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t's difficult to determine the primordial seed of our mental image of childbirth. Hundreds of movie and series scenes mix with stories heard randomly at dinner parties, illustrations from nature books, testimonies from celebrities in magazines, and war stories from mothers and grandmothers. In that abstract mental movie, there's always sweat and screams, boiled water, clean towels, and babies born in four shots. Sometimes, even the voice of God comes in off-screen, condemning Eve to "bear her children in pain" (Genesis) for daring to steal an apple. In the end, a mental smoothie full of epic and devoid of practical information that, sipped throughout life, leaves an intense taste of fear. Fear of pain, fear of the unknown. Something similar to what rises in your throat when the two lines turn purple and you realize that, if nothing goes wrong before, you're next to give birth.
Despite having access to information and being surrounded by other women who have already gone through that ordeal, only when you get pregnant do you realize that you have no remote idea of what childbirth really is. What is the pain like? What does it resemble? How long does it last, where in the body is it felt, with what intensity? Your first reaction is to turn to Google while wondering how it's possible that, being something related to your own body, you know nothing about all that. To begin with, because our phallocentric educational system omits everything that exclusively affects women. Furthermore, we pay less and less attention to what doesn't directly concern us, so we don't get interested in the topic until it's our turn to conjugate the verb "to give birth" in the first person. Catholic tradition also plays a role; the modesty and shame associated with talking about "intimate" aspects act as censors of the narrative between past and future birthing women. The former tend to omit any specific description of what happened in their body or around their genital area as if it were a compendium of gruesome details to be ashamed of, and the latter, who mostly accumulate tons of extremely specific questions about those particular damages, refrain from asking out of modesty for fear of being offensive.
The mystification of the idea of childbirth also does not help to better communicate the process. The conception of childbirth as "the miracle of life" or as "a transformative experience for women" tends to strip the narrative of all its physical and mundane details. It is true that the karmic level decreases when you learn that, during dilation, your body may decide to vomit everything you've eaten, or that your baby may be born before, during, or after a bowel movement. It is not a question of scaring future mothers with horror stories about unbearable pain (if it were truly unbearable, humanity would have already become extinct), but of narrating the facts as they were, without minimizing or exaggerating them. The trend, on the contrary, is different.
The article "Fear of childbirth and intergenerational narratives: An anthropological approach" (Laura Cardús, University of Barcelona, 2015) analyzes and describes this phenomenon in detail. "The oral transmission of childbirth experiences among women is simultaneously at opposite poles: on the one hand, it is difficult to find spaces where truthful information about the process is communicated, and on the other hand, when these spaces do exist, their use is intense." In this sense, one of the women interviewed for the research comments: "If you build a story of pain and fear that you have already overcome, you present yourself as super-heroic, but you are building absolute fear for the other person." (Isabella, oral testimony).
Indeed, this is a common phenomenon: it is not uncommon to hear recent mothers talk about their childbirth experience as if they had survived a war, or about motherhood as something that only those who have lived it can understand. Labeling childbirth in this way contributes to perpetuating a model of obscurantism around it that is a breeding ground for fear, tension, and insecurity among pregnant women, three factors that do not precisely help to control pain during childbirth.
FLIGHT OR EMPOWERMENT: THE MEDICAL ROLE
Numerous studies have shown that fear and anxiety are factors capable of amplifying the perception of pain during childbirth. Therefore, it is essential to minimize them during pregnancy. How? By empowering the pregnant woman. By reinforcing her confidence in her physical and biological capacity to give birth. By de-dramatizing the process. By offering her clear, direct, and realistic information about what she will experience in her body and about the tools she has to face it, from breathing techniques to types of anesthesia. Information is power and feeling in control of the situation calms, even if it will not avoid the physical suffering inseparably associated with childbirth.
A PERSONAL NARRATIVE: MY LABOR PAIN
There are women who dilate up to eight centimeters without even noticing. Others suffer even before dilating. There are those who feel the pain in the abdominal area and those who feel it in the lumbar region. Some give birth in five hours and others, like me, need more than a day to do so. The truth is that no two births are alike, nor are two pain narratives identical. This is the narrative of MY pain, as personal and non-transferable as my own birth.
I experienced three types of pain. The first was like a very intense and time-concentrated period. A pain that suddenly pinched my lumbar area, as if someone had grabbed each of my ovaries with an open hand and squeezed them tightly, counting to 60 to then release them and make any trace of discomfort disappear. The pain came and went like waves: it was intense and static and a minute later it disappeared, freeing me from any discomfort, as if it had never been there. Sometimes, the pain made me hold my breath, like when a wave rolls you over on the beach and you spend a few seconds underwater. But, despite all this, it was a bearable pain at all times: I lived with it for 14 hours at home, eating, writing, and even cooking stuffed eggplants without needing to use more analgesics than breathing, patience, and the massages in the lumbar area that my partner gave me.
The second type of pain arrived suddenly and caught me off guard, because I already thought I had learned to control it. It was like a giant whirlpool pulling my ovaries and the entire abdominal area downwards, as if an abyss had opened beneath me and a superhuman force wanted to tear that part of my body away while the rest of my torso clung to life and tried to prevent it. Intense, sharp, and totally unexpected, it took my breath away and I thought I was drowning. A minute and a half later it subsided, giving me a truce, but then the tremors and vomiting arrived and I started to feel very weak. I got scared: I thought something was wrong because I didn't know it was a normal body reaction. I opted to ask for the epidural and, four hours after the first strong contraction, it was injected. In just fifteen minutes, the hurricane of pain descended to the category of a mild discomfort.
Thirteen hours and nine centimeters of dilation later, the third pain arrived. In Holland –where I reside and where my daughter was born–, the anesthesia is withdrawn in this last phase of labor so that the mother feels the contractions and perceives when she should push (in Spain, this practice depends on who attends the birth). This time, the pain intensified, giving me the sensation that a jackhammer was trying to drill through me from the inside. The minutes were extremely long and it seemed difficult to breathe and remain conscious. Fortunately, I discovered my own analgesic. During the first contraction, the midwife warned me that the pain would be reduced if I pushed. And she was absolutely right. When, after several attempts, I started to push rhythmically, the pain began to be contained during the intervals when I was able to maintain pressure. Each push was like a dam stopping the tsunami and, despite the exhaustion and lack of oxygen, I was eager to start again. I wanted to stop the pain, I wanted to finish, I wanted my daughter to be born. I remember exhaustion, fire between my legs, and a relentless pressure, like air trying to burst an airplane window. I also remember thinking that I didn't give a damn if I burst open completely as long as my daughter came out of me safe and sound. And, in the end, she came out. And all the subsequent pains and discomforts (sutures, recovery, etc.) seemed like an absolute joke after this experience.
Childbirth is a profoundly animal process, as simple as it is unpredictable and as painful as it is fleeting. Believing in being able to control it is a chimera, so the best thing is to exterminate expectations, dance with the present as it comes and repeat over and over again that both the pain and the ravages of childbirth are fleeting and that the only thing that remains is the resulting life.
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