In the delivery room, new fathers usually faint or, even if they remain standing, they are, according to their women, of little help. At the maternity ward of Aima hospital in Jinan, in the Chinese province of Shandong, they have set up sessions aimed at making males experience the pains of childbirth, in particular the more intense ones of the last stage of labour.
The initiative has had some success and already one hundred men have undergone the treatment; among these, many are future fathers, eager to know what their partners will encounter, but others are simply curious in search of an extreme experience or people used to challenging themselves to overcome their limits. For the simulation, some electrodes are applied to the victim's abdomen, then a nurse operates a device which sends electric shocks that induce contractions.
The pain stimulus is graded up on a scale of one to ten, but most participants beg the nurse to turn off the machine when the needle is between six and seven; some, then, did not last more than a few minutes. “I felt like my heart and lungs were being ripped out,” says Song Siling, who came to the session after making the decision, along with his girlfriend, to have a baby soon, “and I started frantically waving at the nurse to turn off the machine”.
According to Lou Dezhu, the nurse who manages the project, this simulation is only partially able to give an idea of what a woman feels during childbirth. "If men could truly feel what it is like to feel in those moments," she observes, "I'm sure they would be more loving and understanding with their women."
Wu Jianlong, whose wife is three months pregnant, is one of the few who has made it to level ten and confesses that this experience has radically changed the way he views birth. "Women have always had children," he says, "and I didn't think giving birth could be so terribly painful."
