Natural childbirth

From RationalWiki

Natural childbirth is a euphemism for vaginal delivery (or, in simple terms, pushing a baby out of one's hoo-hoo). Of course, this is the way that nature intended for babies to be born, but that does not automatically mean that medically-assisted childbirth is "bad." The pain women typically experience during vaginal childbirth is simply a byproduct of the fact that the size of the human pelvis has not quite caught up to the recent evolutionary explosion in the size of the fetal cranium.^[1]

Nonetheless, proponents of nature woo and Eve's Curse insist that long, painful labour is a kind of rite of passage into motherhood, arguing that any technology designed to alleviate that pain (e.g., epidurals) wrongly deprives women of an essential life experience. Although both maternal and infant mortality have declined significantly since the advent of surgical interventions like forceps, caesarean section, and ventouse, mothers who are forced by high-risk pregnancies to undergo these procedures (or who, God forbid, choose to do so) are still made to feel as if they have in some way failed.

Discussion of this topic tends to focus on the means of birth rather than on the infinitely more important ends (a healthy mother and baby). It also tends to neglect the fact that a few minutes, hours, or days spent in labour is only a very small component of the entire lifetime experience of parenthood.