Back to the blog after a ridiculously long absence. Will try to resume in a regular manner!
An article in last Saturday’s Guardian (20.11.10) has prompted me to put key-strokes to blog: it was about ‘tokophobia’, the fear of childbirth. This was a new term for me, and took me by surprise. Surely most births entail total agony unless analgesia has been liberally administered: being afraid of such suffering seems quite reasonable to me, and hardly constitutes a ‘condition’ that needs a special name.
I have often wondered about the evolutionary significance of birth pain. I hope –like to think – that birth is not such a significant trauma for most mammals (except for theinfants being born), though it may be in the case of some domesticated/inbred animals. The sort of desperate, protracted labour experienced in a human birth would seem to confer many disadvantages: it weakens the mother, prevents her from obtaining food, makes her vulnerable to predators etc. But perhaps there are advantages, too: for example, the energy invested in childbirth might cause a mother to value her infant more. It’s likely that in some cases knowledge of the pain involved ensures that pregnancy is postponed until the urge for motherhood is strong, but that would hardly the case in prehistory and is still not likely for the vast majority of ‘modern’ women – ie. they have no choice in the matter.
