Making Birth Safe in the US. (aka Hospital Birth Debate)

The Other Side of the Glass

2011-01-14T16:11:00.001-06:00

What if men had had any idea of what was happening to their loved ones?

Infant Mortality

2011-01-14T15:18:00.000-06:00

From Homebirthdebate.blogspot.com, December, 4, 2006

Dr. Amy:

The fact that death in childbirth is no longer very common is due to the spectacular success of modern obstetrics. Unfortunately, obstetrics is so successful that people actually do not understand what birth is nature is really like.

Safe Baby Partner:

Does she mean "what birth IN nature is really like?" As in kitties, bunnies, puppies, calves, and foals being born?

Why is the mortality rate United States better in 2006 than it was in 1806 or 1956?

Nineteen fifty-six and seven were the highest years for infant and maternal mortality. My mother's fear of losing me during birth in 1956 was because she had known several babies who died. What did babies die from in 1956? Historically, it is well known that the sanitation and discovery of penicillin contributed greatly. In 1960 when my sister was born she and my mother were infected with staph and my brother and father became infected. The hospital was shut down.

Choose well, your legacy, Dr. Susan Blank -- American Academy of Pediatrics task force on Circumcision

2009-12-10T12:53:00.003-06:00

From INTACT AMERICA:

The AAP is actively considering whether they should recommend circumcision.

Make sure they hear our side of the debate!

Send a message to Susan Blank, chair of the circumcision task force, today.

"Very compelling."

That's how Susan Blank – who chairs the American Academy of Pediatricians' task force on circumcision – described studies of adult males in sub-Saharan Africa that suggest circumcision reduces the risk of HIV transmission.

Well, here's what we think is very compelling: circumcising babies is wrong – ethically, morally, and medically. It's shocking to think Dr. Blank and her task force are considering policy recommendations for baby boys in the United States based on misconstrued data from controversial African studies.

Send a message directly to Dr. Blank today and urge the AAP task force not to recommend circumcision. http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5922/t/6483/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=2318

Here's my letter:

Dear Dr. Susan Blank and American Academy of Pediatrics,

The human baby feels and remembers everything that he or she experiences in the womb, in labor and at birth, and in the first seconds, minutes, and hours of life. The prenate feels, tastes, hears, and responds to the environment - via the mother. The human being is in a continuum of NEVER-ending brain development from conception forward, and the primal period is the foundation for the rest of life.

It is logical and scientific that during the birth process the newborn brain is not somehow miraculously selective, thus being capable of "turning off" during time in the hospital with medical caregivers and interventions. There is no mechanism that allows that -- so that medical people can do whatever they wish to a baby. The human newborn is not capable of "de-selecting" the violations of medical caregivers on his personhood. The science is clear: Your own science tells us "what fires wires" so we know the birthing and newborn brain "wires what fires" and learns, even more so outside the womb than she or he did prenatally. The newborn baby is an aware, feeling being - a fully sentient being - and the brain IS "on" while in your hands in your institution. We/You can no longer say: "the baby won't remember" and "the baby won't feel it". Circumcision is just one of the medical interventions experienced by newborns in your hands.

Circumcision is the worst human rights violation of mankind, done by mankind to mankind, wherever it is inflicted upon on a non-consenting uninformed baby, child, or third world country. The American Academy of Pediatrics is being called upon to protect and defend our babies, and to be protectors of the human rights of newborns in our society. As a society we will look back on this action against males, and we we see how it is the primary cause of violence of all kinds, but especially against women and children. We will see how "we" plundered the world's people because of it. People will wonder how we could have been so barbaric at this point in history in our human evolution. Your name will be there, Dr. Susan Blank ... either as the person who helped stop the routine, barbaric, torture of NON-CONSENTING, UNINFORMED baby boys, or the one who pushed for it; the one too blind, too bought to see the impact to every aspect of a male's life and to our society, and to our planet.

Choose well, your legacy, Dr. Susan Blank.

