As a woman, you don’t have to have experienced labour firsthand to know the pain of it.
We’ve all watched the sex-ed videos, heard the stories, and, the really luck amongst us, experience semi-labour pains once a month when we get our period. Mother Nature doesn’t know or care that we’re not actually birthing a child – we still get the same gnarly knife pain in our lower abdomen, back pain, hip pain, desire to throw up, and inability to stand let alone move.
It’s fun fun fun.
So colour me peeved when I read the latest research that suggests labour pain is all in our head.
According to new research from La Trobe University in Melbourne, coping with childbirth is as simple as mind over matter. The study, which interviewed 40 Melbourne mothers, found that women can have a more positive experience by reframing their thoughts about the difficulties of labour.
Women who were able to remain “present” and consider normal labour pain as natural, functional pain were more likely to experience minimised pain and were less likely to need pain relief, epidurals and Caesareans.
“Women who couldn’t link their pain with having a purpose were perhaps less capable or willing to work with it,” Labour pain expert and physiotherapist Dr Laura Whitburn told the Herald Sun.
“My advice to women would be to take some time to think about labour pain as the body working at peak performance as opposed to something going wrong.”
To that I say: get stuffed.
No amount of mindfulness is going to magically fix the knife pains I feel in my uterus. No amount of meditation of weird yoga pose is going to make me feel less like screaming. And, dear researchers, if it is a choice between an epidural or hours of sustained death, I will be choosing the giant needle.
If you are one of the lucky women who can dull the pain just by practising mindfulness then I’m happy for you – really. Respect for having a mind stronger than your body.
But despite what the research might suggest, this^ is not the norm. The norm is excruciating and the normal woman cannot control her labour pain.
You think if I could I – or any woman – would willingly let myself writhe in pain during childbirth? Yeah, nah.