Hi Persephone... just wanted to say, I think your avatar is quite beautiful.
The whole pomegranate/Hades thing - The story of Persephone is my favourite Greek Myth of all time.
I delight in the way it offered an explanation for the changing seasons/growth cycle, due to the sadness, and then joy of her mother, Demeter, as Persephone is forced to divide her year between her abductor and her Mother.
Thanks for keeping me reminded!
E

I have nothing against natural birth - as I said in my original comment it's ultimately the womans choice. I do however dislike biased videos that make women feel guilty for not going the route of natural birth and portray alternatives as wrong and harmful for the mother and the baby.

In reply to your comment:
“ You're right, redthing, women should be able to choose how they want to birth. Your linked article is in promotion of elective caesarian and states that 1 in 4 women make this choice for good reasons.

Women at high risk make this choice wisely, however I would argue that if a woman chooses this option to avoid the trauma of a natural birth, then she is not making an informed choice, because there is significant and prolonged pain after a caesarian and the risks of damage occurring to the woman or the baby are not negligible.

Have you ever seen one performed?

Providing they get the epidural right and don't have to repeat the procedure too often (it's not fun when they bungle attempts) and that the anesthetic is working properly, the woman won't feel the incision, but she will feel them wrestling the baby out, because it's not an easy chore to extract several pounds of newborn and placenta from a ten inch incision (they are getting so good at the bikini cut, but it's just SO tight)

Hopefully the anesthetic is still going strong while they sew up the uterus and shove it all back in. The woman may not be too out of it by then to see the baby held before her face, before they race it off for intubation, weighing, washing etc, but if she was as stressed out as women I have seen, they could knock her out for a while until it's all over.

Of course the pain doesn't end there. Any time the pain-killers wear off over the next few weeks, she'll get a little reminder that she's just had major surgery. She may not be able to walk erect for a while (days to weeks) because the stitches hurt and pull. And then there's her tender lap that is pretty painful to get a baby resting comfortably on while she struggles to breastfeed.

Finally, there's emotional pain to deal with. Like any labour there're the joys and sorrows of the experience. I believe birth shold be an empowering experience, a woman's rite of passage. I would argue that she cannot be empowered when her experience renders her a vessel from which a baby is removed, especially when the choice for caesarian was made simply to avoid pain.

You might think I'm painting a worst-case scenario here, but I haven't mentioned the serious damage the woman and baby could endure. I'll leave it up to any woman reading this to educate herself about those statistics, if she feels she needs to be informed, of course.

In reply to your comment:
“Ultimately it's the womans choice.
People need to recognise the diversity of birth experiences.
””

Persephone, I don't have a lot of time to write, so apologies for being brief.

You're right about the video, I went back and listened to that part. I do believe he says that the amygdala shuts down at some point, but he didn't there.

However, even that quote is not quite right. Labor cannot be shut down so simply, especially because of the volume of adrenaline required to provide to create a reaction to the effects of oxytocin is sky-high, as in, must be artificially manufactured and injected, even for the stress of childbirth. On top of that, the evolutionary mechanism for such an interaction between fear and contractions, if it were actually true, is shoddy at best and more likely plain wrong. The oxytocin/adrenaline interaction mechanism is a complex one, and one that is not chemically antagonistic, especially since high levels of adrenaline are expected and in fact natural during and after birth, as well as during sex, and orgasms. If adrenaline and oxytocin couldn't work together, sex wouldn't be as fun as it is. In short, adrenaline does not neutralize oxytocin, nor do contractions just stop when adrenaline is released.

Since that particular argument is factual in nature, it's only fair if I quote you some sources. If you'll take a look at the three papers I have below, you'll notice that in no way do high-stress levels of adrenaline serve to interfere with contractions in a negative, non-regulatory manner, and that in fact, it has a beneficial effect at a natural (read: non-Epipen injection) level.

Contraction of the depolarized uterine muscle. Department of Normal Physiology, Sverdlovsk Medical Institute (Presented by Academician L. S. Persianinov, Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR). Translated from Byulleten'' Éksperimental''noi Biologii i Meditsiny, Vol. 68, No. 7, pp. 8–11, July, 1969.

Obstetric Outcome Following Epidural Analgesia with Bupivacaine-Adrenaline 0.25% or Bupivacaine 0.125% with Sufentanil-A Prospective Randomized Controlled Study in 1000 Parturients.
Obstetrical & Gynecological Survey. 53(9):533-534, September 1998.
Olofsson, Ch.; Ekblom, A.; Ekman-Ordeberg, G.; Irestedt, L.

or, perhaps most ironically: Why Natural Childbirth? Judith A. Lothian. J Perinat Educ. 2000 Fall; 9(4): 44–46.

Anyways, I agree hospitals do bad things, and there should be more oversight and regulation to prevent this. I have no problem with that, I have a problem with bad science.

You can email me or go to the Coffeehouse if you want, but it's probably not the best idea to continue this discussion on profile comments, perhaps a better setting would be in order. Cheers.