Pain in childbirth can be agentive without being chosen, willed, or empowering

Evidence

But I want to think of the pain of childbirth not as a meaningful experience, and not as an image subversive of male arrogance (on that score, alas, it has not been historically very effective). Pain may be thought of directly as a constitutive element of giving birth. My point is not that birthing should be accepted as a moral basis of the female claim to empowerment. Still less that her ability to face pain courageously is a virtue. It is that particular women in particular places and particular times actually give birth in pain—and this creates a new situation for the mother herself and for others. For those who can exercise it, the power to bring another life and therefore other relations into the world in pain is no less agentive for being particularized as well as unwilled (I refer, of course, not to the decision to have a child but to the process of conception, pregnancy, and birth). — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 428

Categorization

• DEFINE: Asad is distinguishing his own framework from both Klassen’s salvific reading and biomedicine’s pathological reading — pain as constitutive social act rather than meaning or symptom.