Hi everyone, I’m looking for others who feel the same way. Sorry if this is dramatic.
I am honestly so disturbed by how casual society and even mothers are about the often extreme, overwhelming pain of labor. I know it is not always like this, but without pain relief it often is. I've seen many stories of women who went unmedicated because they are told it makes them strong or that it won't be that painful because it is natural or even because it is not an option where they live or culturally unacceptable. Or woman who had failed epidurals. You literally have an entire big baby inside you that has to come out through small spaces, it sounds insane, you should never assume that's gonna go well and isn't gonna hurt a lot.
When I see stories of women screaming in agony or feeling completely helpless and a having a complete loss of control, and then hear those same people laugh it off or say it was worth it, is scary. To me, this level of pain isn't just part of life, it feels like a violation of bodily autonomy. I hate how the excuse is always that it's natural, as if nature isn't known to be really cruel. As if murder and rape and diseases aren't natural as well..
It scares me that because many women get through it, the pain is dismissed. I feel like if more women were left traumatized, the world would finally admit how bad the experience actually is. But ofcourse the brain makes women want to do it again.. which makes it even more crazy.
I feel that expecting someone to undergo probably permanent bodily changes and pain is the true egoism, yet society labels women selfish if they prioritize their own safety and pain-free life over having a child.
In no other case in life are people expected so easily to undergo such pain, danger, permanent bodily changes and loss of autonomy for someone else and called selfish if you don't want to.
What hurts me the most is when men or women claim to love their partner and then so casually expect them to bear children. If my boyfriend or husband would tell me he wants to have kids with me, i would feel so unloved.
Am i overreacting? Everyone tells me i am. I know many woman want kids, but that doesn't mean they want to go through pregnancy and childbirth.
[EDIT: Many women indeed do want to experience carrying their baby in their body and birthing them and that should be their choice ofcourse! But society/schools should give more education on the harms that come along with pregnancy/childbirth and society should stop normalising these harms as if its normal that a lot of women have to suffer so much to be able to have a baby. When women are hurt they shouldn't be dismissed because it is "natural" or they got a baby out of it. Pain is pain. Society shouldn't just expect women to have children as if its nothing.]
My husband was talking to this guy at work and asked him, "Don't tell me you're the type that expects their gf to give birth because of your shit legacy."
I've worked in healthcare and educated him in my time in working ob/gyn. Pregnancy is definitely romantasized. I've seen so many bad couples, obviously the ones who are trying to save their relationship are ones having babies 🙄
Excellent that you educated your husband! And great that men like him exist! I'm always scared that men won't be able to empathize with how scary pregnancy would be for me.. no matter how much i explain, just bc they don't have the bodyparts.
In my mind, pregnancy and childbirth are not far off from, like, self-immolation. When a woman tells me she's pregnant, my first thought is, "Holy shit! Why?! That is NOT going to go well. It's going to be so much worse than you think it is. If you survive, you'll be recovering from that for the rest of your life. And your spouse doesn't love you if they're willing to do that to you!"
Yeah, I'm deeply resentful of our society that brushes this off so casually and even expects every single woman to do this at least once in her life. But apparently I'm one of the very few people who see it that way. Most people see it as this highly emotional, deeply personal, existential journey, and when they tell me they're pregnant, they just want me to be happy for them. So I keep all my thoughts to myself and run the CongratsImSoHappyForYou.exe
You honestly described my thoughts to tea as well 😂😂 I feel disgusted at the thought of pregnancy so I just have to suck it up and congratulate people
I honestly cannot fathom how men think it’s an act of love to be like “I want you to have my babies” or that they think it’s an act of love to make you sacrifice your body and well being for them. Like fuckkkk that. Time and time again men use women’s physical sacrifice to enslave and belittle them as well. No thanks!
I know, right?
"I love you so much that I want you to destroy your body and go through horrible pain". Barf.
Right, like get away from me 🤺🤺
“In my mind, pregnancy and childbirth are not far off from … self-immolation” This is precisely how I’ve always seen it.
Exactly and fine if women choose it themselves, but do not expect it of them. Don't you feel alienated from other people because of this? I feel so unloved by society and the people that surround me.
Yeah, I mean, folks of this society seem to think getting someone pregnant is an act of love. You know what they say... "May that love never find me."
And pregnancy is also seen as a 'right of passage' to womanhood as in you aren't a real woman if you haven't birthed once.
