“Breathe in and exhale slowly. Now imagine you’re walking on a white sandy beach. Feel the waves wash over your feet.” This is how He Chunlei, a certified hypnotherapist in Shanghai, trains pregnant women to manage the inevitable pain during childbirth.

“When the waves come, they bring comfort; when they recede, they take pressures away. Three, two, one, time to relax,” she tells a class of expectant mothers.

The recent suicide of a woman in labor has got China talking about why options for pain management during childbirth weren’t widely available.

“Anesthetists are always in short supply. … They are shared among different departments in our hospital and in most other hospitals in China,” said the chief obstetrician at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Shantou University Medical College in Guangdong, who gave only her surname, Chen.

“I paid 3,000 yuan ($450) for painless delivery, or epidural analgesia, when I had my son in 2003, and the prices haven’t changed much over the past 14 years,” said Bao Yan, an employee for a state publishing house in Beijing. Currently, several private hospitals in the Chinese capital have advertised the same procedure for 50,000 to 70,000 yuan, an online search shows.

“We rely on epidural anesthesia too much because people are so afraid of pain and ignore the spiritual meaning of childbirth,” she said. “But after drugs are injected into the body, moms don’t have to do anything. But hypnosis requires moms to learn, to train themselves.”