An Ungovernable Pain

From demoralizing the suffering of childbirth to encouraging the suffering of beauty and sex rituals, society's framing of female pain is unsurprisingly upside-down

I recently saw a reel that depicted a popular influencer essentially doing a “get ready with me” video but she wasn’t getting ready for date night or brunch…she was doing her contour to give birth in. She was chipper, charming and beautiful-and completely checked out of the actual reality of the moment thanks to her epidural. More alarming to me than the video itself though, was the comment section. Comments heralding her for cashing in and monetizing her moments in labor, saying that this is how birth “should be”, stating how amazing epidurals are. The overarching reactionary theme in her comments was “pain is oppressive to women and numbing it is empowering”.

One woman even stated that “our foremothers would have wanted this for us”. I am admittedly a person who tends to focus on the parts of the past which allowed women to be fully present in their womanhood (in contrast to the disembodied hellscape of modern physical female life), so I initially scoffed at this statement, until I remembered something. The interesting thing about her assumption is that she was at least partially correct. My distaste for her weaponizing the pain of our maternal ascendants against the birthing women of today came from my idealization of the past, and the that begged for some investigation, which I am sharing here.

Pioneer birthing scene, wood print by Gustave Joseph Witkowski, 1887, via this link

Some first wave feminists did in fact actually campaign for twilight sleep for childbirth with the idea that it would help women gain control of the childbearing experience in the beginning of the 20th century. Twilight sleep is the practice, developed by one Dr. Bernard Krönig, of administering scopolamine (to dull memory, also colloquially called “Devil’s Breath”) and morphine (for the actual pain) to the laboring woman so she has no memory of the birth of her child. Scopolamine allowed a state of consciousness where women were still amendable to instruction and capable of following orders but also would not retain memory of any of their experiences or pain.

One such early foremother in favor of twilight sleep was Mary Ware Dennet (read more on her and this entire topic here), so much so that she volunteered for the Twilight Sleep Association, which was formed in 1915 and whose members distributed brochures that claimed twilight sleep was “the best solution for eliminating ‘childbirth with its attendant agonies, horrors, and fears’ for all women”. Women like Dennet, as well as the infamous Margaret Sanger, believed that eliminating that pain of childbirth would place women in a position to become full public citizens by way of evening the playing field with men politically. The weaknesses and vulnerabilities inherent to the woman with childbearing capacity were the crimes of the female body, these women were the righteous vigilantes seeking justice against these unruly bodily misbehaviors.

This entire proposition relies on the premise that the pain of childbirth was an experience that women were not built to withstand, that this experience made them inferior to men due to the weakness and fear it imbued in them. It is interesting to consider the fact that this is an example of framing the facing of adversity (in this case the pain is the adversity) as a negative thing. In our modern culture, the facing and conquering of adversity is generally viewed in a positive light-as it should be. Which makes it all the more interesting to note the fact that the Instagram commentators mentioned above, who likely would agree in general that facing adversity is an admirable and valuable experience, seem to frame childbirth and the natural pain it comes with as an adversity not worth overcoming, an adversity that hurts and weakens us (if this isn’t in fact how they frame it, then why would the avoidance of it be deemed so “empowering?”), much like the folks of yore who used this idea to keep women out of the public sphere. If avoidance is empowering, then confrontation must be oppressive.

This is just yet another example of things which are deemed “primitive”, things that are of nature, being framed as the dictative enemy that rules with no mercy. These natural forces know what we do not, however. In seeking the empowering experience, these women were actually only overpowering nature. Like this story always goes, there were unforeseen consequences. Consequences that, had our foremothers had the ability to predict them, likely would not have desired for their own daughters and granddaughters.

I do not blame the women of the past who sought different options for their reproductive woes. Although I may admittedly idealize bits and pieces of the past I truly am no idealist. I live and breathe and in a female body, I have all my 33 years. I know the weight of reproductive capacity, I have held it in my womb since I was 10 years old. I know the pain of childbirth intimately, I know what it feels like to have your potential to make a baby leveraged against you by a man. I can understand the impulse to wrangle some superficial control over childbirth.

Knowing birth the way I do, I also understand that any control over it is just that-superficial. It is naive to believe that intervention injected where it is not truly necessitated can be anything but harmful. It’s a case of no side effects versus many potential ones. This stands for epidurals and other pain control in birth today- the choice to forgo them has no risk. The choice to utilize them will always have some level of risk. Many women don’t seem to enjoy or appreciate this conversation, however. Talking about the risks of epidurals in the presence of women who have either used them or are considering using them feels like being a child bringing up an unsavory, inappropriate (yet honest and likely relevant!) topic at a semi-formal dinner. People gawk, they give a few side-eyes, they change the subject. The implicit “how dare you” hangs in the air.

