> "“Have you ever wondered,” one visiting professor asked, “why a colt doesn’t get up and gallop around inside the mare?” After all, a horse only minutes old is already able to hobble around the barnyard. The answer, as Mellor reported in an influential review published in 2005, is that biochemicals produced by the placenta and fetus have a sedating and even an anesthetizing effect on the fetus (both equine and human). This fetal cocktail includes adenosine, which suppresses brain activity; pregnanolone, which relieves pain; and prostaglandin D2, which induces sleep — “pretty potent stuff,” he says.
Combined with the warmth and buoyancy of the womb, this brew lulls the fetus into a near-continuous slumber, rendering it effectively unconscious no matter what the state of its anatomy."
C-section can have its own traumas. For months after being born, my (c-section-born) son would startle and cry horribly at anything that made a snick-snick scissors sound, including certain doors/doorknobs, metal chopsticks, etc. And think of it from the evolutionary perspective and the baby-being-born perspective (vs. our external perspective, birthing or watching/helping), and maybe we can posit shock at the transitions that happen with a c-section (inside, cozy and familiar, and then BOOM: Cold! Bright! Lack of pressure! Loud!).
Less traumatic, maybe, but that still seems unpleasant. You go from this nice, calm environment, with basically zero need to do anything for oxygen, nutrients, waste, etc., and are thrust into blinding lights and noises; suddenly you must breath with lungs (after coughing out all the liquid filling them), the temperature is no longer always perfect, you promptly get to experience hunger and have to scream to be fed... Sure, C-section skips "get shoved forcefully through tiny opening" at the start, but you're not skipping that much.
I wouldn't even be sure skipping that part makes it an better, because that sensation might actually distract from all the others, and while it wears of, the others don't in the same way.
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/magazine/10Fetal-t.html
> "“Have you ever wondered,” one visiting professor asked, “why a colt doesn’t get up and gallop around inside the mare?” After all, a horse only minutes old is already able to hobble around the barnyard. The answer, as Mellor reported in an influential review published in 2005, is that biochemicals produced by the placenta and fetus have a sedating and even an anesthetizing effect on the fetus (both equine and human). This fetal cocktail includes adenosine, which suppresses brain activity; pregnanolone, which relieves pain; and prostaglandin D2, which induces sleep — “pretty potent stuff,” he says.
Combined with the warmth and buoyancy of the womb, this brew lulls the fetus into a near-continuous slumber, rendering it effectively unconscious no matter what the state of its anatomy."