What hurts more: Child Birth or getting kicked in the balls?

Kicked in the ballsThe battle of the sexes still wages on when one of the most controversial questions in the history of sexes surfaces. What hurts more: a woman’s pain while she is in labor or a man’s pain when he is kicked on his groin?

Women bear the pain of a watermelon sized baby coming out of a small coin sized hole whereas the men complain that the slightest nick on their balls can leave them incapacitated. So whose pain is more? The human body consists of several specialized nerve cells called Nociceptors that react to pain. Unlike other nerve cells that react to the slightest change in the temperature or pressure, the nociceptors only sends messages to the brain once a threshold of pain is encountered.

Unlike other organs such as the liver that feels no pain, the testicles in a guy’s body are heavily lined with several nociceptors that make it extremely sensitive to even minor pain. After all a man’s potency depends on their well being. Moreover the testicles are even connected to various nerves in the stomach and the brain’s vomit center which explains why pain is felt throughout the abdomen when the balls are kicked. Furthermore the testicles are unprotected which just doubles the problem and when hit causes an increase nausea, blood pressure, heart rate and sweating.

On the other hand, a female body’s hips over the years have become smaller whereas the fetus’ heads have become larger causing acute and visceral localized pain. Although during child birth no internal organ receives a sharp blow, the urinal distension triggers several nociceptors causing extreme pain and fatigue. On an average, a mother goes through eight hours of rigorous labor pain which includes nausea fatigue and pain. To top it all tension, muscle stretching and pain intensifies the entire situation.

So both these pains are accompanied by a lot of mechanical stimulations and signals sent to the brain’s pain center. But pain is subjective experience. It depends person to person and situation to situation.

But altogether, other than pain itself, there are various other variables that must be kept in mind. Like the size of the baby, the age of the individual, the velocity of the hit, the weight of the object or baby and many such variables. So to conclude this, it can be said that pain is itself isn’t a stimulus but in real life situations, we see that nine out of ten mothers face more pain during child birth than a guy when kicked. But there can be cases when it’s the other way around as well. Hence, we call this a tie and stick to the answer that pain is subjective and hence cannot be compared with such crucial generalizations.

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