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Wellness Wednesday for October 11, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I had this since I was a little girl. I don't think there's anything terribly strange about it; childbirth is an extremely painful and scary process. I don' t know that it was the main reason I didn't want to have children, but it was in the mix. When I decided I did want to have a child, it was because the pro reasons finally outweighed the cons.

I ended up having a natural birth. It was traumatic but I got through, though I wasn't interested in doing it again. A few months later, a friend of mine died in childbirth. Like I said, this shit is scary and it's pretty reasonable to be afraid of it.

Like I said, this shit is scary and it's pretty reasonable to be afraid of it.

It very well might be scary, but if you're numerically literate you shouldn't be afraid, not particularly so at least.

And for anyone scared of natural deliveries, just go for a c-sec, assuming you can afford the expense. Let's hope artifical wombs come online in time to matter, so we can skip the moderate incapacitation of a woman for a good chunk of a year pregnancy represents.

It's funny - there are many women who are offended by the very idea of artificial wombs, to the point where I think it's a minority position to be ok with them. I have a hard time understanding that.

Well, I'm an ardent transhumanist, and a lack of vocal support for that position from the teeming masses confirms my suspicions that I'm not psychologically normal, without the usual connotations of that word.

There are plenty of IVF babies conceived from baby batter in a petridish, wouldn't it be easier on them not to force them to get evicted in the first place?

Then again, people are vain, and if the process is primarily advocated as a solution to stretch marks from pregnancy, it can capture some of the colossal cosmetics budget.

Do you think there was any particular incident that originated that fear? Not that there necessarily need be one. I'm claustrophobic and I don't remember ever being shut up anywhere. And yeah, both being shut up in close places and giving birth have real dangers associated with them.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Interesting to think that many mothers are consciously electing to push through/past a fear of the process.

Nope, just a general dislike of pain! Seriously, that pain is so bad I thought I was going to die and I wanted to die. It's bad, man.