It is a provocative thing to ponder- the fact that our modern pain management of labor and birth is the legacy of a movement that was a response to the perception that the experiencing of that pain made women imperfect, full of misfortune and inherently incapable. It becomes even more provocative when one considers the fact that many of the women who fought for the right to it did so from a place of their own traumatic and layered pain. From the above linked paper-

“Mary Ware Dennett experienced three pregnancies and deliveries that resulted in common, but serious, health problems. Carleton, her first son born in 1900, survived but required ‘artificial feeding’, as Dennett remained ill from the strain of labour and unable to breastfeed. In 1903, the birth of her second son, Appleton, was equally traumatic, and he died at 3 weeks old of starvation. Their third child, Devon, was born healthy in 1905, but she had major complications from the birth that eventually required surgery. Physicians advised Dennett that another pregnancy would kill her and that she and her husband should completely abstain from sexual intercourse. Given the illegality of birth control, and their refusal to tell her how to use it, Dennett had little choice but to follow the recommendations of her physicians. She and her husband would ultimately divorce, after he sought the affections of another woman.”

Who can blame Mary? I do not read her story and dismiss it, I read her story and want to further understand the circumstances and environment in which it arose. Women like her were not unreasonable in their fervor to find a different way- but the idea that perhaps they were looking in the wrong places is worth a ponder. Rather than seeking to avoid pain, perhaps their efforts could have been expended on centering other women as the protectresses of birth rather than begging male obstetricians (who, by the way, were desperately trying to validate their oft-looked-down-upon profession by way of new technologies such as twilight sleep) for their approval and cooperation with twilight sleep.

Mary Ware Dennet via this link

The women who pushed for the streamlining of twilight sleep sought the blessing of the “skilled” male medical professional to progress towards their ends. Did those women recognize the inherent interdependence between man and woman and attempt to use it to their benefit perhaps? Or were they asking permission where it ought not be sought in the first place? In the same time period, many of these same women (including Dennet) were campaigning for the right to contraception as well. Would they be so desperate for contraception had they access to traditional knowledge of how to prevent pregnancy or if those same men they sought approval from for their childbirth experiments would simply take a “no” to sexual intercourse every once in awhile?

Twilight sleep was immensely popular for a few years (1914-1915) and Scopolamine was used in childbirth for years afterword. The method was not ever-lasting because, of course, the side effects were many. From intense headaches and blurred vision to the potential for violent bouts of delirium (which meant women undergoing this method were kept restrained in bed with canvas cages surrounding them), twilight sleep was fraught with the potential to destroy the dignity of the birthing woman. While the practice itself was done away with fairly quickly, the damage was done.

We have to recognize whose voices were being magnified. Were women with healthy and happy pregnancies and babies motivated to instigate epic, lasting changes to the childbearing experience? And if not- if a female centered movement is rooted in the worst example of something, is it actually representative of the general condition of the female? Asking these questions isn’t to say these women didn’t need or deserve help. It is to say that the long running consequences of their demands to fix their suffering do now affect all women by way of the changes in childbirth culture-birth as medical event, hospital birth as default, obstetricians above midwives and other drugs and methods of pain control (like epidurals) that have their own side effects.

Changes spurred from a place of felt injustice over natural events means that justice was in fact being sought. Can we actually seek justice against nature and the laws she presides over though? Not without immense disconnection and disembodiment. In the everlasting search for a pain free life, we have given up some measure of our humanity. This can apply to many areas of life, not just childbirth.

The above-linked paper quotes Charlotte Teller in her essay ‘The Neglected Psychology of Twilight Sleep’ in Good Housekeeping as discussing women’s bodies ‘not as instruments of cosmic forces, but as the personal possessions of ourselves’. Are our bodies not both though? Instruments of cosmic forces and also our own? Further, perhaps the reconciliation of that conflict is the work of the woman. We can belong to ourselves and to the universe simultaneously, and the pain of childbirth actually allows us to understand this in a way which is difficult, if not impossible to know in any other way.

Would our foremothers, who sought freedom from fear and pain, want us to view pregnancy as a physical disability as many of us do now-an inherently fearful position? Would they be happy to know our C-section rate globally is 1 in 5 and that that number is on the rise? Would they be thrilled to know women with epidurals are most often restricted to their bed and forced to give birth on their backs with their feet in the air, bright lights directed at their vulvas like spotlights on the star of the show? That forceps, episiotomies and vaccums are used to expedite delivery when pushing efforts are dulled by anesthesia? Perhaps some of those women, scarred by their own even worse experiences, would be okay with this. I guarantee many of their less boisterous contemporaries would disagree however. I wonder if the fact that CPMs are still not legally permitted to practice in 16 US states would feel like freedom to these ladies?

What the women who claim that the numb version of childbirth is the good and right version fail to comprehend is the power of perspective. If one frames pain as something that is after you, some sort of spiritual curse that comes to attack the birthing woman-of course this feels like a force we have to overcome. This perspective often also lends itself to how birth experiences are interpreted after the fact-if a woman feels betrayed by her body and feels that the pain is a tyrannical super-force that came after her and hurt her, of course this will be traumatic. When the pain is instead framed as something that simply just is, a temporary and purposeful fact of life that can actually teach us how much resiliency we have the capacity for-it isn’t so scary. It becomes a force to align ourselves with, an ally whose power compliments our own. The pain is a manifestation of the strength of our contractions, the contractions that we have to work with to bring forth new life.

