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Epidurals and Purity

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I have never understood the idea of women putting themselves through extreme pain in childbirth so they could feel “natural.” Now, I’ve never been through childbirth nor do I have children so maybe you can I don’t know what I’m talking about. But what other painful medical procedure do people undergo where pain medication is routinely forsaken for the principle of being “natural.” It sure seems to me that this is a lot more closely related with other facets of the purity fetish of modern bodies that range from homeopathy to acupuncture to GMO freakouts than it is to anything approximating science or medicine.

Jessi Klein:

I AM seven months pregnant and standing in line at a grocery store in Brooklyn, minding my own business (as much as anyone pregnant can mind her own business, because people constantly feel as if they have the right to talk to pregnant women about their pregnancy). A woman in front of me turns around. She’s a little younger than me. She does not appear pregnant. She is not with kids. Maybe she has kids at home. It doesn’t really matter.

She asks me, “When are you due?”

This is a common question and one I don’t mind answering.

I tell her. I assume we are done.

But then, she says, “Are you having a natural birth?”

I’m just trying to buy a sandwich. Is this complete stranger really asking about my birth plans? I decide to be honest.

“No,” I reply with a smile.

She looks at me, worried. “So you’re having an epidural?”

I am beside myself.

“Yes. At the very least,” I say.

Now she looks genuinely shocked. She turns and scurries away, like a missionary who’s just been told by a particularly stubborn native that she’s very excited to go directly to pagan hell.

My god, I’ll bet she won’t even breastfeed. We all know the bottle is the technology of Satan!, says a bunch of people of a generation who somehow managed to survive without being breastfed for 2 years.

Both breastfeeding and maximum pain childbirth are more ways that society tells women how to live their lives correctly, while telling them every other natural thing about them needs to be suppressed.

The term natural birth.

“Natural.” It sounds so … natural. So relaxing. So earth goddess. So feminine.

But how often do people really want women to be or do anything “natural”? It seems to me the answer is almost never. In fact, almost everything natural about women is considered pretty horrific. Hairy legs and armpits? Please shave, you furry beast. Do you have hips and cellulite? Please go hide in the very back of your shoe closet and turn the light off and stay there until someone tells you to come out. (No one will tell you to come out.)

It’s interesting that no one cares very much about women doing anything “naturally” until it involves their being in excruciating pain.

No one ever asks a man if he’s having a “natural root canal.” No one ever asks if a man is having a “natural vasectomy.”

This is why I generally believe, and of course I know there are exceptions, but I’m just saying, usually, you should get the epidural.

The criterion for whether we are doing our jobs as women “correctly”— and, yes, it’s a job — is more often than not how many of our own wants and needs we are putting aside. We want to eat, but since everyone likes us better when our weight is the same number as our body temperature, we must learn to be hungry. And we can’t acknowledge we’re hungry, because no one wants to think about skinniness as something that takes work. This is why half the ingénues on the Oscars red carpet feel compelled to say they just scarfed down a cheeseburger on the way to the show.

And as for the “scary medical consequences of an epidural I read on the internet or heard about from my doula friend,” well, to say the least they aren’t any more scary than any other harsh medical procedure, which childbirth certainly is, epidural or no. Besides, there’s more than enough pain in life:

When you have a baby, there will be plenty more pain. The pain of recovery, no matter how you give birth. The pain of nursing. The pain of not fitting into any of your old clothes. The pain of not fitting into even your maternity jeans. The pain of hearing your baby cry and not knowing how to fix it. The pain of wondering whether your partner still finds you attractive. The pain of arguing with your husband while your child is in the other room. The pain of knowing that you witnessed the very first moment of this beautiful person’s life, and that one day, and you hope that it’s at least a hundred years from now, there will inevitably be a last moment.

Indeed.

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