I am a birth trauma therapist, baby advocate, and filmmaker doing a birth film for and about fathers in birth. Part four of my film will address the impact of circumcision on the male baby disconnected from his mother, unprotected, and so unspeakably violated ... for no medical reason ... and how this plays out his entire life, including family and child abuse, sexual assault, violence, and war. On my radio show this fall I have done a series with guests who are advocates of intact males; they are doctors, psychologists, midwives, and therapists in a series this fall. I have come to believe that circumcision of our baby males is the most barbaric act of humanity. It is outrageous that female genital mutilation is seen as such, while male babies in our culture are tortured, and these tortured males lead us to war after war, while porn is number one money maker, and pedophiles are a number one concern for communities and parents. Circumcision is torture Dr. Blank, and from what I have learned there is no medical reason to do it, only political and financial gains. The research in Africa is inconclusive and even shows no decrease in AIDS for these men, while AIDS has risen for women.

I have one circumcised son, age 34, and one intact son, age 27. I was holding my son when he was circumcised. It was horrible and shocking, and I couldn't stop it. I had assumed that what I was told to be done next was humane and science based. Now, we do know that it is not. It was tragic to learn later there is no reason for it, and more tragic, as a mother, to learn the resulting outcomes for him that he has to live his whole life with. For example, the violation of the body part responsible for creating pleasure results in a lifetime of dysfunctions in sexual functioning, from minor, like premature ejaculation, excessive masturbation, and being unaware of one's partner's needs (rough because he doesn't have the part of his penis meant to communicate to his brain about pleasure), for which we now have industry after industry to "fix" to the violent crimes against women, children, and society. Men do not know what it is they are missing, and depending on other aspects of their early life and violations, to varying degrees, they go after what is missing with a vengeance; and, Dr. Blank, they go after women and children. This one act against male babies/men provides multiple industries to this country and fuels war.

I am grateful that I became aware of alternative methods of emotional and physical healing, besides the ineffective talk and drug therapy that dominates our society. I could begin to support my son to heal his soul, an apology from the one who allowed it instead of protecting him begins the healing, and he can now choose to even restore his foreskin. Even so, as a mother, I suspect I will never get over the brutality and loss that I allowed my son to experience for no reason. We know now many modalities for healing those who have been harmed, but these modalities are also diminished and vilified by your profession, after promoting the violation, for financial reasons. To embrace the healing of the trauma one has to see the violation inflicted upon helpless newborn babies.

I guarantee you the American people are wising up, and rising up, and they will continue to become a majority against circumcision. Three cultures circumcise their male children: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. You figure it out. Do the research outside your status quo of medicine funded by drug companies, about the real reasons your professional group struggles to promote what it knows is true one minute and then is promoting the opposite again the next. Your profession has a responsibility to tell and BE the truth, and to stop the torture of our male babies. EVERYWHERE.

Again, Circumcision is the worst human rights violation of mankind done by mankind to mankind, wherever it is inflicted upon on a non-consenting uninformed baby, child, or third world country. As a society we will look back on this action against males, and we we see how it is the primary cause of violence of all kinds, but especially against women and children, and how we plundered the world's people because of it. People will wonder how we could have been so barbaric at this point in history in our human evolution. Your name will be there, Dr. Susan Blank ... either as the person who helped stop the routine, barbaric, torture of NON-CONSENTING, UNINFORMED baby boys, or the one pushed for it; the one too blind, too bought to see the impact to every aspect of a male's life and to our society, and to our planet.

Choose well, your legacy, Dr. Blank.

L. Janel Martin Miranda, MA
Columbia, MO
573-424-0997
www.theothersideoftheglass.com
www.thoughtcrimeradio.blogspot.com -- you can listen to podcasts of many professionals from many areas speaking about the impact of circumcision.

I agree with Intact America:

Your statement to ABC News that recent African studies of male circumcision are "very compelling" suggests that the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Neonatal Circumcision may ignore the ethics, risks and harms of performing medically unnecessary surgery on non-consenting infant boys.

As chair of the task force, please respond to the following questions regarding your upcoming decision:

- How will the task force address the ethical problems related to performing medically unnecessary circumcision surgery on non-consenting newborn males?

- How is the task force taking into account the risks and harms of circumcision?

- Aren't circumcision trials conducted on consenting adults irrelevant to circumcising baby boys who cannot consent?

I look forward to your prompt response.

