As a pediatric nurse, I disagree.
In our antenatal classes they talked in detail about the pain relief options that are available and they stressed that pretty much all pain relief administered to the mother will affect the baby. They showed us a video of a newborn from an unmedicated birth who, when placed on his mother’s stomach, immediately began wiggling his way up her torso to latch on a nipple. Then there was video of a baby from a medicated birth, and he was just floppy and sleepy, and just lay there. Even when they lifted him up to the breast, he still struggled to latch. That was some fairly effective propaganda for our group.
My reasons for wanting an unmedicated birth:
*Epidural is not without risk - it’s an injection into the spine. It can cause permanent damage.
*Epidural can slow labour down.
*Once epidural has been administered, you can’t move around or change positions easily.
*My hospital prefers you try the gas first to see if that is enough to get you through. That stuff is HORRIBLE.
*It’s one day. Anyone who has dragged themselves to a job they hate day after day, month after month, has probably suffered more! 
I wound up having an emergency Caesarean with #2. I desperately wanted to avoid that, and I cried when they told me the baby was wedged and couldn’t get out by himself. Reasons I didn’t want a Caesarean:
*Longer recovery
*More painful recovery
*Physical limitations for a longer period
*Greater risks in subsequent pregnancies
If you just compare the post birth experience between my two kids, natural vs cesarean, you might understand. After natural birth I was given paracetamol, was walking a couple of miles a day within a week or two and though my stitches made sitting painful, I was generally good to go. After Caesarean I was given Oxycodone and other painkillers, told I couldn’t drive for six weeks and not to lift anything heavier than my older child for a similar period, not to use stairs if possible (I live in a two storey house!), and it was strongly suggested by a nurse and my obgyn that I wait at least two years before falling pregnant again to reduce the risks associated with post cesarean pregnancies. My scar was painful for a long time afterwards, and more than a year later was still often almost unbearably itchy.
As a trade off, it sucked. The saving in birthing time did not compensate for the increased recovery time. To add insult to injury, I actually went through a 14 hour unmedicated unsuccessful labour too, so I got the worst of both worlds 
Well obviously. Don’t women get headaches to avoid making a baby?
d&r
Giving birth is generally considered painful by most women primarily because of the contractions of the uterus during labor. I don’t think one needs to be a “feminist radical” to be interested in reducing the pain of childbirth (perhaps I don’t understand your question, there). But women (and people) experience pain differently. Many women don’t find the experience so painful that medication is needed, but most do seem to prefer some kind of pain management.
Most women don’t opt for cesareans as a first choice for delivery because they will then have two issues to contend with- a delivery and a surgery. It’s more likely that they will receive a c-section because their vaginal birth is not proceeding normally. If a woman has had a previous c-section, she will likely have c-sections for all subsequent deliveries. VBAC’s (vaginal birth after cesarean) is not a popular choice as there is a small but real risk of uterine rupture.
Pain medication during birth can include pills (not terribly common due to risk of nausea and vomiting), injections, IV medications, epidurals or spinal blocks. My facility uses epdiurals first and IV’s second. Epidurals are very, very popular but they can have issues.
One of the issues with epidurals are that they can be ‘too light’ (not covering pain well) or ‘too heavy’ (making the woman unable to control her legs). The place where I work has very few issues with epidurals, but we perform thousands and thousands of them every year and are not a teaching hospital, so we are quite good at it.
Another issue is the potential of injury to the spine/spinal canal, etc. I personally have never witnessed this in the 15 years I have worked at the hospital where I am employed. Another issue is the potential to leak spinal fluid during or after and epidural which can cause a spinal headache that can last for several days while the body replenishes its store of cerebrospinal fluid. I have personally seen two cases of this, but both were successfully treated with a ‘blood patch.’
Following a vaginal birth, the epidural is removed shortly after the delivery. The pain-killing effects of the epidural tend to wear off over several hours and the woman is able to ambulate as soon as she has no more numbness. We generally ask our patients to expect bed rest for 6 hours and to allow us to assist then to the restroom for their first 3 trips.