I've had several relatives just dismiss my refusal to push a whole human out of me because 'it's a wonderful experience every woman needs to go through' and I'm making too much of a big deal over childbirth as everything always works out.
When they see that I'm not convinced I get hit with the bingos of me regretting it in my 50s, 60s etc as no one will be around to look after me.
I'm not ruining my life or body for a kid and that's final.
Well, I'm 70 and still saying, "I've certainly made my share of bad choices over the years, but THANK GOODNESS that at least I always had sense enough to not give in to the pressure to have kids!"
Am in my fifties and just got off the phone with my mom. I told her essentially the same thing!
I hate how society is generally so casual about anything negative that concerns women. Be it period pain, pregnancy, menopause or any other problem that is exclusive to women, everyone acts like it's all normal and you should just deal with it. Sickening.
I relate so hard. The misinformation campaign around childbirth is as old as time and still alive and well. If everyone understood it as we do, maybe this planet wouldn’t be so overpopulated.
Some friends of ours just had a baby and was telling us how she got diagnosed with heart failure 13 days before the baby was born and how traumatic the birth was and I’m not even joking 2 minutes later said they were gonna have one more Maybe 2 more if the 2nd isn’t a girl 🥴
Edit: typo
Gotta birth a boy at all costs 🙄
They have the boy they want a girl lol 🥴
I take it the first one is a girl? So it's worth risking her life (again!) however many times it takes to get the MALE baby they really wanted?
That's common and disgusting. Those would be ex-friends AFAIC.
No first is a boy! So they want one each 🙄
Oh, I think Autocorrect changed your "wasn't" to "was" then (bc your comment said, "Maybe 2 more if the 2nd was a girl 🥴")
Omg yes this freaking new update keeps changing words when I don’t need it to 😭
I’m also terrible at proofreading 💀😅
I'm great at proofreading...AFTER hitting Post. Never, ever, ever before. If I were to abide by the etiquette I see some ppl here doing of adding an ETA note* whenever they correct a typo, every comment I make would look like the world's longest and most tedious email thread 🤣
.* As I see you did, which was thoughtful given that otherwise our whole conversation would sound insane to bystanders!
No, I feel the same way. I'm honestly just appalled at how majority of people "process" things. Things that have such major consequences. A whole new ass human being? Oh no problem. Even pregnancy aside, just the sheer dismissive attitude of what it means to bring another person to this shithole...not a single second of foresight.
The damage pregnancy does to the body is severely underrated and I almost believe at this point that it's hidden on purpose because of BS propaganda - the amount of women who were shocked at what happened to their body and the fact that it may most likely never go back to how it was is very concerning.
100% agree. And especially the last part. My mom used ot guilt trip me for how her stomach looked. She'd tell me at like 8 'look what you did to me'...... like that's not my fault you chose this. Sorry we are poor because you are a single mom that is a felon so you cant get a stable job so you cant get a mommy makeover. I see it with all my relatives that are women. They have constant back pain, incontinence, migraines, body image issues, and more. They aren't able to laugh or cough without passing on themselves. Then they have more kids. Young as well. The one that didnt have a kid in highschool dropped out of college because she got pregnant by a military guy. Now she's just a house mom basically while still working a job to make ends meet. This sounds like hell to me. Ironically they will judge me for getting a genital surgery I medically needed telling me 'you know its permanent right?' Yea well so is childbirth.
“In no other case in life are people expected so easily to undergo such pain, danger, permanent bodily changes and loss of autonomy for someone else and called selfish if you don't want to.”
Agreed. A combat soldier can experience pain, danger, permanent body changes & loss of autonomy to preserve peace & safety for others. But could you imagine people calling them selfish for not enjoying war. Or a cop selfish for not enjoying crime. A firefighter selfish for not enjoying burning homes & wildfires. A doctor/nurse selfish for not enjoying disease.
It is foolish to call someone selfish because they don’t value or enjoy the same things you do. Because the risk isn’t worth the reward for them.
Pregnancy is truly horrible
Yeah totally. My mother suffered serious lifelong consequences from her delivery of me (her second child) due to the incompetence and neglect of the hospital. You never really think of that as a possibility. It’s like people think everything will just go smooth.
I worked in a large corporate entertainment company. When co-workers would tell me they were PG, I never congratulated them, but said, "That's nice, if it makes you happy" or something close to IDGAF.
I think it’s especially nasty when they feel the need to post videos of the absolutely godawful experience on reels/shorts so I have to run into them while I’m minding my own damn business. Like, get that nasty shit away from me. Keep it to yourself.
