Should It Hurt?

A "revolutionary" and "heretical" theory of childbirth has been preached for years by a London obstetrician: that childbirth is not naturally painful, that rather it should be an occasion of "exaltation and incomparable happiness." The cause of women's agony, insists Dr. Grantly Dick Read, is fear--a traditional anxiety with womankind ever since the Lord God warned Eve: "In pain thou shalt bring forth children" (Genesis 3:16).

"The more cultured the races of the earth have become," wrote Read in Childbirth without Fear (Harper; $2.75), "so much the more dogmatic they have been in pronouncing childbirth to be a painful and dangerous ordeal." But fear inhibits the muscles which open the womb and thrust out the child, causing pain and compounding the fear into further suffering. He claims to have made childbirth a pleasure for many women by 1) starting to dispel their fears and ignorance soon after they become pregnant, 2) teaching them in advance how to relax and make the child come easily, 3) giving them close, sympathetic attention during the early stages of labor, when many doctors and nurses abandon the patient to a lonely state of terror and pain.

Last week Dr. Read had found a disciple in the U.S. A New Jersey doctor, Blackwell Sawyer of Lakewood, announced (in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology) that he had tried Dr. Read's approach on 168 patients, with success in nine out of ten cases. Comments of mothers: "the happiest moment of my life," "it did not amount to anything."

Cheated of Pain. Dr. Sawyer's deliveries were not wholly painless, he admits, but the pain was not only tolerable (in normal deliveries) but was "lost . . . in a kind of ecstasy and pride. . . ." His analysis of feminine psychology borrows from Dr. Helene Deutsch of Boston, a temperate Freudian who notes in her two-volume Psychology of Women that an "increasing number of women" react strangely to the "perfect painless delivery" produced by modern anesthetics. They feel cheated, disappointed and "empty," sometimes think the baby is not theirs but that of another woman.

Says Dr. Deutsch, who has borne one son: "The woman wants to fight the birth pains largely with her own resources, and is ready to accept a certain amount of pain for the sake of the fullness of her experience. ... A moderate amount of masochism is normal and aids in toleration of the pain. . . ."

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