Too posh to push?

• April 11, 2008
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In Hollywood, motherhood pays. That is if your name is Angelina. Or J-Lo. Or, most recently, Christina. For those who have a name that will move mags off the shelf and a new baby to boot, the first weeks of motherhood are marked less by sleepless nights and nappies and more by a frenzied bidding war where all a celeb mother has to do is name her price. For the first photo, that is.

Christina Aguilera's price was $US1.5 million ($A1.6 million). Whereas most new mums are hard-pressed to find enough concealer to disguise the bags parked underneath their sleep-hungry eyes, Aguilera, in all of her air-brushed glory, became the latest A-lister to have a baby and talk about it to Britain's most respectable tabloid, Hello!.

It's not hard to work out why new mothers often feel so inadequate when faced with the image of a shiny, perfectly coiffed and styled celeb mum looking lovingly at the baby she most likely did not wake up to settle at 2am the night before. Celeb mums have set the bar unbearably high when it comes to having it all and doing it right (ignoring poor Britney).

Yet, in between gushing about life as a new mum, the tone of the conversation with Aguilera moved from frothy to frank. When asked about her decision to have a planned caesarean, she said: "I'd heard horror stories about tearing. I really wanted a calm and peaceful environment. I didn't want any surprises."

Is it possible that Aguilera had a good reason to have a caesar, other than merely being too posh to push?

We've all heard the well-worn arguments about "natural" versus "surgical" when it comes to birth. The truth is that no matter how you do it (give birth, that is), it hurts. Despite being famous for having make-up artists on permanent retainer, Aguilera's bare-faced comment suggests something potentially more serious when it comes to the hows and whys of birth in the noughties.

It's called tokophobia and according to new research, Aguilera isn't the only woman in the world who is afraid of tearing: as many as one in seven women are thought to be tokophobic ("tokos" is from the Greek meaning "childbirth"). The fact that more woman are admitting to actually being afraid of vaginal birth means that the rising rates of elective caesareans are not necessarily only a result of celebrity preggos who are beyond the whole birth thing. Continued...

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Celeb mums have set the bar unbearably high when it comes to having it all and doing it right.