Harsh labor
▶ Traditional thinking, lack of anesthetists deprive most Chinese women of painless childbirth
Li Shuang (pseudonym), a mother of two children in Hangzhou, East China’s Zhejiang Province, requested a painless childbirth using epidural injections before her two deliveries in 2014 and 2017. She was rejected both times due to a lack of anesthetists in the hospital.
“I had to choose natural childbirth, and it was so painful that I almost wanted to kill myself during labor,” she told the Global Times.
For most pregnant women in China, painless childbirth, common in Western countries, is far from a guaranteed option. But this may soon change. China will soon begin to promote painless childbirth in an effort to further lower the number of caesarean sections, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
A number of pilot hospitals will be chosen around the country between 2018 and 2020 to normalize and improve labor pain relief before it is widely promoted, according to a work plan released by China’s National Health Commission in November, the Xinhua report says.
The hospitals will need to set up special teams for painless childbirth and provide more personnel, facilities and other support for pain relief services.
The rate of painless childbirth in China is only 10 percent on average, according to a report by the People’s Daily. The method is mostly offered in private and specialized hospitals in big cities, and is more common in southern China than in the north.
Fearing labor pain, many women choose to deliver through C-section, and as a result, the C-section rate in China has been notoriously high. The WHO said in 2011 that 46.5 percent of births in China occur via C-section, far above the organization’s recommended rate of 15 percent.
The shortage of pain-relief specialists in China is one reason why it had been so difficult to promote painless delivery in China.
Statistics show that there is a shortage of 300,000 anesthetists in China. “Not many people who go to medical school will choose to become an anesthetist, as it has a high requirement for the candidates and yet it is considered less accomplished than a real doctor,” Dong Qinglong, the director of anesthesiology at the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, told Yangcheng Evening News.
A gynecologist from a hospital in Ningbo, East China’s Zhejiang Province, who declined to be named, told the Global Times that an anesthetist for painless delivery needs to be on call 24 hours a day to respond to emergencies. However, there is a shortage of anesthetists in her hospital and most of them are dispatched to work on major surgery first.
Traditional biases against painless delivery and the fact that many Chinese women do not have a say in how they give birth is another reason why it is not common.
On November 29, the Chongqing Morning News reported a story about a 29-year-old pregnant woman who decided to use an epidural injection for pain relief during labor. However, her mother-in-law kept her from using the method, believing that it would “make the baby stupid” and cause after-surgery complications for the mother such as rheumatoid arthritis in the future.
Another case in point occurred in 2017, when a pregnant woman in Shaanxi Province jumped to her death after her plea for a C-section was rejected.