[nikolay]

... Except when they injure your spine, like with one of my friends. I'm not sure why women choose painless childbirth, which is not only potentially bad for them, but for their newborns as well. My wife gave birth to 3 children, two in the US, and doctors were shocked she didn't want them. Yes, it hurts. The moment your child is born, all pain is gone, and you're in the most beautiful state ever, and this creates even a stronger bond, knowing what you had to go through to bring a child to life! Men, women - we're all weaklings today. When I think about our ancestors and the sword-and-spear bloodbath battles they fought in to protect their families, we don't have such men and women anymore! Pain is an essential part of life. Chronic pain is a different story, of course.

[biggc]

Suffering is not a virtue

[nikolay]

It surely is. Ascetism and stoicism are extinct virtues, maybe venerated only in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Many of our holy fathers have suffered terrible torture and death, but they even welcomed it. That's why Orthodoxy is so hard to grasp in the West, where people damage their livers just to tame their headache a bit, let's say.

[chrismorgan]

It’s funny, because Paul criticised such thought in Colossians 2:23:

> These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting rigour of devotion and self-abasement and severity to the body, but they are of no value in checking the indulgence of the flesh.

Meaning: sure, looks good, but doesn’t actually help if the suffering itself is your goal.

(Notwithstanding this, Acts 5:41. A lot, in such topics, depends on exactly how you present things.)

[wl]

There's a lot of people out there who blame their epidurals for lower back pain and the like, but the evidence for causality is not there.