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[Orange Wizard]

If a slightly anachronistic medical practitioner had one, would you call it a midwife crisis?

I dont understand this...

A midwife is a ye olde (although they still exist) term for a lady (or man, I won't judge) who helps other ladies give birth without dying horribly.

As such, "slightly anachronistic medical practitioner" == midwife, and midwife is a play on mid-life.

[Aseaheru]

I know that, I just dont agree with the term being called Anachronistic, for various reasons...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Mostly, because practically every nation has a few, and likely always will (Except in possibly New York, where you need more training than a doctor to become one, then have to jump thru about 200 more hoops to practice...). But then, coming from a family where most of my siblings where delivered by them, a mother who trained to become one (or to teach them, one or the other), and the fact that I would have been delivered by one  had not things had caused a c-section...

[Orange Wizard]

Fair enough. It's not really relevant to the joke in any way, though.

[Aseaheru]

I think that alot of doctors thesedays are saying that no anestetic is a good thing, for the kid atleast.
That is, unless they are going to do a c-section anyways.

[Frumple]

... if that were true, I would be expecting to hear a lot more about pregnant women attempting to strangle doctors with their stethoscopes. Because I think I speak for all sane women in the world when I respond to sans-painkiller birth with a hearty, "Fuck no."

[Orange Wizard]

No anaesthetics? What!?

[KingofstarrySkies]

OH MY GOD WHY
D:

[Aseaheru]

Spoiler: This might be uncouth... (click to show/hide)

Well, have fun with that painkiller getting metabolized by you, transferred to the kid via umbilical cord and reducing their ability to do things, like get born without a major surgery. Plus theres the (probably outdated at this point) statistic that most mothers who have c-sections once will have more difficulty with future births, thus more c-sections...

[Orange Wizard]

We're talking about anaesthesia during birth. It's probably not relevant whether the kid is going to ingest it by that stage.

[Aseaheru]

Labor can take hours, and the kid gets O2 from the cord until its out. For all intents and purposes, mother and kid share blood, so what affects the mom affects the kid...

[Bauglir]

Yeah, but the kid doesn't exactly do a whole lot of active stuff to assist in the birth (by my understanding). A bit of painkiller's not going to impact them. Might make it more difficult by weakening the mother's muscles, but then again, we're pretty good at placing nerve blocks and such to stop pain signals from getting to the brain without impacting the musculature nearly as much as you might imagine. With birth, my understanding is that the painkiller in question is usually an epidural, which puts the meds directly into cerebrospinal fluid (not blood), and due to the low concentrations of drug necessary to get things to work in that environment, doesn't do much to blood concentrations.

Then again, I was just a pharmacy technician, and rarely worked in the hospital's pediatric units (which is where Labor and Delivery is), so I could be wrong. You'd want a pharmacist's advice to be sure, I guess.

EDIT: Not cerebrospinal fluid, my bad. That's another kind of injection. The epidural space is not filled with cerebrospinal fluid, although it is still isolated from the circulatory system, which is the point I was making.

[Aseaheru]

The kid has to do work too, its not just the mom pushing...

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

I can't recall, does the umbilical cord contain pain receptors? Because if it does that changes my position on this massively.

Also, fun fact, in labour, I took so long coming out that one doctor actually did acupuncture on my mother to sooth the aching.

[FearfulJesuit]

I put my mother through three straight days of labor. I try to remember this whenever I argue with her.

[Bauglir]

The kid has to do work too, its not just the mom pushing...

I'm having trouble finding evidence of this, but I have found evidence that an infant's brain activity drops sharply during birth, reducing the risk of brain damage to due low oxygen before breathing kicks in. Which seems somewhat counter to your claim, but obviously not conclusive. Got any sources I could take a look at? If I'm buying into a popular myth about how childbirth works, I'd like to know - God knows there are too many of those.

Umbilicals do not contain pain receptors. Brief research implies they contain no nerves of any kind, but I'm not certain of that and it seems unlikely; it's clear that the cutting of the cord is painless due to a lack of pain receptors, though.