A couple of weeks ago, the morning after I gave birth to my second child, a particularly garrulous nurse stopped by my room and asked if I had been given an epidural pain block during labor. When I told her I hadn't, she was so instantly approving I half-expected her to slap a gold star on my hospital gown. I had been a good girl, it seemed. My baby would feed more eagerly and efficiently, I'd be up and around sooner and, my burbly visitor implied, in the long run I'd feel better about myself.

Did any of this spiel ring true? Not exactly. Not in my experience. My first baby, born after a 24-hour labor during which I had requested -- O.K., bleated piteously for -- an epidural, nursed avidly from the moment he breathed air. And I couldn't take credit for a conscious decision to forgo anesthesia this time; I'd simply been swept downstream by the sheer force of a shorter, more intense labor. I was glad to have experienced a different kind of childbirth this time around and grateful not to have been up all night. I was lucky to have had with me a midwife (and a husband and sister) who made an unmedicated labor seem possible, without ever implying that it was the True and Only Way. But that is not to say, as natural childbirth's cheerleaders do, that I was in some way a better person for it. It's not even to say that without anesthesia I was more alive to the miracle of birth. Pain concentrates the mind, but what it concentrates the mind on is pain.

Yet my officious nurse is far from alone in her attitude. True, doctors at a recent meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists reported that more women are now accepting pain relief in childbirth. Between 1981 and 1997, the percentage of women who had epidural or spinal injections during labor in large hospitals tripled -- from 22 percent to 66 percent. Yet the same front-page articles that reported these figures -- and the lessening of guilt they imply -- also recorded the persistent tut-tutting of the natural childbirth community. This loose alliance of childbirth educators and control-freak parents makes a fetish of the perfectly orchestrated birth experience. In their ranks, the commendable drive to wrest control of childbirth from overweening doctors (the kind who, not so long ago, banned fathers from the delivery room and strapped laboring women down) devolves into the illusion that women themselves can exert complete control over what is, in fact, a notoriously unpredictable event, and that those who ask for pain relief have failed a test of character.

Natural childbirth, according to Ina May Gaskin, the president of the Midwives Alliance of North America, is "hugely empowering." After a natural birth, she said recently, "you have so much power you feel you could do anything. Women go on being grateful for that birth and will go on remembering it as a signal event in their lives that changed them."

This sort of belief has a long and not especially humane lineage. In 1847, when Dr. James Young Simpson introduced chloroform as one of the first anesthesias for childbirth, moralists derided it precisely because it vanquished the pain that women were supposed to feel as punishment for Eve's transgression. Besides, such critics feared, drugs that relieved a woman's suffering might also tear away her inhibitions and goad her into some unspecified erotic display. Chloroform's advocates argued in vain that there was nothing particularly elevating or even necessary about agony in childbirth; only when Queen Victoria accepted chloroform for her delivery in 1853 did these objections begin to fade.

One belief that has not faded away, however, is that with anesthesia, a woman misses out on the peak experience of her life. And certainly, the total knockout hospitals gave our laboring mothers deprived women of as raw and singular an experience as they are likely to have. The trouble is that natural-childbirth purists make this sort of claim, even today, about epidurals, which do not submerge women in twilight sleep or induce anesthesia, but merely, blessedly, block pain signals from the waist down.

Moreover, all this emphasis on keen awareness means exalting the moment of childbirth as the moment at which a woman is most authentically, "naturally" a woman, most in tune with her evolutionary destiny. It supposes that a mother is born -- as her baby is born -- not made. "The sight and touch of her child provide the natural thrill that accompanies the reality of possessing a coveted prize," wrote Grantly Dick-Read, the British obstetrician who was natural childbirth's first popular advocate, "its greeting cry imprints such joy on her consciousness that for all time she can return to that sweet music and live again the crowning moment of her life."

Today's natural childbirth purists don't see moral punishment in pain but they do see moral superiority in refusing pain relief. They do see labor as a kind of performance, for which a woman can and should rehearse, and in which she can comport herself more or less admirably. They see it, in other words, as an opportunity to define the self. Maybe they hold fast to this ideal for the same reason people climb Everest or paraglide in the Andes. They regard labor as an extreme sport -- an ennobling physical challenge that we pampered First Worlders are supposed to courageously endure and savor. Spurning the palliatives of modern medicine is part of the drill, an emblem of virtue. And nobody wants to be the Sandy Hill Pittman of the delivery room: the whiner, the weakling.

Yet what matters, surely, is not how you get through labor but that you get through it. What matters is a healthy baby. What matters is all the days and nights that come after. The strange thing about childbirth is not how much it prepares you for the rest of life, but how little it does -- how quickly it recedes into memory, how soon the daily work of rearing a child eclipses it. Walking my crying daughter in the gray hours just before dawn, the last thing I'm thinking about is how fine it was of me not to have had anesthesia when I pushed her into the world, and the only accomplishment that makes me feel powerful, for an instant, is soothing her.