The Other Side of the Glass

Part One was officially released June 2013 in digital distribution format. To purchase to to www.theothersideoftheglass.com If you were a donor and want to download your copy send an email to theothersideoftheglassfilm@gmail.com.

The trailer

Go to YouTube

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Safe Baby Resolution

Dear Friends, Family, and Colleagues in Making Birth Safe:

I am flying high today. I have just received exciting news from my partner, Star Newland, in Hawaii. Our Safe Baby Resolution that we co-wrote for the Hawaii State Legislature has been assigned numbers and is on it's way!

Safe Baby Resolution is now the Senate Concurrent Resolution 8. The resolution is being introduced by Hawaii Senator Suzanne Chun Oakland and Representative Josh Green, MD, Chair of the Health Committee. The complete resolution can be viewed at http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/sessioncurrent/Bills/SCR8_.pdf . Track progress on the Senate resolution, HCR33 at http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/site1/docs/getstatus2.asp?billno=HR16 (Senator Oakland) and HR16 House resolution at http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/site1/docs/getstatus2.asp?billno=HCR33 (Representative Green). Now, the fun begins and WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT!

First, some background about the Safe Baby Resolution. The resolution asks the state legislators to lead us in looking at what both our hearts and the science tell us that a human being needs from pre-conception through infancy as the foundation for a safe, healthy, and harmonious life. We are asking the legislators to study the early primal period of conception through infancy as the foundational time for health, wellness, and harmony as well as foundational time of the myriad of social and physical concerns of society. We seek to make gestation and birth gentle and safe for mothers and babies as well as for medical caregivers and society. The resolution is about all parties working together in partnership to create this foundation of personal harmony for our babies -- and, worldwide.

The Safe Baby Resolution has grown out of Star's years of tireless work in creating the Domestic Harmony Initiative that is being widely embraced at all levels in Hawaii from the grassroots to city mayors to the Governor's office. Star's self-funded initiative focuses on creating harmonious humans from the beginning of life. It is about creating domestic harmony (an ever-moving and balancing relationship), rather than seeking peace (an illusive arrival point in a chaotic world), and rather than preventing or fixing domestic violence (symptoms of lack of early harmony). Her website is http://www.planetpuna.com/.

Second, an expression of my gratitude to one and all -- I am elated beyond words that our original resolution was fully accepted without much content negotiation, compromise, and revision. It is truly my dream come true. I took Star's work and I dreamed big - culminating decades of my own experiences and work, and incorporating what I have learned from many of you in the pre and perinatal psychology field and from wise babies in my practice. Thank you. I was writing the Safe Baby Resolution and support materials during the months prior to, during, and since my son's deployment to Iraq. As I grieved my baby's preparation and leaving for war and wrote, my deepest heart's desire for a more loving and harmonious world for our children had a voice and was heard. Harmony can come from chaos and pain.

SO, we need you support!! Raju Bhatt, our third partner, is our legislative liaison and lives in Texas. Raju and I am preparing for our deployment to Hawaii to support those amazing people who have stepped up to lead this country in the first serious state legislative look at the earliest period of life being critical to individual, family, social, and world harmony. Raju will lead our lobbying efforts and I will be completing support documents for the resolution -- ASAP. We need your expertise and we need your letters of support. Mothers, fathers, grandparents, professionals in birth, please watch our blog (http://www.safebabyresolution.blogspot.com/) for assistance and addresses to send your letters of support to Hawaii.

We need hard-hitting research resources from your professional research and specialty areas -- prenatal brain development, prenatal health and consciousness, fetal programming, neurobiology, birth trauma and healing/treatment, imprinting, Doualas, fathers needs, post-partum depression, VBAC, water birth, adoption, abortion, physiological model of midwifery, induction and epidural, the impact of drugs, natural birth, interventions and separation at birth, prematurity, maternal and infant mortality, breastfeeding, adoption, maternal choice, etc, etc, etc.

As a professional in your respective field, could you please write a two page position paper on a tenet or line item of the resolution with relevant research sitings, and write a letter of support from your professional perspective? Dr. Jeane Rhodes, Associate Editor of the Journal of Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health is completing a bibliography of research support. If you have any resources to support any tenet or line item of the resolution, PLEASE forward it to me or Dr. Rhodes at drjeane at comcas dot net.

