Mental state can ease the fear

SHAZIA MALIK is a consultant gynaecologist and obstetrician at the Portland hospital in london. She says:

I THINK it’s common knowledge that different people have different pain thresholds. We know that some people are utterly debilitated by small injuries, while others have crippling arthritis but don’t complain of any pain. We all react differently.

Now researchers at Cambridge University have discovered that around one in 100 women carry a variation of a gene called KCNG4 that is thought to raise their pain threshold, and act like a ‘natural epidural’. As for the idea that you can be genetically predisposed not to find childbirth painful, I think the estimation that one per cent of women carry this gene variation seems . . . generous. I’ve been doing this job for 25 years and have been at thousands of births and it is very rare for a woman to say she’s had no pain whatsoever. I’ve seen a lot of women who can breathe through it, or manage the pain better than others, but it’s very rare for a woman to say she’s had an entirely pain-free experience. I think a lot of the way women react is not dictated by their own pain threshold, but is about how they have prepared for the birth and their emotional and mental state. A lot of women may have been frightened by horror stories from friends and relatives or read online, and that can mean they’re more primed to feel pain. So I think it’s about managing expectations. I suppose what it comes down to is that it’s not only different from woman to woman, but also from birth to birth.