Why do we tell women lies about childbirth?

Adear family friend recently gave birth to her first child, a little girl. Mother and baby are doing well — or as well as can be expected.

It was a difficult three-day labour culminating in a forceps delivery that came as a real shock to the system.

Not to me, of course — I’ve had two myself and know exactly how much of a car crash childbirth can be — but to my friend, who had been led to expect a rather different experience.

at one point during her pregnancy, for example, I remember her saying she would like to give birth without any pain relief. I said nothing, not wanting to come across as downbeat.

But as the months wore on and she dutifully attended her ante-natal classes, it became clear she was having her head filled with the usual judgmental nonsense.

Namely, that you’re not a real woman unless you have a natural childbirth.

I remember this all too well. The way you’re bombarded with rose-tinted visions of home births, water pools, gentle back rubs and the latest fad of hypno-birthing.

The way they make you feel as if the manner of giving birth is something you can choose, when, in fact, you have no control whatsoever over what happens and no way of predicting it.

The way they make you feel that childbirth is some mystical experience, when all too often the reality is heavy drugs, fear, panic, indescribable agony and emergency intervention.

MyNaTIONaL Childbirth Trust classes back in 2003 were completely away with the fairies. They showed us slides of Native american women squatting to give birth in the desert.

We were encouraged to roll around on blow-up balls and were told all about the soothing power of music.

When I inquired about pain relief, I might as well have been asking for a crack pipe, such was the look of disapproval on the midwife’s face.

at no point did anyone explain that things might not go according to plan, and that if and when that happened, it wouldn’t be my fault, just bad luck, bad genes or both.

Judging by my friend’s experiences, nothing has changed.

Women are still being sold a politically correct fantasy of childbirth that, far from liberating mothers, just adds to the tremendous pressure they already feel to be perfect in every way.

Tonight on Channel 4, a show called extraordinary Births proves just how far this madness has spread. Presented by acid attack victim Katie Piper, a mother of a girl born by elective Caesarean for sound medical reasons, the programme talks to various earth mothers, from a woman who believes her unborn child can communicate with dolphins to another having a ‘lotus birth’, where the child remains attached to the placenta until it falls off naturally.

Viewers will be treated to images of the proud parents carrying the thing around in a bag and rubbing it with herbs.

Obviously these are extreme examples, but the fact remains that the prevailing culture around childbirth is one that glorifies ‘natural’ practices and demonises women who put their trust in modern medicine.

The truth is that giving birth is a dangerous business, one that until relatively recently — the Forties, with the advent of penicillin — carried a very real risk of death.

even today, 40 per cent of women will suffer some sort of complication, and the figure is higher among firsttime mothers.

For those lucky women who do give birth in a state of zen-like calm, I’m sure it is a magical experience.

For the rest of us — those of us who owe our lives and those of our babies to the skill of medics and midwives — the day our children came into the world will always be tinged with the sense that somehow we failed the ultimate test of womanhood.