Giving birth is considered one of the most painful experiences that women have ever gone through. However, billions of mothers have overcome it to recount that valuable experience.
On the sharing platform Quora, a female user was invited to describe the feeling of bringing a life from her own body into the world. The stories all vividly depict the pain, but also the sacred happiness of childbirth.
The most viewed response, with over 7,000 upvotes, was from a woman named Jane Chin: “I was in so much pain that I couldn’t imagine anything else. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t even breathe.” After agreeing to an epidural to combat the pain, Chin recalled the “strange” feeling of giving birth while under anesthesia, no longer feeling anything.
“I can describe it as having to summon all of my ‘internal power’ and believing that whatever my mind was willing to do, the muscles that I couldn’t feel due to the anesthesia would do. Suddenly, everything ends, the baby is born, and they place it on your chest. You can cry a little while the baby cries with you.”
But when the baby was born, Jane Chin revealed more: “The pain disappears in an amazing, incredible way, like the sun breaking through after a storm. To the point where you hardly feel anything anymore about what else is happening to you.”
Another user named Laura Thomson wrote: “My entire childbirth experience was primal, not driven by the usual logical part of the brain that has already written code for it, but by my instinct and survival.”
Mother Barbara Carleton simply stated, “Yes, it does hurt,” but emphasized that “the pain is relatively short-lived, much less than having a kidney stone or riding a roller coaster.”
Jane Graham added, “The pain of contractions feels like being stung by a wasp. But like a wasp sting, it immediately goes away. So, while the feeling may be worse than anything you can imagine, the recovery is astonishingly fast.”
Elizabeth Duff, a senior policy advisor at the charity organization NCT, shared in The Independent: “Women have more choices than ever when it comes to childbirth. And just like every woman is different, every birth is different. Preparing during pregnancy includes learning about all the options for childbirth, any potential risks, knowing how to plan flexibly for labor and delivery, and how to make decisions based on the available information.
First-time mothers should use the time of pregnancy to build a network that can provide them with the information and support they need in the early days after giving birth.”