I would be curious to know if said midwife has ever has a baby. In any event, why would one endure more pain than necessary in the medical context?
Pain meds can affect the baby. So how do you decide what is necessary then?
I chose not to medicate my baby. It was worth it to me. I cannot gauge someone else's pain and insist that they do so as well.
Considering this midwife is a man I don’t think so.
I remember reading an article once that mentioned the labor pains and the traumatic experience increasing the psychological bond between mother and child.
http://relentlessabundance.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/bonni-hall-endorphins-labour-pain-and-bonding/
Endorphins, Labor, Pain, and Bonding
by Bonni Elizabeth Hall
I’ve always wondered why women in childbirth should experience pain. I do realize that pain can be lessened by various perfectly natural means (change of position, lessening of anxiety, and more), but what I mean is that for the majority of women (as well as other mammals), birth involves pain. Why?
The human body produces various hormones in response to different situations. To pain (and some other stimuli), the hormonal response is to release endorphins, which are natural pain relievers. They not only suppress pain, they give the person a sense of well-being and sometimes a “high”. Atheletes often rave about the wonders of an endorphin high, as well as the effects of epinephrine (also known as adrenaline). Both of these naturally produced chemicals come into play when a woman is in labor.
To put it mildly, the mother’s endorphin level affects the level of endorphins the baby is receiving. This makes the labor more tolerable for the mother, but may well affect the baby even more. It’s entirely possible that a tiny baby can’t produce the level of endorphin (and epinephrine) necessary to really be able to get any relief from the pain of birth, and considering that the baby’s skull bones actually overlap in order to allow the birth, it’s very likely that there is some level of pain involved for the child.
In addition, there is an experience known as “birth euphoria” experienced by mothers who labor and deliver medication-free. This euphoria is specifically related to the mother’s levels of endorphins and epinephrine. It is believed that this euphoria is an important part of the bonding process.
Recent studies have shown that certain kinds of anesthesia (notably epidurals) severely reduce the levels of endorphins in the mother’s body. No pain, no endorphins. What, then, does this do to the baby’s level of pain relief? Naturally, if the mother has had narcotics, the baby will have received some, but then there are the issues with negative side effects (notably depressed respiration) of those drugs. And while the drugs used in epidurals can and do cross the placenta, they certainly don’t have the same pain-relieving result on the baby, since the mother received the drugs in the epidural space of the spine and the baby is receiving them on a more system-wide level.
According to a study done in Europe on the psychological effects of epidurals (Khrebiel, et al., 1987), ewes given epidural anesthesia during labor and birth all eventually rejected their lambs. The full implications of this are not entirely known, and certainly human intelligence can and does affect the relationship between mother and child beyond the primal mammalian responses, but given other tests with human mothers and babies which point to bonding problems (Sepkoski CM, Lester BM, Ostheimer GW, Brazelton TB; Dev Med Child Neurol 1992 Dec;34(12):1072-80), it seems likely that the physical sensations of labor and birth may affect the mother’s response to her infant by inducing hormonal and neurological changes to make her more able to nurture her offspring, and that interfering with those sensations may well cause bonding problems between mothers and babies.