Hey Skipmonkey...do you understand the concept of a "Joke?"

I personally wouldn't feel safe doing it alone, but it can be done, it has been done, so it's not impossible or unnatural.

I'd also like to know how you know that the very first homo sapiens gave birth with assistance? No one recorded it and so it can't be proven or disproven, it's just an assumption.

No matter how many precautions you take, women still die in childbirth. No matter how much medical science advances, some premature babies will not survive. If she wants to take the risk, that's her decision, her body.

As for the psychosomatic thing, well scientific experiments have shown that if someone is told something will hurt, it will hurt a lot to them. If a different person is told the same action won't hurt, it hurts less or not at all which pretty much proves degrees of pain have to do with the mind and how much you think something will hurt. It can be on some degree like a paper cut, you don't feel pain until you see you cut yourself. Or like when a kid learning to walk falls down and the adults gasp and then it's crying and owweee when if the adults say nothing, the kid goes about same as before. Some things will always hurt, surgery, getting shot, pain is a an impluse to your brain to tell you something is wrong or to stop doing something because it's hurting you, but labor, nothing is technically wrong so I can understand if some women don't feel pain. The vagina and pelvis is designed to expand. Take rape, you don't want anyone in there so it hurts and rips you up, can cause lacerations and tears, but sex you want, lubrication, your muscles relax, pleasure instead. So it's still the same physical act, what's the difference? The state of mind, the state of fear and humiliation.

Women are shown by the media that having a baby is one of the most painful things in the world, so of course women are going to internalize that message. I'm not saying birth doesn't hurt or can't hurt, but there have been women like my mother who thinks birth is natural so it won't really hurt and low and behold, 3 babies delivered she tells me that it didn't hurt her, that it was just really tiring, the hemmoroids hurt more.

I find it incredulous that plenty of people on this site scream that God isn't real because there isn't any proof, but real live people relate their real life experience and instead it's they're insane and you just can't believe it, it's unnatural, of course it hurts.

Well here's some other things I think you would scream at being called unnatural, transgendered people, gay people, abortions.

In response to nox. It's the right choice for you when nothing bad happens. You don't know it's not for you until it's too late. This is not like picking wall paint where you can just easily change your mind when it's not going well. Please get real here.

That was fucking classic. I can't stop laughing... kinda wish I read that after work.

I have nothing much to add. "Freebirthing" is a hideous prescription when applied to all (or even most) women. Don't fight evolutionary biology, people. I don't know if freebirthing can be attributed to a misplaced devotion to all things vaguely "natural," or to our amusing American tendency to greet every problem with a positive attitude and crossed fingers.

I don't question anyone's right to practice unassisted birthing, but it strikes me as a bad idea.

It probably works out OK most of the time, but there are two problems with the argument that it is a natural practice.

The first problem is just that nature is brutal. All that matters in nature is that enough offspring grow to reproduce and preserve the species. Humans tend to expect more than this. If unassisted birth became the norm, we'd still reproduce as much as ever, but there would definitely be a higher mortality rate of both mother and infant during birth. This is not mere speculation, but readily quantifiable given the set of common birth complications that were once fatal but are now routinely handled by modern medicine.

The second problem is that humans are far removed from nature. We're social animals for which unassisted birthing is not the historical norm and hasn't been for thousands of years. We have not been subject to the same selective pressures as other species, and as a result are almost certainly less suited to giving birth solo.

Just curious - why didn't she want to have a doula or close female friend or relative there? And it sounds like you were there so she wasn't entirely alone.

And the lubrication. That's really pretty key. Even delightfully consentual sex can cause problems without proper arousal. Arguably, if a rapist cared to whip out some KY there could be less physical harm.

Big things coming out of little things hurt. I don't have any particular societal conditioning and shame regarding bowel movements when I've eaten a lot of granola... but if I've been hiking and living on trail mix for a couple of days those suckers can be ouchy.

I have a friend who's contractions didn't hurt. She's a midwife. I asked her if it was a matter of understanding or experience and she laughed, "Its luck." In her very well informed opinion some women have it hard and some have it easy.

Of course, so many humans have the tendency to consider their truth to be universal... "If _____ doesn't hurt ME it must not be real!" Menstrual cramps, tattoos, gunshot wounds, UTIs from sex, hay fever, -- it all just depends on the person and how their body happens to work.

Of course, if you knew ahead of time you'd have an easy time of it I suppose you could give birth in line at the DMV... but you wouldn't be alone.