Recently I have read a wonderful book: Banished knowledge by Alice Miller.
In this book she writes a lot of interesting stuff. I do recommend it for reading.
One thing from the book I want to highlight though.
The fear of gyneacologists and midwives making such a business out of births of babies.
The babies are being weighed, measured and given injections short after birth as if its life depended on it, but Frederick Leboyer clearly showed this was not the case.
Those films and books show that a baby that has come into the world naturally without destructive interventions is content and will smile.
The reason for this is that the baby is not treated like its a piece of meat in stead of a living human being. It must be quite hard on a baby to be immediately measure, weighed, bathed and all that under bright neon lights that hurt the eyes.
Oddly enough the evidence of Frederick Leboyer did not radically change the practises in the labour and delivery wards.
There was a phase in the 1970's where things were slowly going better, but short after that technologizing of the delivery room increased at an alarming speed and hasn't stopped since.
It seems that nobody is interested in the physical and psychological sufferings of the newborn baby, or the mother for that matter.
Leboyers evidence showed that its unnecessary, unscientific and right out dangerous that in most hospitals normal births seem to look more like a operation on an ill patient. Induction is becoming pretty standard and is used more and more often, babies end up in intensive care, coz frankly, quite often, they weren't ready yet to come out.
This means, psychological damage for the baby, because it needs its mother, that is what it expects by instinct and what does it get, a warm plastic room where nobody cares whether its crying or not, how traumatizing must that be.
Most babies are anyway separated from their mothers right after birth, which shouldn't be happening. The first minutes to hours after birth are for bonding, mother and baby should be together.
Mothers who have experienced the separation at birth themselves will accept the hospital rules without a battle as those are "normal" to them, mothers who haven't experienced that will put up a fight.
Post partum depression are result from this kind of unnecessary separation. Then the mother will get medication to treat their old (their own birth) and new (the birth of their baby) pain. Often its portrayed as being normal, but post partum depression is not normal.
The biggest problem in this vicious circle is that the obstetricians, gyneacologists and midwives have often been born under similar circumstances and with that consider it totally normal to treat mothers and babies so cruel.
And with this bad start a lot of things can go wrong slowly but carefully.
Thursday 25 September 2008
Wednesday 10 September 2008
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