Hi everyone in today's podcast we're going to do a quick overview about pain management in labor.

Welcome to the Evidence Space Birth Podcast.

Join us each week as I tackle the evidence on another hot topic about childbirth.

As a reminder, this information is not medical advice.

See Evibirth.com slash disclaimer for more details.

Welcome to the Evidence Based Birth podcast. My name's Rebecca Decker and I'm a nurse with my PhD and the founder of evidence-based birth.

Today we are kicking off a multi-week series all about pain management in labor. I wanted to start off by

doing a quick overview about pain and labor. So pain seems to be the number one

thing that a lot of people worry about when it comes to being

pregnant and heading towards childbirth.

In the past, I've worked with a lot of college students and in the beginning when I start

working with them. A lot of them are completely terrified of the pain of childbirth.

So I end up working with them over the course of the semester to demystify this topic and kind of reframe it and talk about it in a different way.

And what most people don't know is that there's actually two different ways.

You can look at the topic of pain and labor.

A while ago, several researchers with the last names of Leep and Anderson

proposed these two different viewpoints or perspective. One perspective is the viewpoint of pain relief during labor.

And the other perspective is working with pain or coping with pain.

Many doctors and nurses believe strongly in the pain relief perspective.

They might believe that pain during labor is unnecessary in today's society and that we should

completely eliminate pain and that the benefits of pain medications

always outweigh the risks. Some of them may not understand why someone would want to go without pain

...