Examining the pain that is truly for us but which is tangled up in so much messaging that has convinced many of us to seek to do away with it makes me consider the pain that we are actively encouraged by society to engage in and actually seek out. The things that come to mind are painful sex acts and painful beauty rituals. While many women are happy to do away with the pain of childbirth or even avoid childbirth in general (whether by hiring a surrogate to endure the pain for them or by tossing motherhood aside completely out of fear)-those same women often are equally happy to inject their lips with filler, undergo general anesthesia to get breast implants that often make them sick and engage in sexual relationships with men who like to hit them (its okay though, because they only hit them while they are inside of them).

Plastic surgery Barbie, anyone? via this link

This is an idea that I have not personally ever seen considered- why are certain forms of female pain acceptable, and others are not? The most obvious answer is of course money- no one makes money when women don’t get epidurals and push through the initial discomfort of breastfeeding to avoid formula. Plenty of money is made when women choose to get plastic surgery or perform in porn. I think this answer is very relevant, but I also think that there is much, much more to it than just the pure economic angle.

The bit on BDSM, for example, isn’t necessarily a money-making grab at women. It is more of a soul-taking grab. The definition of soul that I am partial to is “the moral and emotional nature of human beings”. I believe the moral and emotional nature of the female is not actually inclined to desire to be hurt, threatened, insulted and demoralized within sexual interaction. I think it is often (not always) within our nature to desire to be dominated in some manner, to be led in some way, to find some sort of feral quality within our animal selves that we are only safe to expose within the box that is love. This does not equate to the illusion that BDSM sells however. The spell that violent porn and the men and women who consume it has cast on women in general has many of us convinced that we are abnormal if we don’t desire to be choked or smacked during sex. The expectation is that women should be at the very least, willing to try these things, lest we be mocked as “vanilla” or “prudish”. How did we get to a place where letting a man we met on a dating app manhandle us mere days after being introduced by the techno-matchmaker is the acceptable version of pain?

Further, what is the societal benefit of having a generation of women who think it is good to endure painful surgeries for beauty and violence for sexual attention and affection? What is the societal benefit of having a generation of women who think that they are not equipped to handle the pain of birthing babies or the soreness of chapped nipples in the early days of breastfeeding those babies or even the typical discomforts of pregnancy in general? Both of these questions feed into yet another one- what about the emotional pain that accompanies both of these premises? The cycle of emotional pain that begins with one and ends in the other?

Consider a woman whose self-esteem is so bruised by the enduring of endless messaging that tells her she is ugly and only worthy of affection if she pushes through sexually painful acts- this is a woman who undoubtedly will have suffered both physical and emotional pain that will leave her in a state where she may feel incapable of enduring or disinterested in the sort of pain that comes with childbirth. So much so that avoiding it will be deemed “empowering”! Why? Because perhaps it is the only pain she feels she can control. Instead of finding her most powerful self, she again is sold another lie.

In answering the questions about the societal benefits of these phenomena, there aren’t any that benefit women, children, families, or communities. The benefits that arise are limited to industry and economy and government, to corporations and the hyper-powerful. Women who have not been initiated by the pain of birth or by motherhood at all and who are simultaneously bound to ideologies that tell them they must suffer to be beautiful and endure humiliation to be loved- this is a group of women who are good consumers, good listeners, and good workers. This set up, however, is one that is ultimately so harmful to our collective happiness. Speaking of female happiness and quite relevant to this discussion- if you do anything after reading this, please PLEASE go read the Girls’ Attitudes Survey, which is in its 15th year and put out by GirlGuiding. From the latest survey:

“The number of girls and young women aged 7-21 who describe themselves as very happy has continued to fall over the years. Now fewer than 1 in 5 girls say they’re very happy compared to 2 in 5 in 2009. Girls are also more anxious, worried and lonely than before. As well as being concerned about money and their future opportunities, they’re also worried about not looking like women in the media, and being sexually harassed.”

I cannot help but link information like this to a theft of female initiation rites paired with a injection of rotten messaging around the pain that we are expected to endure. It truly feels to me like the “powers that be” are trying to break us, our souls-and from stats like those above, it unfortunately seems to be working, and even more unfortunately-working well on the youngest of us. These young girls are already being exposed to media that makes them doubt themselves, thereby beginning the cycle of seeking validation through painful rituals they are told will rid them of that anxiety and unhappiness.

I think that in reclaiming and embracing the ungovernable, radical, original pain of childbirth-and doing so in the presence of our daughters when possible-we could do a lot to heal the wounds of our foremothers, both the wounds they endured by living and birthing in the times that they did and the wounds they created by rejecting pain so wholeheartedly that it led to unforeseen consequences for the women and babies of today. I think that this reclamation similarly can lead us back to a place of myth and magic, a place of love and gentleness for our female souls-where we aren’t as vulnerable to the things that hate us and neither will our daughters be. I don’t want to be a foremother who passes down a legacy of avoidance and disembodiment, I want to be a foremother whose legacy is one of facing hard things head-on, roaring reclamation, and tenderness for our innate female qualities and experiences.