There is an assumption with a lot of births that because the woman isn't screaming her head off she's not in labour at all. Story: my friend's due date for her first baby had already passed, she took a bath one night and noticed LOTS of liquid pouring out of her an hour later, once she was all dried and in bed. She also had contractions far stronger, and more painful, than the BH ones she'd been having all week. But they weren't coming in regular waves that she could easily time. Calls the hospital and is told that the fluid was bathwater, the contractions just BH, and is strongly advised to go to sleep and don't fuss. Eventually she can barely think straight from the pain and so gets herself (in a cab) to hospital, at the initial exam the baby's head was fully outside her cervix and she delivered in an extremely distressed state due to the complete lack of pain relief. Mum and baby (now child) both did fine in the end, but she recalls the way no-one took her seriously because she wasn't howling her head off and is seriously unimpressed and disillusioned by it. Her favourite topic is people who favour painkiller free, "natural" births not as an option but as the norm - reckons they're about as viable and humane in the 21st century as painkiller free "natural" deaths from stomach cancer.... Just throwing this into the pot, because for every maternataxi there's probably a mum or two who never got the delivery she wanted and who was left feeling like she could have got in deeper trouble if she'd followed the advice she was given.