Obstetricians claim that childbirth is
neither sexual nor spiritual. Doulas claim that childbirth is
both sexual and spiritual. To see how big a strawman this is, consider the following:
Sexuality seeks the enjoyment preferred by each individual. Spirituality seeks what authorities define to be enjoyable.
Sexuality draws on the real power of one's own muscles. Spirituality draws on the imaginary power of a deity.
Sexuality produces a precise awareness of one's body in space and time. Spirituality makes one feel as if space and time don't even exist.
Thus it could well be said that sexuality and spirituality are
opposite emotions, and thus both obstetricians and doulas are wrong about the emotional significance of childbirth.
Although most women don't feel sexual during childbirth, it's clear that if sexuality and spirituality are considered mutex, sexuality as an objective characterization of childbirth is much more amenable to scientific consideration of how to deal with it medically.
The increase use of interventions in obstetrics has been called "fearmongering", but I have yet to see any study showing that there isn't such an increase. Is the implication that intervention is not something to be feared?
Obstetricians claim that their practice is undoubtably the best for the baby, and that any reform of it will put the baby's life and health at risk. The parallel with what religious leaders claim about their congregants' immortal souls is hard to miss. They are both ways to make people feel that it's evil to question dogma.
If a fetal monitor is to be considered a real monitoring device -- rather than an oracle like Hubbard's E Meter -- then it should have a display easily readable by the average patient. If the interpretation of the monitoring data is so esoteric that it's impossible to program such a display even with state-of-the-art AI techniques, then it certainly wouldn't be considered a science by Randi's standards.
It's commonly assumed that emotions and expectations have an influence over things like heartbeat, digestion, and sexual arousal. And language has many words and phrases implying such a connection. Yet obstetricians claim that childbirth is completely independent of such influence. There is the assumption that pushing is the only thing a patient can do about the progress of childbirth, and therefore that during the first stage she is helpless.
Suppose a reasonable definition were developed, by some mathematical formula, of a fraction of fetal distress, and this were displayed to the patient. If the patient had been educated about the difference between the first and second stages, there would be the possibility that her first stage would proceed fast enough to avoid fetal distress. If she doesn't seem to be capable of that, then intervention would occur.
There is a Freudian implication of a performance criterion in this idea, but sometimes a responsibility is just a responsibility, considering that the patient is bringing a life into the world.
