{"id":20,"date":"2007-03-10T11:04:06","date_gmt":"2007-03-10T19:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/?p=20"},"modified":"2007-03-10T11:05:19","modified_gmt":"2007-03-10T19:05:19","slug":"feminists-for-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/?p=20","title":{"rendered":"Feminists for Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I really liked <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/mwt\/feature\/1999\/08\/03\/chloroform\/print.html\">this article<\/a> in Salon, which points out that, despite our current Earth Mother ideal of unmedicated births, choosing pain relief drugs during labor can be a profoundly empowering option, and one that we owe to the early feminists.<\/p>\n<p>Suzanne says you have two choices going into labor: Plan for an epidural, or plan for an unmedicated birth, the only difference being that if you take the the second option, you will end up demanding the epidural somewhat later in the process.  I think that&#8217;s a very funny little quip, and true in many cases, although obviously there are women who do go through birth without medical intervention, which is great: every woman should have as much control as possible over the experience and be able to make her own choices regarding pain medication.<\/p>\n<p>However I do think the Salon author, Nina Shapiro, is right when she suggests that a woman who does not pay at least lip service to the ideal of unmedicated birth can expect to catch some flak, and that there&#8217;s something really distasteful and kind of sexist about that, even though the pressure largely comes from other women.<\/p>\n<p>For myself, never having been through this before, I don&#8217;t feel I can make a decision beforehand.  I&#8217;ve heard stories of women who went through childbirth saying the pain was no worse than menstrual cramping, and if my experience is similar, I won&#8217;t need drugs.  But I won&#8217;t hesitate to request an epidural if the pain becomes overwhelming, and I refuse to feel guilty about that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I really liked this article in Salon, which points out that, despite our current Earth Mother ideal of unmedicated births, choosing pain relief drugs during labor can be a profoundly empowering option, and one that we owe to the early feminists. Suzanne says you have two choices going into labor: Plan for an epidural, or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}