childbirth

Whenever people ask me what it's like I always say I'd rather have the pain of childbirth or terminal cancer. Pure hell is what it is.

If there was a separate allowance for recovering from childbirth, that would make sense. For example, 16 weeks for a woman who adopts vs.

Western medicine treats pregnancy and childbirth like a disease. So, yes; I do think they probably get delivery wrong.

Dying of cancer is a good thing- it means you didn't die in childbirth or from malaria or diabetes. Cancer is a really big name for a lot of the tough diseases we don't yet have a cure for.

This is because it takes scientists and engineers about 30 years to mature into their field and find their niche, counting from childbirth. Another 30 years before their are close to retirement age.

Illness will come, hardship will come, childbirth will come. Anything you won't be able to handle by yourself, by cause of weakness, incompetence or lack of resources, you will need the support of others to get through it.

Those people think it equally tragic if even a single mother dies in childbirth. Children in those regions are named before they're even born because it is expected as a matter of course that they will get to use those names!

I'd personally interpret this as men becoming more respectful of women when they witness their wives undergoing childbirth. However, the more drastic effect of child gender can be seen on male employee wages.

However, when succumbing to that results in an unwanted childbirth, it does more than just punish the parent, it now involves the child and the whole community.

The reality that I've seen is that a pregnancy and childbirth slows them down -- temporarily -- both physically and mentally. It can be difficult to keep focussed when you're spending your first trimester getting sick every day.

Pregnancy and childbirth is a barbaric process and a woman will never be quite the same after. Taking care of an infant is tiring, stressful, boring, and thankless--and no matter how enlightened the husband is and how willing he is to help out, because of the baby's hard-wired inclinations the buck will always stop with the wife.

Just to throw out a random example, in the few weeks after our daughter was born we received a dozen or so letters from the insurance company all telling us the company didn't think some aspect of the childbirth care was "necessary", and that they didn't want to pay for it. Quite a shocker for us, as the birth was relatively routine, and every intervention was something the medical staff thought was necessary.

Semmelweis demanded of the scientific establishment that they recognize cadaverine tissue as the cause, going so far as to suggest that tissues in the mother were occasionally being crushed during childbirth, and later becoming gangrene, and thus mothers were infecting themselves. Again: my point isn't that Semmelweis didn't make an important discovery, or that the scientific establishment of the time didn't miss a critically important opportunity; my point is that there is more to the story than the missed opportunity of Semmelweis' detractors.

Well, there is the mailing list incident where, when someone congratulated another contributor on the birth of their child, Stallman labelled the entire phenomenon of childbirth as "menacing" and went on to say "these birth announcements also spread the myth that having a baby is something to be proud of, which fuels natalist pressure, which leads to pollution, extinction of wildlife, poverty, and ultimately mass starvation." Not to get into the whole discussion about whether that was the right forum or etc, but by definition I'd say being generally anti-humanity-propogating-itself meets the bar for "misanthropy".