Water Babies

The Precocious Human Baby
by Dr. Michael Hyson

" The truth is, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit." - John 3:4-5

In the animals, there are two kinds of babies – babies that must have further development and those that are ready to go right at birth. These are called precocious. Examples are zebras, wildebeests, fish, dolphins, as opposed to others like baby opossums or kangaroo babies and… until now… the human baby. Human babies are weak, and mostly helpless at birth – IF they are born into an air/land environment and subject to their full one-gravity weight.

Now suppose we birth this same human baby into another environment, the water, and watch what happens. What we find, from the now thousands of underwater births, is that the babies swim immediately, even while they are on the umbilical cord!

They are fine underwater, eyes open and fully functional, smiling at the people above water, and with little indication of any desire to breathe (they are still getting oxygenated blood from the placenta through the umbilical).

Soon, of course, the baby is brought to the surface for its first breath and the baby usually begins a land phase of existence. Yet we know that children retain their swimming ability and a full diving response when they are raised around water from birth.

Early in this research, Igor Tscharkofsky, one of the main developers of underwater birth, had a daughter who was born prematurely. The Russian doctors thought she would likely die. Tscharkofsky took the child home and floated her in a largish tank of warm water. She soon learned to float, and breathe in the water, and even sleep there. She was out of the water for feeding and holding yet spent the majority of her time in the water for some weeks. She developed into a fine young lady who attended university.

Igor Smirnoff, Igor’s research director, has documented water babies who sleep in the water face-down and while fully asleep, periodically turn their heads to get a breath. Early explorers to Polynesia reported places where many babies, initially mistaken for coconuts, were sleeping in the lagoons. So baby life in the water was traditional there.

Now what is the point of all this? That we ARE precocious animals at birth IN THE WATER.
This phase lasts until crawling begins. Until that time, the baby has a lot of subcutaneous fat that gives them buoyancy and insulation in the water. As crawling begins, the child loses the "baby fat" and begins to learn to move on land and walk.

Tscharkofsky and Smirnoff found that the water babies developed 6 months faster over their first two years! This included walking and talking sooner than "land-locked" babies. We know that bundling a baby on a board, as some native American tribes did, delays the development of walking and leads to higher rates of dyslexia.
Now we see birth and development in water accelerates development. So, the gravity field is like a constant "bundling board" binding the newborn in the morass of a one-gravity field when its true environment is the water.

Correlative evidence abounds. According to the Aquatic Ape Theory, humans had a phase of development in the water. The theory suggests that our sub-cutaneous fat, the shape of our noses, the salt-water tears, the loss of hair, the patterns in the hair, the need for fish oils like the eicosanoic acid from fish that are needed for brain development etc. are all “marine” characteristics. One can explain much of our structure and our behavior with this theory.

Now the standard theory is that our ancestors came down from the trees and went out onto the hot, dry, savannah to scavenge meat and learn to hunt. Recently it was learned that the millions of years long drought in East Africa that was the stimulus for these developments --- never happened. Most of the genus Homo fossils extant come from riverine and forested areas. Some feel that the "savannah theory is dead".

The aquatic ape theory is now the best candidate for a description of our evolution.

One way to test this is our behaviour. I propose a simple test. How many people say “Hey, we’ve got a two week vacation coming up. Let’s get out the spears and go run around hunting on the hot, dry savannah! That would be great! "

Nah.., we say “Let’s go to the beach!”

For many years now, we have birthed our babies on land, into a dry, one-G environment.
By this we have hampered the development of our babies, depriving them of rich early experiences and the chance to swim and become strong in a buoyant environment.

What we see around us are people who have had their development thwarted by being deprived of their correct primal birth and early development environment of the water.

Let us return to our true roots. We are amphibious – born into water, and raised there and around it until we crawl and walk, and then we return to swim and dive, play and fish.

We are water creatures. When we recognize this we can restore our species to its rightful state.

This is why we are creating ocean and water birthing programs here in Hawaii. The dolphins have long been our friends and have attended human water births in the Black Sea over the last 20 years. We are reviving this practice in Hawaii where dolphin attended ocean births were practiced at least until 1937. This is a beginning of restoring our birth and rearing practices to correspond with our true nature.