We need and appreciate your expertise and time, and we also need financial and logistic support. This is a true grassroots effort and now reaching state legislative levels. As grassroot lobbyists, we are seeking financial support to continue the lobbying effort and to support other states to become involved. For me, Star, and Raju our work to this point truly has been a "labor of love." Each of us have been working towards this for several years without financial compensation and recently without "necessities" (like cars). We aren't a legal non-proft, but we are certainly non-profit, and we are grateful for your gifts of financial support, time, and talent to support us to now lobby for the resolution (and to grow a national effort.) We need:
  • Financial donations for printing, marketing, travel to Hawaii and expenses for lobbying, etc,
  • Someone to donate the building of a website. We have a blog (http://www.safebabyresolution.blogspot.com/ and a yahoo group, http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/SafeBabyResolution/ but we really need a website. I have the web narrative completed.
  • We also need a 501c3 partner/fiscal agent -- someone with ability to support a national effort and whose goals are in total alignment with the resolution, or someone willing to do one for the resolution. In the state of MO, where I live, there is a non-profit status that permits lobbying.
  • Someone who can set up a PayPal account or other means of receiving donations on the blog until we have a website, webmaster and fiscal agent.
  • Volunteer research help, editors, outreach.
  • Please consider supporting us however you can, and consider supporting the resolution in your own community and state.

I have also been in contact with several Missouri legislators this past week towards our goal of introducing the resolution in other states and creating an national movement. Raju is introducing the resolution in Texas and India. It has been introduced in several foreign countries, including Afghanistan. In MO as well as many other states, the resolution transcends the no-win debate about doctors versus midwives and hospital versus homebirth in legalizing midwifery. Again, the Safe Baby Resolution seeks to make the primary period of human development and the foundation for life to be gentle and safe for mothers and babies as well as for medical caregivers and society. The resolution is about all parties working together in partnership to create this foundation of personal harmony for our babies -- and, worldwide.

Thanks so much for all of your support and work in this important journey we are all on together --- creating aware, safe, and gentle conception through infancy as the foundation of life for our babies. Hey, together, we just might save this planet.

Blessings to all,

Janel

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1 comment:

Housefairy said...

Congratulations!!!!!

3:14 PM

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"Soft is the heart of a child. Do not harden it."

A public awareness reminder that things that happen behind the scenes, out of our sight, aren't always as rosy as we might think them to be. Perhaps its a restaurant cook who accidentally drops your burger on the floor before placing it on the bun and serving it to you. Here it's an overworked apathetic (pathetic) nurse giving my newborn daughter her first bath. Please comment and rate this video, so as to insure that it is viewed as widely as possible, perhaps to prevent other such abuse. -- The mother who posted this YouTube. How NOT to wash a baby on YouTube Are you going to try to tell me that "babies don't remember?" There is no difference to this baby's experience and the imprinting of her nervous system/brain and one that is held and cleaned by the mother or father either at the hospital or at home? By the way, this is probably NOT the baby's first bath. The nurse is ungloved. Medical staff protocol is that they can't handle a baby ungloved until is has been bathed (scrubbed if you've seen it) because the baby is a BIO-HAZARD -- for them. Never mind that the bio-hazard IS the baby's first line of defense against hospital germs.

Missouri Senator Louden Speaks

Finally, A Birth Film for Fathers

Part One of the "The Other Side of the Glass: Finally, A Birth Film for and about Men" was released June, 2013.

Through presentation of the current research and stories of fathers, the routine use of interventions are questioned. How we protect and support the physiological need of the human newborn attachment sequence is the foundation for creating safe birth wherever birth happens.

Based on knowing that babies are sentient beings and the experience of birth is remembered in the body, mind, and soul, fathers are asked to research for themselves what is best for their partner and baby and to prepare to protect their baby.

The film is designed for midwives, doulas, and couples, particularly fathers to work with their caregivers. Doctors and nurses in the medical environment are asked to "be kind" to the laboring, birthing baby, and newborn. They are called to be accountable for doing what science has been so clear about for decades. The mother-baby relationship is core for life. Doctors and nurses and hospital caregivers and administrators are asked to create protocols that protect the mother-baby relationship.

Men are asked to join together to address the vagaries of the medical system that harm their partner, baby and self in the process of the most defining moments of their lives. Men are asked to begin to challenge the system BEFORE they even conceive babies as there is no way to be assured of being able to protect his loved ones once they are in the medical machine, the war zone, on the conveyor belt -- some of the ways that men describe their journey into fatherhood in the medicine culture.

