A woman in labour hurts because a child is coming. Jesus uses that idiom for the last days of the old covenant world.
Isaiah and Micah already used labour language for Zion’s crisis and new life. The New Testament picks it up for the generation that would see the old house fall.
Matthew 24 lists wars, famines, and earthquakes as the beginning of birth-pangs — signs inside that generation’s horizon, not a brochure for every later century.
The labour ends. A people is born through that transition. Reading birth-pangs as a permanent setting on history misses the metaphor.
The New Creation is not still in the womb. The pangs belonged to the change of worlds.