I LIKE to think I’m still comfortably within the first half of what I expect to be a long and happy life, yet I know that when the time comes for me to look back on it all, being a mother will be the stand-out experience of that life.

Giving birth and surviving the weeks that followed, on the other hand, will be far and away the most traumatic. Part of the reason for that is that childbirth, in all its bone-wrenching, bloody glory, just is traumatic, but part is that I, as an educated 30-something, was so utterly unprepared for what would happen to me.

Sure, I’d seen One Born Every Minute and listened to a candid friend’s memory of being “axed in half” in the delivery room, but ultimately I must have been influenced by the dominant narrative around childbirth that always ends with the mother, hair and make-up intact, sitting up in bed “doing just fine” while looking lovingly at her progeny. To say that the reality came as a shock would be the understatement of the decade.

It is obviously impossible for me to say whether being better informed pre-birth would have made the actual experience any better for me, but the aversion to telling women the truth about childbirth – or at least to empowering women to tell their own truths about giving birth – is nonetheless troubling.

That there is an aversion was highlighted last week when a speech given at the British Science Festival by a Hull University lecturer received widespread media coverage. Having been asked to investigate tocophobia – an unreasonable dread of childbirth – by her local NHS, Catriona Jones said she had found that by using websites like Mumsnet to share their experiences of how traumatic childbirth can be, women are contributing to a climate of fear that is negatively impacting on other women.

“If you go online and you go into any of the Mumsnet forums there are women telling their stories of childbirth, and it was terrible, it was a bloodbath, and that can be quite frightening for women to engage with,” she was widely quoted as saying.

This was seized on by the media, which to some extent demonised Mumsnet and the women who share their experiences on it. The problem is, that while these reports accurately reflected Ms Jones’s words, they failed to tell the whole story, with just one newspaper – The Telegraph – noting that she had also warned that cuts to antenatal services were resulting in women being less prepared for childbirth than they used to be.

“Previously,” that article paraphrased Ms Jones as saying, “women would be shown around delivery rooms in the weeks before the birth but most maternity wards are now too busy”.

But if the real story is that an overstretched and underfunded health service is failing to prepare women for childbirth, and that in turn is compounding their negative experience of birth, why did the narrative around the research universally become one of women terrifying other women, creating an added burden for the NHS in the process? Why are we so keen to cast women as problematic rather than acknowledging they have valid stories to tell?

The obvious answer is that a media controlled by men at best fails to recognise, and at worst seeks to distort or ignore, narratives that have women and women’s experiences at their core. As at least some of the reports on Ms Jones’s comments were written by women, though, the truth is more troubling even than that, with a deep-seated societal refusal to hear women’s voices likely to blame.

Indeed, as has long been highlighted by the classicist Mary Beard – a scholar who endures endless misogynistic abuse because she tells the stories of the women airbrushed from history – even in the earliest written evidence of western culture “women’s voices are not being heard in the public sphere”.

Yet the importance of hearing those voices cannot be overstated. While the unconditional support of my partner and wider family were crucial for my post-partum recovery, there is no way I’d have been able to come to terms with the birth experience, or get through the waking, the feeding, the worrying – the endless, endless worrying – without the company of complete strangers who at that very moment were going through exactly the same thing as me.

It was thanks to the many, many hours spent reading Mumsnet threads on everything from induction and labour to lochia and tongue-tie that I realised that everything I had just experienced was totally normal and I wasn’t someone for whom things had gone badly wrong. The psychological impact of that was profound.

Far from silencing women’s voices and ignoring the stories that have shaped their experience for centuries, we should be doing more to ensure those stories are heard. Only then can the actual cause of problems such as tocophobia be addressed and the horrific can become less horrifying. Websites like Mumsnet, which give women the opportunity to finally share their experiences in a public forum, are part of that solution.