There are many reasons why women fear birth and labor and I'd like to go over some of the basics. There's the way movies show a soon-to-be mother screaming and writhing (add to that the deliberate scare tactics that sex ed is pushing in an attempt to reduce teen pregnancy), there's the history of birth that saw many women die in childbirth, there is the medical community's attitude that birth is something women can't do on their own and need professional help with, there's the mistrust we have of our bodies in general compounded by all the specific times our bodies have let us down, and then there is the plain old fear of the unknown.
First, a movie's goal is not to educate or to give an accurate portrayal of labor, the goal is to entertain and get good reviews. But the knowledge that a movie scene is not actually the way things happen doesn't remove the image from our minds. Also, knowing that our bodies are not the barely pubescent ones the sex ed adds are targeting doesn't really do much to ease our fears either. The truth is, I have yet to find one consistent source that portrays labor and delivery in a positive light. This bugs the snot out of me. I am NOT the only person I know of who has had a very satisfying birth experience. While I in no way believe that all births are wonderful, beautiful experiences, I am equally vehement that wonderful, beautiful births are possible. I feel like our culture believes that birth is heinous and anyone who says otherwise is cracked up. It's as if there was a culture whose only experience of sex was rape and I am trying to say that making love can be awesome.
Secondly, yes, many women died in childbirth. But, as it turns out, they were not dying when they gave birth at home with their midwife, women were dying in droves when birth was first moved to hospitals. This was before the discovery of germs. Doctors were quite literally giving pelvic exams to laboring women when they were fresh from doing a cadaver and had not washed their hands. As birth began to move from the care of midwives (who only attended laboring women and not sick people) to doctors (whose sole responsibility was visiting sick person after sick person), things really got bad. Women had every right to fear birth because they went into the hospital perfectly healthy, had a baby, and then became deathly ill or died. It made sense at the time that birth was to blame. But luckily germs were discovered and standards for hygiene were established and now doctors and hospitals are no longer the germ ridden harbingers they once were. (One of the things that facilitated this shift in caregivers was the popularity of witch hunts. Any wise old woman bearing herbs was obviously not to be trusted!) This was a very sad episode in the history of birth. The birthing knowledge that midwives had was lost to the mainstream as male doctors who had never given birth themselves, tried to figure out this crazy process and reinvent the wheel of delivery. They had the very best of intentions and wanted so much to help. And hospitals have come a LONG way in their care and treatment of laboring women, but they still have a long way to go in reclaiming the knowledge that they accidentally rejected so long ago. (A good book to read on the history of birth in America is Immaculate Deception II.) So yes, women used to die in childbirth. But it was not birth that was the problem.
The third fear, the idea that doctors are the authority on birth, not laboring women, makes a lot of sense once you understand the history of hospital birth in America. (At first, as doctors took over from midwives, many babies were still born at home. Even Lady and the Trap showed the Dr. leaving the home after delivering the baby.) When doctors first began taking over birth, American women wore corsets. Obviously, deforming a woman's body makes it hard for her to birth naturally. Plus pregnancy was not socially acceptable in public so women were confined to their rooms. These women were physically weak, misshapen, and as a result, unable to birth without interventions. They truly did need a doctor to deliver them! It didn't help that for hundreds of years people were clueless about prenatal health. Lots of things went wrong and so moving birth out of homes and into a hospital was a very logical step. Birth in America became a very surgical, sterile, cold and impersonal procedure. Even as recently as 50 years ago we had things like Twilight Sleep. (My grandmother was given this when she birthed my mother and aunts.) This drug puts a person into a semi-conscious state that, once they awake, they remembered nothing. Under this drug laboring woman became half crazed psychos who raged out of control. Their hands and legs were cuffed to the bed to keep them from harming themselves or the attending physician. Even though this is no longer the practice, the stigma that a woman in labor is no longer in her right mind has persisted. (In fact, I think a laboring woman is perhaps more in her right mind than normal! I have a theory that a woman's reproductive hormones are God's way of forcing us to tell the truth. When PMSing or in labor, women are known to bring up silly little things, crazy things, that bother them, things they would never mention normally, but I assert that even w/o the help of hormones these things still do bug us. We are just able to suppress it normally. There is evidence that shows emotional baggage can also stall labor. Once the soon-to-be mother gets the load off her chest (generally something related to her mother or husband) the labor picks up again. Crazy, huh?) Because doctors once WERE necessary and women once WERE crazy when they labored, it's been hard to replace these ideas now that things are no longer done the way they used to be.
The last two, the fear of our bodies letting us down and the fear of the unknown, I will tackle together. While our bodies might be fearfully and wonderfully made, we do live in a fallen world and things do go horribly wrong sometimes. In my opinion, the fear that our bodies are going to let us down, especially if they have in the past, is the most real fear since the other fears (IMO) are based on misinformation. So what's the accurate information? It is so important to educate yourself as much as possible on what a normal, natural birth is, the less interventions and interference the better. God could have thought up any way at all for new people to come into the world and this is what He picked. I personally believe He knows what He's doing. So, if you are armed with information and know the way your body is supposed to work you'll know when something is wrong. If you only focus on the stuff that can, and does go wrong, you'll be clueless when your body is doing it right. I've been told that reading any Ina May Gaskin book is wonderful in boosting one's faith in the female body's ability to birth. (I intend to get a couple of her books if and when #4 is on the way.) Ina May is probably THE authority on natural childbirth here in the US. But, since I have only read ABOUT her books and not actually read the books themselves I can't recommend any at this time. :) Reading about birth and familiarizing yourself with what is normal will also take away much of the fear of the unknown. It is true that there is no way to KNOW what giving birth feels like till you've done it, but you CAN know what to expect. That in and of itself can make it so much less scary.
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