Donors can email theothersideoftheglassfilm@gmail.com to get a digital copy.
Buy the film at www.theothersideoftheglass.com.

The film focuses on the male baby, his journey from the womb to the world and reveals healing and integrating the mother, father, and baby's wounded birth experience. The film is about the restoring of our families, society, and world through birthing loved, protected, and nurtured males (and females, of course). It's about empowering males to support the females to birth humanity safely, lovingly, and consciously.

Finally, a birth film for fathers.

What People Are Saying About the FIlm

Well, I finally had a chance to check out the trailer and .. wow! It's nice that they're acknowledging the father has more than just cursory rights (of course mom's rights are rarely acknowledged either) and it's great that they're bringing out the impact of the experience on the newborn, but I'm really impressed that they're not shying away from the political side.

They are rightly calling what happens in every American maternity unit, every day, by its rightful name - abuse. Abuse of the newborn, abuse of the parents and their rights, abuse of the supposedly sacrosanct ethical principal of patient autonomy and the medico-legal doctrine of informed consent, which has been long ago discarded in all but name. I love it!

In the immortal words of the "shrub", "bring it on!" This film needs to be shown and if I can help facilitate or promote it, let me know.

Father in Asheville, NC


OMG'ess, I just saw the trailer and am in tears. This is so needed. I watch over and over and over as fathers get swallowed in the fear of hospitals birth practice. I need a tool like this to help fathers see how very vital it is for them to protect their partner and baby. I am torn apart every time I see a father stand back and chew his knuckle while his wife is essentially assaulted or his baby is left to lie there screaming.
Please send me more info!!!!
Carrie Hankins
CD(DONA), CCCE, Aspiring Midwife
720-936-3609


Thanks for sharing this. It was very touching to me. I thought of my brother-in-law standing on the other side of the glass when my sister had to have a C-section with her first child because the doctor was missing his golf date. I'll never forget his pacing back and forth and my realizing that he was already a father, even though he hadn't been allowed to be with his son yet.

Margaret, Columbia, MO

In case you don't find me here

Soon, I'll be back to heavy-duty editing and it will be quiet here again. I keep thinking this blog is winding down, and then it revives. It is so important to me.

I wish I'd kept a blog of my journey with this film this past 10 months. It's been amazing.

I have a new blog address for the film, and will keep a journal of simple reporting of the journey for the rest of the film.

www.theothersideoftheglassthefilm.blogspot.com

I'll be heading east this week to meet with a group of men. I plan to post pictures and clips on the film blog.

I'll keep up here when I can -- when I learn something juicy, outrageous, or inspiring related to making birth safer for the birthing baby.

Review of the film

Most of us were born surrounded by people who had no clue about how aware and feeling we were. This trailer triggers a lot of emotions for people if they have not considered the baby's needs and were not considered as a baby. Most of us born in the US were not. The final film will include detailed and profound information about the science-based, cutting-edge therapies for healing birth trauma.

The full film will have the interviews of a wider spectrum of professionals and fathers, and will include a third birth, at home, where the caregivers do a necessary intervention, suctioning, while being conscious of the baby.

The final version will feature OBs, RNs, CNMs, LM, CPM, Doulas, childbirth educators, pre and perinatal psychologists and trauma healing therapists, physiologists, neurologists, speech therapists and lots and lots of fathers -- will hopefully be done in early 2009.

The final version will include the science needed to advocated for delayed cord clamping, and the science that shows when a baby needs to be suctioned and addresses other interventions. Experts in conscious parenting will teach how to be present with a sentient newborn in a conscious, gentle way -- especially when administering life-saving techniques.

The goal is to keep the baby in the mother's arms so that the baby gets all of his or her placental blood and to avoid unnecessary, violating, and abusive touch and interactions. When we do that, whether at home or hospital, with doctor or midwife, the birth is safe for the father. The "trick" for birthing men and women is how to make it happen in the hospital.

Birth Trauma Healing

  • Read Miracle Boy's story

    • Ani DeFranco Speaks About Her Homebirth

    Ani DiFranco Interview with Mindful Mama Magazine from Mindful Mama Magazine on Vimeo.

    "Self-Evident" by Ani DeFranco

    Patrick Houser at www.Fatherstobe.org

    Colin speaks out about interventions at birth

    Dolphins