My father taught a course at the
University of New Hampshire from roughly 1960 to 1980 called "Human
Reproductive Biology". He found in 1960 that students at UNH
were woefully uninformed on this subject. Times being what they were,
this was a controversial step. Sex should be taught in the home, not
as an elective at the university! His connection with the subject was
that he was a professor in the zoology department who did research in
endocrinology (with frogs mostly, I believe). The course met a
science distribution requirement, for the first several years. As you
can imagine, this was a very popular course! (I like to think my
father's teaching was appealing as well as the subject matter.) At
its peak, his lectures were shown by closed-circuit TV in a total of
three lecture halls, and he had roughly 2,000 students enrolled.
Apparently it also came to include "drugs", meaning
recreational drugs, which was another subject of immediate practical
interest to students.
My father was a self-effacing man who
sought to avoid conflict, but this was an area where he was willing
to take some heat. Later a woman was charged with indecent exposure
for walking naked through town (with, I believe, a plastic replica of
a penis worn as a pendant). Against the advice of legal counsel, he
volunteered to testify that in the course of walking, a woman was not
exposing any sex organs. Why she was doing this is something that
eluded me then, as it does now.
Anyway, the reason for bringing this up
has to do with natural childbirth. At some point a group of female
students encouraged my father to show a film on natural childbirth,
and it showed a woman showing considerable distress while in labor.
He declined to include it in the course, saying that he thought if
women had to see that they'd never have children! This was probably a
common view for its time.
I have the modern view, in most
respects. Women should be fully informed about natural childbirth and
other options, and choose for themselves what they want. No opinion
of mine should influence what any woman decides to do. However, if I
imagine myself as a woman planning for labor, I would not be inclined
to choose that option. Without intervention, labor is extremely
painful. Why would one choose to go through that? Many causes of
death involve increasing pain towards the end. Are there people who
choose to forego painkillers because they want it to be natural? I
suppose there are a few somewhere, but I doubt they are anywhere near
as common as those who choose natural childbirth.
I can see that being awake during the
event, as opposed to the general anesthesia that I believe was common
at one time, would definitely have an appeal. But I believe that all
methods where you stay awake do involve a considerable amount of
discomfort anyway. Does someone really need the whole nine yards?
It's not for me to say, but that's my take on the issue.
