'Tradwife' influencers like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm are eschewing pain relief in childbirth, part of a larger epidural backlash.
—that is, the"traditional wives" of social media who tend to preach submissiveness in marriage and that"a woman's place is in the home." But oddly enough, the two camps have lately collided at an uncanny meeting point: childbirth. And more specifically, unmedicated childbirth.
As Somerstein catalogs, childbearing people became eager for pain medication as soon as it became available. And there's been piles of proof through the years that epidurals specifically are safe. Indeed, Emily Oster’s 2013 pregnancy bibledeep dives into the pros and cons of epidurals and finds there's no evidence they negatively impact the baby .
But my baby was. So over the next 24 hours, the pain relief from my epidural allowed me to make peace with, or at least inhabit, that reality. Once you have an epidural, you’re not allowed to get up from your bed because of the numbness, but I still found myself wanting, needing, to stretch and move in cat-cow and child’s pose throughout my labor as my cervix dilated. Ironically, with the pain numbed , I felt more in touch with my body after my epidural than before.
Neeleman’s vague feeling that she just doesn’t like them for some nebulous reason may speak to why. The obstetrician responsible for popularizing the idea of natural childbirth, Grantly Dick-Read , “asserted that by being fully conscious and emotionally present for birth, women could achieve ‘the perfection of womanhood,’” Somerstein writes. “He yoked ‘natural’—meaning unmedicated—labor to what he saw as women’s biological imperative and the ultimate expression of female identity.
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