From the Womb to the World -- A Template for Living

L. Janel Martin-Miranda

We now know that the prenatal period is the foundation for health and wellness -- or pathology and pain. Personality, behavior, and health (i.e., blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, etc.) are all expressions of early uterine life. Evidence-based, peer-reviewed research in the last decade confirms this -- what we have intuitively known (and yet denied.) Conception and prenatal experiences determine the architecture of the brain and all body systems for the lifetime. We are concieved, gestated, and birthed in the biology of our mother's hormones, based on her experience and environment.

Simple logical - if one allows himself to consider the magnitude of this - tells us that the human being is built during the prenatal period and that this time must be pretty important, if not downright defining. The prenatal and birth experiences as DEFINING is what investigators and theorists in all aspects of science -- medicine and psychology -- are exploring and finding true. Scientists in physics, cellular biology,physiology, epidemology, ethology, fetal programming, animal research, medicine, psychology, and brain studies are all coming together to form the picture of the importance of the experience of the human being from conception, and earlier. (The mother's egg and father's sperm are each a living cell and has history and memory. We are the never-ending cellular tissue of our ancestors).

Everything the mother experiences is experienced by the conceiving, gestating, laboring, and birthing baby and is imprinted in the on the newborn baby's brain.

Labor and birth is the first physical, independent experience of the human being. As one transitions from the womb to the world this just might be the single, most significant and defining experience in the human's life. Labor and birth establishes a set of survival skills in the brain and body of the laboring and birthing baby. What happens here is critical for the human being for the lifetime -- are the mother and baby drugged, is it bright and noisy, with strangers and their time frames, rough treatment or is the woman in power of her own body, following and allowing hers and her baby's physiology to happen, quiet, dark, surrounded only by people who love her? This all matters -- every second -- in the experience of transitioning from uterine life in symbiotic connection with the mother to being an independently functioning being. It is critical for the human body-brain-soul still hormonally connected to the mother. Within seconds every system must work efficiently at birth.

At the moment of birth, we visually see and physically hold a completely separate, functioning human being -- one whose body AND brain has just completed a critical, monumental, development task. This is a being - a live and sacred being is not a blob impervious to drugs, boundary violations, separation, fear, and pain. How absurd this belief is -- that we can do whatever to babies and they don't feel or remember it. This human was a totally functional human being in the womb for months and his brain has a billion or so neurons at birth, already wiring up this experience. He knows his mother and families' voices and he knows language (having heard it over nine months) and the baby is known in science to be a SENSORY being. He is taking in whatever is happening via his senses. It is preverbal learning.

His or his body was and will continue to be regulated by the mother -- her heart, her nervous system, and her voice and touch will continue to support the survival of this new being. For months and years. My voice at the other end of the phone is still a source of safety and comfort to my adult child in need -- a calming to their nervous system. (It can work the other direction as well.) My heart and inner knowing often "feel" the need to connect across miles and oceans.

During birth how the mother and baby are cared for will be expressed in their lifelong relationship. Trauma to the head, neck, shoulders, and hips during the birth experience is the first physical experience, but especially to those born in the hospital. Unresolved and unacknowledged, the first traumas during birth is the cause of infant, child, and adult issues, including chronic pain and physical and emotional dysfunctions. Adult trips to physicians, chiropractors, and therapists are rooted in their very first physical and emotional experience. Birth. What keeps society from embracing and applying basic biology and physiology to birth -- so that we must reform how babies are born in hospitals? So that we make birth more gentle, more peaceful, more baby-centered, and support mother-child attachment?

What keeps one from observing simple physiological fact that babies remember birth? Most of us have been birthed "under the influence" of drugs and experienced a very violating transition from the womb to the world. Our own births create the template for both needing and fearing medical interventions. The denial of our own birth by previous generations who didn't know the impact of their actions feeds the politics (of medicine, the drug companies' influence, and insurance companies), denial (of a society who does not know how to forgive and change directions), and fear (of malpractice for doctors and guilt and shame for mothers and fathers).

Recognizing that prenatal development and labor and birth are keys to physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual well being creates a monumental need for society to change how we treat women and babies in birth. It calls for an overhaul of every service we fund and provide for in our society. The effects of the prenatal and birth periods is totally unrecognized in medicine and psychology, and so solutions to the myriad of social and personal problems is ignored. For example, not even in addiction studies, autism, depression and violence or even basic parenting does our society look at the earliest brain development and birth experience (of baby and mother and father) for answers. The detrimental impact of drugs and interventions at birth is ignored, and the contribution of conscious conception (wanted children are happier), prenatal development (healthy body and brain) and natural, empowered birth (non-violent survival imprints) is overlooked.

Again, our own births and the collective denial supports the continuing denial of the importance of the prenatal and birth experiences as the foundation (cause, if you must) of the multitude of medical, emotional, psychological, educational issues in our society. To acknowledge this is to open a huge Pandora's box that require change -- PERSONAL, individual change as well as political and systemic change.

Changing how we conceive our babies, how we treat and support pregnant women, and how we treat women and babies in labor and birth. It would require looking at the science that supports the healing of trauma and the brain. It would require chaning the way we train professionals in medicine, psychology and anyone who works with birthing women, babies, and children.It requires individual awareness and consciousness of all. Doctors, nurses, midwives, and importantly, conceiving and birthing women and men.