For the cesarean delivery, the epidural is typically left in for 2-3 days, and then removed and pain pills are introduced. It’s important to note here that a woman who has had a c-section will also have a catheter draining her bladder for 12 to 24 hours. We tend to also ambulate these women after 6 or 12 hours, depending on how she is feeling.
Many women do choose cesarean deliveries for lots of good-for-them reasons. I know it’s not popular among some groups to schedule delivery, but I think it is indeed a feminist issue. The term for pregnancy is generally considered 38-42 weeks- that’s a whole month of variance. These days, many women work and planning helps them wrap up work projects in a timely manner so they can enjoy their recovery and time off; planning allows the spouse to plan for time of as well; it can help with arrangements for help at home and/or for out-of-town visitors- things like that.
I’m actually surprised by this thread. I was under the impression that complete pain relief was not possible, due to the method of injection, avoiding problems with the baby, and still being required to push without hurting yourself (something you couldn’t tell was happening if you can’t feel anything at all.
And, yes, I know that anesthesia and pain relief are not the same thing, but every painful procedure I’ve ever had has always had both. And I’ve never had a pain relieving substance that stopped pain from your own exertion.
One of my aunts had triplets in her first pregnancy, which were delivered via Caesarian. For her two subsequent children (one at a time), she was unable to deliver vaginally because her uterus had been so stretched by the triplets (each of whom was over 6 pounds)
One article I read on Cesarians suggested that with proper medical supervision it was not necessary to have subsequent births caesariean after having one that way. Also mentioned that the proportion of caesarians was more dependent on geography than anything else in North America - some areas, some cities the doctors are more likely to recommend (strongly?) a caesarian at the least sign of problems.
There was also a piece, in the NY Times IIRC, about problems in Africa; described how many women died from incomplete births. It mentioned one woman who had to travel by bus for several hours to get to a clinic with the (dead) baby hanging half out of her after a failed childbirth. (I assume it was the shoulder problem mentioned earlier). Without trained medical help, this problem was usually a death sentence. Oddly, you wonder why no midwives would be able to handle such a situation, unless it was a case of the usual/traditional support structures of the villages destroyed by urbanization.
It depends. There are two major kinds of cuts you can make to the uterus - a “vertical” cut or a “bikini” cut. The bikini cut is the newer cut, and for many years VBAC was thought to be safe if you’d had a bikini cut. Now we’re not so sure, and many hospitals are beginning to forbid VBAC even with a bikini cut.
The choice of cut has to do with several things, including how far along the pregnancy is (preemies sometimes still need the vertical cut if they haven’t grown big enough to stretch the uterus enough for a bikini cut to make a big enough hole to get the baby out), abdominal obesity in the mother and just physician preference.
For those who are interested, if you’ve had 1 previous Caesarean, the risks for uterine rupture as a VBAC are 0.5% if you had a low-transverse “bikini” C/S, and 2% if you had a vertical “classical” C/S.
I saw quite a good documentary on Netflix (A Walk to Beautiful) about a fistula hospital in Ethiopia. Fistulas are evidently quite common in parts of Africa for this same reason - in places with inadequate medical care you can actually have a childbirth that fails so hard that part of your vaginal wall dies, leaving you incontinent and therefore a pariah in your community. The hospital is free but most of the women have to undertake an extremely arduous journey to get there, and not everyone can be helped.
A C-section is not trivial. You find out in late pregnancy and after a C-section just what you use your abdominal muscles for, because it hurts when you do. And you use them for damn near everything. It hurts to turn over in bed after a C-section. You aren’t supposed to lift anything heavier than about 10 lbs for six weeks after a C-section.
The lifting thing alone is an enormous pain to deal with. It means you can’t carry the baby in a car seat. You can’t really go grocery shopping by yourself, since 10 lbs of groceries really isn’t much. I was really glad when the six weeks after my C-section was up and I could go back to normal activities.
I knew about the restrictions after a C-section going in, and that was part of why I would have had a vaginal birth, given the choice. But I wasn’t given the choice, and I’m glad a C-section was available.
True fact. Which is why everytime a man gets an erection he dies from blood loss to the brain.