NOT since Merlin tried to instruct his pet owl on the mechanics of flying in Disney's Sword In The Stone, and got an indignant flea in his ear for his troubles, has there been a more foolish example of someone trying to pull rank on the real experts.

Dr Denis Walsh should have known what he was letting himself in for. As associate professor of midwifery at Nottingham University, he has presumably spent his life surrounded by women. So when he argued, in an article for a journal published by the UK's Royal College of Midwifery, that women in labour should endure the pain of childbirth because epidurals interfered with the development of the mother-baby bond, he must have anticipated a vigorous response from those on the distaff side of the human race who had actually experienced the delights of childbirth rather than just studying it dispassionately from an academic viewpoint.

The response wasn't that slow in coming. Evidence Based Midwifery might not be as prominent on news-stands as Hello! magazine, but bad news travels fast and, by the time word got round about Dr Walsh's infernal cheek in daring to express an opinion about childbirth without ever having endured it personally, women had a new Public Enemy No 1.

So he thinks the pain of childbirth is "natural" and shouldn't be regarded negatively, eh? Here's a red-hot poker, Dr Know-It-All. Bend over, there's a good boy, and let's see what a positive and natural experience we can devise for you too.

Frankly, a lot of this criticism was richly deserved. Everyone knows that if men had to give birth they'd have found a way of making it an out-of-body experience by now, one which could all be done and dusted back in a test tube in the lab whilst they whiled away the wait in the nearest pub. Men don't do stoicism.

Dr Walsh also appears to have forgotten that medicine developed historically because doctors wanted to find new ways of making their fellow human beings' three-score-and-ten years on this earth slightly more bearable by eliminating as much suffering and pain as possible. If doctors during the Black Death had simply told patients that the boils were natural and good because they helped them see life from a different perspective -- ie, the perspective of someone who was dying horribly from the Black Death -- then none of us would be around now.

But to extrapolate from Dr Walsh's comments to a generalised whinge about men would do them a huge injustice. Dr Walsh isn't typical of men. He's in a tiny minority. Ask most men what they would do during childbirth if the roles were reversed, and they'd freely admit that they'd take anything that was going -- epidurals, mind-altering narcotics, general anaesthetic, crateloads of Guinness. . . you name it. They generally hate seeing their wives suffer in childbirth. Hate it.

The ones you have to watch out for are other women. They're the preachy evangelical types on this issue. They're the ones who once read a piece in the Guardian on the birthing practices of Kalahari tribeswomen and decided that this was the way all childbirth should be, and that Western medicine had it all wrong.

God spare us from their birthing pools and their yoga!

And the worst of it is that for every single male like Dr Walsh calling for less pain relief and more hypnosis, massage and hydrotherapy, there are scores of born-again female childbirth gurus saying exactly the same thing.

The difference is that they're infinitely more irritating because, unlike Dr Walsh, they can't stop telling you how they themselves went through childbirth with only a sacred crystal personally blessed by their guardian angel, a sponge soaked in aloe vera, and a partner playing primitive aboriginal rhythms on the bongo drums to alleviate their distress -- the smug, sanctimonious harpies. They're almost as bad as the pro-breastfeeding lobbyists. Have you ever met one man who'd devote his life to making women feed their babies one way rather than another?

The idea is laughable. But countless women appear unable to rest easy in their beds for the thought that some new mother somewhere might be making up the baby formula in a bottle rather than unhooking the front of her maternity dress whenever junior wants a feed.

Breastfeeding's a good thing, but let's not get carried away, ladies. It's not a make or break issue for the planet either way.

Even so, the reaction of some women last week that Dr Walsh shouldn't have spoken out because his views might upset mothers who took pain relief during labour was pretty lame as well. Sally Russell of the Netmums website worried that women who didn't have a so-called natural birth would "find they are stigmatised and made to feel they have let themselves down".

If so, they should grow a thicker skin. You can't expect doctors and academics not to air their views in medical journals simply because a few women might be upset by what they read. How else could there be debate about anything if the sensitivities of the few are allowed to override the free exchange of opinion?

This is one of the most invidious aspects of modern culture, this idea that you shouldn't say or do something if it upsets somebody else. Women are particularly prone to that sort of anti-rational emotionalism. They react in just the same way every time there's new research showing that childcare is bad for children, and that the happiest, healthiest, most successful people in later life are those who, as children, were reared in their early years at home with their mothers.

It's unfortunate that children in childcare fall short on all these scales, not least because the way modern economies are structured makes it unrealistic to expect women to stay at home rather than work. And besides, women find work personally fulfilling, and that's important too. But facts are facts and there's no point arguing with them.

To say that researchers should not conclude time and again that full-time childcare is a bad thing for children simply because it upsets working mothers, is like saying that scientists should stop banging on about evolution because it's distressing for recidivist Christians who prefer to think that the world was created in six days the way the Bible says and that the fossils of dinosaurs are just Satan up to his old tricks.

Verifiable truth is more important, and more worth defending, than subjective emotion. Which is presumably why Dr Walsh published his paper in a journal called Evidence Based Midwifery rather than Feelings Based Midwifery. His critics should respond in similar fashion instead of sulkily insisting that it's not fair.

- Eilis O'Hanlon