural childbirth. With the second, however, her pains got insurmountable, like she had not experienced before. She finally gave into an epidural administration. Yet, another mother I know was preparing for an epidural beforehand. But once she read the clauses of an epidural use and the likelihood of future side effects (although rare), she opted out of it and managed the labor really well. Irony as it may seem, but the two women had different experiences – one had an unexpected epidural shot while the other gave it up although she anticipated it.
Regardless of whether it’s simply a personal choice or a medical emergency, the first/second/third delivery, single or multiple deliveries, one should not compare or judge women by whether or not they choose an epidural. The same goes out for one who delivered her baby in just like 20 minutes, unlike a woman who went through a 24-hour ordeal! Delivering a baby is not a method by the book. It takes its own course and is never the same for every mother.
And guess what, it comes from a woman who had two C-sections – the first one which came with no other option, while the second was something I had opted for. A mama from the C-section club later told me as to how grateful she was that in her view it was so much easier for her to go under the surgeon’s knife to bring her baby into the world. Fair enough.
When I think about all the screams and tears that women go through while childbearing, I come into an awe of womanhood. I cringe at how their bodies must be at work – almost mangled. I am inspired by their strength and pain-defying courage. But my view of someone who leaned in on a savior called epidural is nothing less worthy of admiration. For one – it takes your blood, energy, and soul to bear a child for nine months with so much care and affection. And two – this episode of child-bearing is not something which should make you overlook and underestimate a woman who chose not to have or rather had no chance to have a natural birth. Because unless you get under the skin of a woman, you don’t know what she has gone through or what she is going through.
Besides, if a woman chooses to be pain-free, she has the liberty to do so. I’d rather call her blessed that she lives in an era where there are medical luxuries to minimize the pain. So why not make the best use of it? Epidural or no epidural should certainly not be the criterion to judge a woman at her motherhood.
If you haven’t been to pain management classes, or if had no Lamaze classes, then an epidural is something you might fall back on. Also, if you realize that this degree of pain was not what you were prepared for, then too you will want to have an epidural.
An epidural is not something that should make you feel guilty. Don’t give in to the pressures of how other mothers have birthed. The idea is simply to celebrate the birth of a baby, not the approach that is taken to birthing the child.
