Thought for the Day, 29 April 2004

The Rt Rev. James Jones

Yesterday the National Institute for Clinical Excellence published guidelines steering women away from requesting caesareans. Since 1980 the rate has risen from 9% of all births to 22%. This has provoked a lot of debate about a woman's right to choose and about the reasons for this increase.

I have to confess I was one of those squeamish prospective fathers who dreaded the prospect of being there at the birth of our first child, and dreaded the prospect of being there for the second, and the third! Although I do admit to being totally caught up in the wonder of it all when it happened!

I have sympathy with those women – cruelly caricatured by the phrase “too posh to push” – who wish to be spared the pain. What intrigued me about the report was that women who were seeking birth by caesarean, because they were afraid of going through a painful labour, would be offered more support and counselling, and would be urged to reconsider. Apparently, avoidance of pain was deemed an insufficiently justifiable reason for interfering in a natural process.

I think this is an important philosophical, even moral, point and worth pondering! These guidelines certainly challenge a culture where the minimising of pain and the maximising of happiness are elevated to the heights of moral absolutes.

I recently took part in the BBC2 programme “What does the World think about God?” One of the questions in the survey, done in ten different countries, asks whether suffering was an obstacle to faith in God. In some of the poor countries in Africa and Asia where physical suffering is a daily reality it presented no problem at all! In Britain, on the other hand, where we minimise pain and maximise happiness (and do the former quite successfully) 54% of people said that suffering was an obstacle to believing in God!

It seems that other less scientifically advanced countries are more at ease with pain than we are.

Perhaps, through all our technology we have sealed ourselves off from our natural environment.

Now only the masochistic seek out and welcome pain. And in the last book of the Bible God holds out the promise of a new world where heaven comes down to earth “and pain shall be no more”. But what clinicians are reminding us – through this latest report – is however much we may at times want to anaesthetise our lives what Shakespeare once said remains true “Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe”.