Surely everyone who gives birth has done 'well'?

[kickingking]

Not sure of the right place to post this - it's partly inspired by the OBEM threads.

On those threads (and in real life) there is a lot of 'she did well, what with a 9lber' and 'she did well on only gas and air' and (less frequently) 'she did well because her labour lasted so long, poor thing'.

My line of thinking days that you can't say that anyone had done 'well' OR that everyone who has a baby has done well, because it is impossible to quantify other people's pain, fear and joy. Saying that someone has 'done well' implies you are comparing it to other births where the mothers haven't done so well. Which I think is unfair.

I will add as a disclaimer here (in case anyone searches me or recognises me from another thread) that I had elcs and have never experienced labour myself, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

Thoughts?

Sorry, too much to be coherent but my point is that there is a feminist backdrop to this. Women are not as celebrated as they should be for giving birth because it's seen as something women should be able to do. We feel like it has to be easy or we're not proper women, so the sense of failure if we found it hard is huge - patriarchal society expects us to birth easily. And with no pain relief - WTF? If men had to birth, the most sophisticated pain relief methods imaginable would have been developed by now.