I FEEL YOUR PAIN, BUT DO YOU FEEL MINE?

Byline: JILLIAN O'CONNOR

When it comes to delivering a baby, there are those who love drugs, those who disapprove, and those who can't remember if they needed drugs in the first place.

In that last case, I'd say they probably had some really good drugs.

Childbirth may be the last domain in mainstream society where there is widespread agreement about the fact that the process really, really hurts, but rampant disagreement on whether the sufferer should get a nice surge of painkillers.

Would a heart surgery patient forgo anesthesia to try some breathing exercises instead?

Is a gunshot victim encouraged to just, you know, relax?

Not too likely. And as my husband put it: ``I'd take the drugs. It sounds like it hurts.''

But the problem is, for expectant first-time mothers like me pondering the nature of these drugs, it's hard to get a grip on exactly how much having a kid does in fact hurt. Are we talking something like a Mack truck collision? Or something a double dose of Advil and Gatorade might cure?

I want to see a scientific scale of the pain -- 1 for a broken nail, 10 for colliding face first with a parking meter as friends watch -- before I make the choice.

Unfortunately, it seems very few women recall their level of pain, or lack thereof, without a generous dose of dogma.

One relative, a two-time veteran of Lamaze, called to plug her plan after a cousin underwent a long and arduous labor with drugs.

``You're not thinking of taking the epidural under any circumstances, are you?'' she said.

Well, of course I'm thinking of taking the epidural under some circumstances -- including but not limited to having a baby the size of a first-grader. (Not to mention that I might need some entertainment if I'm pushing away for a day and a half.)

Besides, very little will change my mind about that option until I get a sample of what we're dealing with here on this labor thing. I consider that to be a fair enough hearing for the natural-childbirth cause, since I seldom make any attempt to, say, have my teeth filled au naturel: ``Gee, let's try the drill without the Novocain for a bit to see if it really does hurt. --''

The epidural's there, and I presume it wasn't developed solely to get women on HMOs to pay out more to Big Pharma. I suspect there was a certain amount of demand.

Interestingly, there are strong feminist arguments for both the druggies and the anti-drug set.

Natural childbirth fans point out that their method takes the power away from doctors and returns it to the womenfolk, since pregnancy is not an illness but a natural state that midwives and other women attended to for centuries. (Fair enough, but that doesn't mean it feels OK.)

On the same side, we have also had 19th-century religious zealots who lobbied against knocking out expectant moms in labor because women must bear the pain of Eve, that wanton temptress in the Garden of Eden -- the plight of women was to feel that agony, so no cheating allowed!

Drugs sound like a bold step forward for the women's movement when they put it that way.

Of course, the 21st-century debate centers largely on whether the baby is in any way harmed by the epidural, which is the most commonly used anesthesia during labor. It involves a needle placed into a space in the spine. Oh, yeah, and there's a numbing shot that you get before, um, the real shot -- a painkiller for the painkiller, if you will; that's one big needle.

And there are frightening reports in pregnancy books about a chance of a reduction in the baby's heart rate (Bad!), or the needle accidentally piercing the mom's spinal cord (Bad! Bad!) giving her the headache of a millennium -- for about three days.

But the pro-drug side counters that these are rare events, and usually the result of a mistake that could never happen with any good medical staff, i.e. not with them, of course.

Natural childbirth advocates beg to differ, and make some good points, including the benefits of not giving big drugs to tiny infants and the fact that birth is, after all, a natural occurrence -- albeit one that feels like being drawn and quartered.

Unfortunately, since epidural drugs are said to sometimes interfere with the mother's natural contractions during childbirth, they could possibly complicate labor and drag out the whole thing.

So what we really need here is a neat little equation. Are four hours of natural labor equal to 16 hours on happy serum? Are 10 drug-free hours the same as a day spent comfortably numb? And how do martinis and Jagermeister compare in this continuum? Anyone? Anyone?

Someone's gotta know, and I wanna see the research ... if the two sides can stop promoting their opinions long enough to hammer out the facts, that is.

Jillian O'Connor, [phone]

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