When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

InterNations

THE POST INTERNAZIONALE

The Post Internazionale is an Italian online and weekly magazine. It was founded in 2010 by Giulio Gambino and is headquartered in Rome.
Photo of a home birth
Society
Francesca Bubba

"In Pain You Shall Bring Forth Children" — The Business Behind Suffering In Childbirth

Certain female doctors, extremist midwives, online consultants extol the benefits of painful labor, blame mothers who resort to C-sections and convince them to refuse anesthesia. From Italy, an expose on who they are and why they preach a return to the ancestral nature of motherhood.

ROME — “I was told that enduring the pain of childbirth would be the first test as a mother..."

Ginevra Massiletti, 32, went into labor with her first child last year in the southern Italian city of Cosenza, convinced that childbirth should be a fully natural experience.

"I was in too much pain, but I didn't want to give in to analgesia," she said. "In the end, however, I couldn't take it; I asked for an epidural to feel less pain, but in the meantime I was crying and apologizing to my baby, feeling that I had betrayed him because of my weakness and need for relief.”

Ginevra says she's now over the shock, but “for months, I believed I was not up to my motherhood.”

During her pregnancy, reading various blogs and social pages, she had internalized a belief: that childbirth accompanied by anesthesia to relieve the mother's pain was a second-class birth, and especially that in doing so she would selfishly put herself before the baby.

Ginevra’s is not an isolated case. Indeed, online, in some newspapers, and even in certain health circles, a narrative of motherhood that ostracizes any medical-pharmacological support for childbirth, not to mention the use of C-section, is raging in the name of an ancestral vision according to which the mother's body must do everything on its own. Any “little help” offered by science will have negative effects on the unborn child.

Behind this, there is often also a real business, with courses and consultations, strictly on a for-profit basis.

Watch VideoShow less