The Language of Birth

By Alyssa Colton
Issue 138 - September-October 2006

When I think of pain, I think of something shooting, unendurable, wrenching—something that is a shock to the system. I think of something that needs to be stopped at all costs. When I set about preparing myself for my first daughter's birth, I understood that pain was involved. Though on some level I was scared, I think I was more scared by all the medical horrors that could happen. As I did more research, I understood that many medical complications are brought about by the practice of medicine itself.

I knew that I wanted to have a natural childbirth, though I allowed for the possibility that I might want drugs. Still, I wanted to do everything I could to avoid that possibility. So I read. I read mainstream books, such as What to Expect When You're Expecting, but, thankfully, I also read Barbara Harper's Gentle Birth Choices, which made me aware of the history and politics of birth in the US. I found other resources of reliable information about the reality of childbirth. While no one could assure me that there would be no pain, I became reassured that the pain would eventually end, and that it was "pain with a purpose."

However, after going through the experience of labor and birth, I hesitate to call my experience of labor painful. It was extremely difficult—I had a very long labor that seemed to slow as the sun came up on each successive day. It was physically challenging because I couldn't get a full night's sleep. And my experience of labor certainly wasn't comfortable. Because of the way my baby was positioned, the pressure on my lower back was enormous—I was thankful anytime anyone applied pressure to it. But I found that labor was less like being torn open than like having someone regularly and rhythmically press against my insides.

In describing the experience of the body in labor, words such as cramps and contractions seem more precise than pains. Perhaps, for some people, these words aren't strong enough to evoke the extreme experience that labor can be; perhaps, for them, pain is the only word that adequately describes labor. But for me, a writer always in search of the right word, pain just doesn't quite fit. It's not that I'm trying to downplay the physical challenge of labor: I am trying to be more precise. My body felt more as if it was stretching and contracting than receiving shocks of pain. This kind of description seems milder, but it also seems more accurate and more hopeful.

Pain doesn't seem to be the right word to describe the body's natural preparations for birth; the experience of pain is nonspecific, uncontrollable, irrational. Contractions and an alternative word, rushes, describe more accurately the regular rhythms of the body in labor. If I were to describe any part of my experience giving birth as painful, it would be the sensations when my midwife began repairing my perineum, which had torn in all my hard work of pushing out my baby's rather large head But this pain came later, after the birth, and it was pain connected to a medical procedure rather than to a natural process.

Where does the term labor pains come from, anyway? I know the Bible speaks of the "pangs" and "pains" of labor, but Biblical thought also holds that these pains are God's "punishment" for Eve's sin. The definition of pain in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition reveals that the word is connected to Greek and Sanskrit words for punishment and revenge. Two of the definitions of pain are "usually localized physical suffering associated with bodily disorder (as a disease or an injury)" and "acute mental or emotional distress or suffering: GRIEF." Another, not much more comforting definition of pain is "one that irks or annoys or is otherwise troublesome—often used in such phrases as pain in the neck." The plural pains merits two definitions of its own: "the throes of childbirth," followed by "trouble, care, or effort taken to accomplish something." That last definition sounds like a better, more accurate definition of what women go through to birth a baby, and it takes away the tinge of punishment.

It's clear that the meanings of pain in our culture are a mixture of good and bad, of positive and negative connotations, though the word is more often used in its negative senses. Perhaps that's why we have the phrase pain with a purpose: to emphasize the definition of pain as "trouble, care, or effort taken to accomplish something." At the very least, what we need in our childbirth classes and books are reminders of this definition of pain. Without this kind of clarification, it's no wonder so many women are ready to sign up for epidural anesthesia before they've even gone into labor.

Simply put, how we talk about pain influences how we understand it, and even how we experience it. Midwives have also criticized the term delivery, because it takes away the woman's own work in the process. The phrase the doctor delivered the baby does not even recognize the mother as being present. Instead, some midwives prefer to say they caught a baby, a more descriptive and, it seems to me, more accurate term, because that is what a midwife literally does. How about the mother birthed the baby? That phrase reclaims the woman's agency in the process, recognizing her crucial role as more than just a vessel through which a baby is born. Think how powerful a message such changes in language would send to our daughters as they grow up. Think how differently they might come to view birth, how much more confidence they might have in their ability to do exactly what their bodies were designed to do. Some may say that language simply falls short of being able to describe such a deeply physical and personal experience as giving birth.