Sincerely,

Women and Babies in a Disaster Situation

2009-02-12T12:00:00.007-06:00

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Mum forced into home birth after floods cut off road
Thursday, February 12, 2009, 08:22

WATER baby Charlie Beattie made a memorable arrival into the world when floods meant his mum could not make it to hospital for his birth.

Debbie Beattie went into labour on Tuesday morning, but she and husband Russell, along with three-year-old daughter Lauren, found the roads out from their home in Rayne were blocked by floods and they could not get to William Julien Courtauld Hospital (WJC) in Braintree.

They had to turn back home and two emergency care practitioners, Steve Colmer and Steve Monk, from the ambulance service, who had fought their way through the flood water, made it there just in time to deliver Charlie.

He was born at four minutes past eight and weighed in at a healthy 8lb 13oz.
Proud dad Russell said: "We set out at 7.30 in the morning and found that the road from Rayne to Braintree was about 4ft under water and the alternative route out of the village had flood water 2ft deep.

Continue at UK Mum forced to do homebirth because of flooding

This and many other new reports continue to fuel my concerns for pregnant and birthing women and babies who will inevitably be caught up in situations that do not allow them access to the hospital, and/or in many states, including Missouri, ACCESS to a midwife. As the Columbia, MO community prepared for disaster possibilities, I was at a forum in June of 2007 and repeatedly asked every representative from the mult-organization team about the plight of women in MO. At that time, it was a felony for a midwife to practice in MO. All women in MO did not have the option to choose midwifery, and this meant that many women in the rural areas (most of MO) were forced to accept the choice of driving hours to give birth.

At this meeting, all day long, I continued to asked the representatives of the Red Cross, the Fire District, the city, all the members of the diaster readiness teams,

"What about the pregnant and birthing women, and women with infants?"
"What if the hospital is unable to accept patients because it is destroyed, or quaranteened?"
"What if a laboring woman can not make it to the hospital? This happens now in an ice or snow storm now?"

And, I point out that in other industrialized nations, including the UK, midwives work WITH doctors and nurses in partnership. Their government and hospitals accept and promote midwifery care. There, a woman has a societial learning and knowing that birth outside of a hospital without a doctor anywhere near by is doable and even preferrable. So, when a diaster happens she IS ABLE to do it without the ingrained fears and beliefs that American women have. But, my question, "What are you doing in this area?" receives only uhmms, ahhhh, or "that is question for so-and-so who is on next panel."

All day long people just looked at me, some dumbfounded, some annoyed ... Midwifery was still illegal at that time and the social and political battleground was very bloody at that time. The only possible options given were that emergency workers or medical staff would have to be called. MY QUESTION, "Is this being considered -- is a plan for pregnant and laboring and birthing women being developed?'

"Ahhhh, uhhhmmm."

For some very strange reason, the dire needs of the pregnant, laboring and birthing woman and her baby during a disaster have not even been considered. I blows me away everytime I think about it, and everytime I think about that day of asking different people, experts in preparing for disaster and protecting us, about pregnant and birthing women and babies needs during a diaster. I am sure it is the same in most places. Every community, big and small, needs an elaborate system in place to care for these most vulnerable of people in a diaster. Is there a "committee" just to look at this need -- from another perspective OTHER than the medical perspective and what they can do and need? Is there a plan in place, with a team on board, of midwives, doulas, and nurses and doctors who will GO TO the woman? Why is this not a high agenda for the Red Cross?

HOMEFIRST in Chicago is a good model to begin to see what is needed.

For the Safe Baby Resolution, which I co-wrote with Star Newland and was introduced in Hawaii Legislature in 2007, I wrote a broad document of questions for legislators everywhere:

Legislative Research Study Questions
by Janel Martin-Miranda, MA, LPC,

The Safe Baby Resolution team asks our state legislators to form a Safe Baby Commission to be comprised of representatives from birthing women, doulas, midwives, physicians, therapists, psychologists, teachers, clergy, attorneys, representatives from women’s and children’s group (i.e., Shaken Baby, Domestic Violence, March of Dimes, Drug Prevention) and a legislative liaison to consider how to answer the following questions.