For some of them, it does. There's a lot to be said for the many women who can't freely make that choice, who are misinformed or otherwise coerced into it, but truly respecting people's autonomy means acknowledging that at the end of the day, some people will still make choices for their bodies that we never would for ours.
It is important to talk about the expectations and the lack of informed consent that's so often intertwined with pregnancy and childbirth, but we can (and should) do so without the assumption that no woman would choose that for herself. Because they would, and they do. We should help those that don't without erasing others in the process.
Yes you have a point. I should have worded it differently. I know a lot of women actually want to be pregnant and give birth and some are even ok with the pain. However i feel like there's a fine line between accepting something and wanting it. If they could design the nature of childbirth from scratch, i doubt they'd make it this painful/dangerous. There also some internal misogeny that comes into play where a lot of women think pain during childbirth is what makes that strong and a good mom and they need to get through it. But if you're just talking about wanting to experience pregnancy/childbirth then yes you're right a lot of women do want that, but that doesn't mean people get to downplay their possible pain/trauma just because they ended up with what they wanted (a baby).
I know plenty of women who would go through pregnancy and childbirth over and over if it meant not ending up with a full blown child at the end of it! Many women do just love the experience from beginning to end.
Ok but do they love the posssible extreme pain that comes with it?
Some people might see the process and the outcome as two separate things, but some also don't - especially because it's out of our control, since we can't actually design that process from scratch. Maybe one day, medical science could replicate it reliably, but even that is not something any individual has much agency in making happen on their own. There's a line between accepting and wanting for sure, but it's not surprising that we don't see it discussed as often in a context where the process required for the result doesn't have alternatives.
They get to evaluate their own experience however they want - it's their experience after all. What they shouldn't do is downplay other people's experiences, or other people's different risk preferences. The two can coexist, they just sadly often don't.
I also hate how casual people are about adoption - those babies still came out of other women’s bodies and might not even have been willingly given up.
I feel like everyone is able to make their own choices about their autonomy, yet the role society plays in it can sometimes be terrible. The stuff I hear about "Natural births" skeeve me out the most. I was a natural birth, and I came popped out as the second most neurotic person I know, so clearly they aren't THAT important!
But tbh, people do stuff that's considered "painful" willingly all the time. Waxing legs, doing weight lifting or extreme sports, eyebrow plucking, perming hair, becoming an astronaut, etc etc etc. IMO, giving birth is not much different than, say, plastic surgery, and assuming other people have no idea how bad it's going to be because they still decide to go through with it is kinda... rude, I guess? Especially those that already have kids and have decided to strap in for round two.
I've even heard women say it's not the most painful thing they've been through, and that's not even that uncommon. One thing I consistently hear is worse than giving birth is passing a kidney stone. Yikes! I know I'm never going through it, myself, so who am I to argue that they're wrong?
EDIT: I saw the clarification you made about what you really meant! Thank you for that. It sounds like you think we need better Sex Ed, just in general, and I couldn't agree more!
Childbirth shouldn't be treated as something safe and beautiful just because it's natural, and young people should be made aware of that early on in their lives. Hell, most adult MEN could use a course on how pregnancy affects the body... Especially if they plan on writing legislation that is restricting bodily autonomy for the pregnant people! 😒
🤨 "not that different than, say, plastic surgery" is a wild thing to say.
That's the best thing I could liken it to. Like, it's a lot of pain and risk for something a lot of people would think is crazy, but it can be really fulfilling for the person who gets it done.
You got any better comparisons? I'm all ears.
Giving birth is wildly different than plastic surgery on about a hundred levels.
SIGH, IT WAS A COMPARISON.
You could describe cosmetic surgery by saying something like, "They render you completely comatose and unresponsive so a doctor could cut you open, rearrange the bones in your face, shave cartilage down that you can never grow back, and then just sew you up and pray they didn't botch the job, or else your face is ruined forever! Also you could get an infection and die!"
Well, shit, if you put it that way, you'd have to be CRAZY to ever want to get cosmetic surgery! And, truthfully, our society has conditioned people to constantly want to "improve" themselves in increasingly unrealistic ways. But that doesn't mean that every person who gets a face lift doesn't know what they're doing or understand the risks. Nor are they mentally ill or brainwashed by society. Some people simply just do it for personal gratification.
But yeah, if YOU can come up with a better simile, then let me know.
You’re supposed how women are treated? Hopefully there’s a drastic shift- because we aren’t going the right direction.