Mumsnet may be responsible for a lot of questionable things – penis beaker, anyone? – but will it actually end the human race? Will it stop us reproducing? This seems a tad excessive but apparently by sharing stories about childbirth there, women are scaring other women into “a pathological terror of childbirth”, says an expert. Catriona Jones is a lecturer in midwifery at the University of Hull who studies “tocophopbia”. She suggests social media is partly to blame for this fear-with-no-name (which, of course, now has one).
Let’s break this down, shall we? Women fear childbirth because pushing out another human being through a small opening in your body is to be split asunder. They fear the pain that leads up to it: labour. They fear the pain during the actual pushing-it-out bit, and often have little idea about the pain that comes after. But we “feel the fear and do it anyway” – just as that dumb mantra tells us to.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ND17GW
