When it comes to giving birth, women have a lot of options to consider. Should it happen at home or in a hospital? Do they need to hire a doula? And, most importantly for some, should they opt for any help with the pain? While most women might ask a friend, their mom, or even their doctor for advice, one random guy online apparently thinks we want to hear his point of view. Parents on Twitter are clapping back after a guy said women never need to get an epidural. How does he know? Well, because he watched his own wife give birth without one, of course.
Twitter user Nicole Cliffe shared the dude's inane comment with her followers.
While the origin of the comment is unknown, it appears to be a screenshot from a thread on Reddit. It reads: "Personal Opinion: My wife gave birth to two babies, 9lbs 10oz (10 hrs labor) and 8lbs 6oz (only 2 hrs for the second baby). No epidural. Women don't NEED them at all. Never have. Since we only started using them in modern medicine. But hey, what do I know? I'm just the dude who held her hand through it twice."
Oh, okay. You held a woman's hand so you're an expert on labor pain now, right?
As you can imagine, Twitter was NOT having it.
One woman went straight for violence and said she'd like to break the guy's legs and then refuse him pain meds because "they didn't have it in olden times." Yikes.
Others simply schooled the guy on the true meaning of personal choice.
As one commenter succinctly said, "ANYONE should have an epidural if they want one."
A lot of men also jumped in to defend their wives and partners who got epidurals during labor.
"My wife wanted to do natural childbirth. I supported her. Then halfway through 37 hours of labor the pain became unbearable, so she got the epidural. I supported her …. What do I know; she was the one in pain," one man wrote.
Another man said his wife would have died during childbirth without interventions and modern medicine.
As we so often forget, epidurals and other interventions aren't optional for some people. Emergencies can and do happen, and some people don't have the luxury of choice when their life or the life of their unborn baby is on the line.
And some moms were just like, "Hell yeah, bring on the epidural!"
After all, more than half of moms who give birth end up getting an epidural, and there's no shame in that. We don't get medals for giving birth a certain way or being able to handle the most pain.
Some people aren't down with epidurals, and that's perfectly fine. Like any medical procedure, they do carry risks, like blood pressure changes and headaches, and they can even stall labor in some cases. But for other people, epidurals might be the key to having the exact birth experience they want. And women should be free to make their own choices, regardless of what some smug dude on the Internet has to say about it.
If there's one good thing that came out of this Twitter thread, it's that pretty much no one agrees with this guy.
Some women want an epidural and some women don't, but the only person who gets to decide if a woman NEEDS one is the woman giving birth.
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.