Pregnancy is a time to prepare for the baby, as well as the birth, and the necessary but exciting changes that will be required in the woman's life, and in the lives of the baby's father and all members of her family.
Women's bodies are designed to give birth and know how to labor better than we understand. Many of our attempts to control or improve the process end up disrupting it in ways that have unintended, often harmful consequences.
Childbirth is a sexual function -- part of the intricately designed and orchestrated, deeply organic system for conceiving, bearing, bringing forth and nurturing human offspring. Like sex itself, it operates and involves and affects us on many levels. Like making love, it is physical -- physiologic, but it is more. It works best in an environment of intimacy, privacy, and expressiveness. It is vulnerable; there can be problems, sometimes it needs help. But mainly it doesn't; it is a powerful force, with its own intelligence -- an involuntary bodily process.
The more we study labor and birth, the more we realize the intricacy of the natural processes and the dangers and side effects of all efforts to change and control it.
Although the pain of labor and delivery has a physical basis, the experience of the pain is subjective. How it is experienced differs from one society to another and is affected by women's expectations, what they have learned from other women, their self-confidence when they enter labor, the environment in which they labor, and the care they receive... Fear and anxiety potentiate pain and affect how we perceive and react to it.
The physiology of the mother and the newborn prepare them to fall deeply in love when they reunite after their separation at birth. The qualitative aspects of the mother's experience during and in the period immediately following the birth is extremely important.