No Gas and Air For Women Giving Birth in the Eco-Utopian Future

Anyone who might have doubted the zealotry of eco-warriors of our age and the depth of their totalitarian inclinations need only turn to a ‘Marriage Diary’ published in the Telegraph. It’s written by a woman who is now pregnant after 10 years of marriage to her “self-confessed eco-warrior husband”. Indeed, his climate credentials were why she married him in the first place.

While it had never been top of my agenda, I was happy to follow his example – swapping all our cleaning products for eco-alternatives, using our bikes to get around and then more recently swapping out the diesel car for an electric one. Now I’m pregnant with our first child and I’m sure we’ll raise our children with the same values.

However, at a recent antenatal class, when we learnt about baby delivery options, my husband announced that there was no way I would have gas and air during labour because of the impact on the environment.

I laughed out loud when he said it, assuming he was joking. The look on his face told me that he wasn’t. He shoved his phone at me to show me an article about the Scottish Government writing to the NHS about the impact of greenhouse emissions from Entonox, which is commonly known as “gas and air”.

He smugly told me that they were urging for greater awareness of the effect it had on the planet and wanting pregnant women to play their part in tackling greenhouse gases and climate change.

Needless to say you could cut the atmosphere in our antenatal class with a knife. Like me, people assumed he was joking at first. I tried to stay calm as I pointed out that, while I was in labour, I would do anything I needed, and indeed wanted to do, to make the whole process easier. He objected vehemently to this and didn’t back down. In fact he seemed insulted that I would put myself, and indeed our child, before the environment.

He claims Entonox use in Scotland is equivalent to 18,000 transatlantic flights. I lost my cool and stormed out, outraged that he won’t prioritise me, and that he embarrassed me in public.

Anyone fancy betting on how long that marriage will last? Is this a sign of the eco-utopian vision of the future? Not only no pain relief for women giving birth, but also no medical treatment? On the plus side, perhaps this sort of patriarchal ‘green’ Handmaid’s Tale stance will expose the sheer lunacy of the climate alarmist culture and the psychological and personal trauma it’s creating. It might also send a large part of the female vote elsewhere.

Definitely worth reading in full.