Birth is like Sex

...and that's the only way I could explain to my husband why I feel the way I do about my son's birth.

About 6 months after the birth, we had a conversation in which he told me he didn't understand how our son's birth was 'that bad'. That it was 'just in a different room' (after a transfer from birth centre to hospital).

I thought about that conversation a lot, and I came up with this analogy.

Imagine you are a virgin. That you dreamed about and planned for a long time what sex would be - intimate, loving, private. Being with a person (or in the case of the 'birth' part of the analogy, people) who you know and trust deeply. Then...you get raped. All your dreams of how it should have been are stripped away. You have strange face(s) surrounding you. There is no love or respect in the room, it is full of fear. It is not as it should be. Then compare it with having sex the way it should be. Look at the situations - both times you have 'achieved' the physical act of sex. But the physical and especially emotional ramifications are worlds apart. And it wouldn't be something you just 'get over'. It is something that would shape your entire world and your entire view on things.

So in birth, should we really be OK with it if both mother and baby come out alive? Is that ALL that it's about? Do we not want mother and baby to be HAPPY and healthy? Or is it just the healthy part that matters (which could be argued anyway, particularly where the birth did leave physical injuries/scars, such as major abdominal surgery in the form of cesarean does)? Is PND or PTSD considered to be 'healthy'? Do the emotional ramifications of the equivalent of rape during birth not matter, because mother and baby are alive? Just some food for thought.

Just like sex, birth is natural. We don't go to hospital to have sex just in case something goes wrong. We don't have strange doctors and nurses watching us have sex to make sure we're doing it right, that it's not taking too long and that we're not going to die. We don't (usually) have sex under bright lights and we don't have 100 people in the room, coming in and out as they please, touching as they please, talking to us as they please. It's just not natural. We don't get hooked up to machines to check our stats, and we don't have hormones injected into us during sex to make it fit someone else's timetable.

So why does this happen in birth?

Sex is natural. Birth is natural.