We are asking the state legislators to assign the commission (or appropriate department, such as Maternal Health and Child Wellness) with the objectives:

- Gather and study the current science that supports the resolution,

- Facilitate multi-disciplinary collaboration,

- Determine the feasibility of launching a major research project to look for long-term solutions, and

- Report the findings of the resolution study at the next legislative session

Number Five addresses homeland diaster preparedness and need to provide for pregnant and laboring women:

5. Homeland Disaster Preparedness – Include a plan for Pregnant, Laboring and Birthing Women, and Infants. How is the Missouri Home Land Security disaster plan prepared to care for pregnant and birthing women in MO in the event of a disaster? Currently, the practice of direct-entry midwifery is against the law in MO, and the CNM must be backed by a physician; therefore, out-of-hospital birth is rare and socially feared. In the event of a disaster hospitals will be focused on trauma patients and/or may be quarantined, and there will be zero options in Missouri for safe and quality care for pregnant and birthing women and babies outside of the hospital. What will they do?

I hope every community will look at this and make provisions for the most vulnerable during a disaster -- pregnant women and laboring and birthing women and babies. I find it interesting in the stories coming out of the recent weather and bridge situation in UK. When a woman can not get to the hospital there is not a collective panic. Women there know they can give birth outside of a hospital.
What what about this stupid, "Shoe lace" thing to tie off the cord? One report was father was struggling to get his shoe lace off!?!? As I prepare the research and father's voices for my film, I am just appalled ... WHY IS THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY STILL PROMOTING THIS!?!? The baby needs to stay attached to the mother. The BABY NEEDS his or her CORD BLOOD. The mother's body and the PLACENTA ARE the RESUSCITATOR. The BABY's physiology WORKS and will clamp the cord. THE FATHER NEEDS TO BE CONNECTING WITH HIS BABY, NOT SEPARATING him or her PREMATURELY from the mother. There is NO MEDICAL REASON to clamp the cord! #*$ &$& )$)__$&#^$*

From the UK article:
"We stayed at the scene for a couple of hours and worked together with the midwife to carry out full health checks, making sure both mum and baby were stable.

"Fortunately they didn't need to go to hospital and the family, including the proud older sister, were able to stay at home, allowing the new addition to settle in comfortably."

NOTE the MENTAL and EMOTIONAL difference? NO way in H-ll, would that happen in America -- leaving the mother and baby in the sanctity of their own home, after being assessed by the medical team on site. In America NO ONE can be born with out the interrogation of the multiple teams of nurses and doctors. Don't we all know the babies who were born at home only to be whisked away for hours and days of intrusive, violating, painful "tests" by strangers and separation from mother?

Now, that I've blown off some steam, back to work on the film ....

Response to Homebirth Petition

2008-12-12T12:41:00.007-06:00

I like to share comments on older posts that won't show up here on the homepage. Today I received one commenting on a petition I posted in June of 2008.

Mommato6 has left a new comment on your post "Keep Home Birth Legal Petition":

To sign that would be utterly stupid! Babies do die in Homebirth and it is most of the time, preventable.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. It is, however, not substantiated by statistics.

Of course you've heard that the US has the worst infant (and maternal) mortality rates in the industrialized world. Who hasn't? It's even in the mainstream news and concern. The US has the greatest access to technology and medical care, but the worst rates of mortality. Why isn't the US medical establishment itself looking into why this is? Instead, ACOG comes out with stopping midwifery as one of it's two prime efforts this year. Is ACOG and the medical establishement invested in doing what is necessary to create the best outcomes? It does not appear so. Is their agenda about what is truly about women's bodies and souls? Or babies bodies and souls? It does not appear so.

THE POINT of this blog is to point out that NEITHER homebirth nor hospital birth are safeEST until they WORK TOGETHER to provide the best care possible for women and babies, FOR THE BABY in particular!!

In countries where midwifery and homebirth is PART OF THE MATERNAL HEALTH CARE SYSTEM, and not controlled by obstetricians and drug companies, MORE BABIES LIVE. This is because the legal and public will is that women have availablity of homebirth WITH ALL the access to medical care IF NEEDED.

The blocking and controllng of midwifery by the medical establishment in the US is taking it's toll on women and babies. UNNECESSARILY, and it is criminal what they are getting by with. Women are seeking to have a safer birth outside of the hospital and going to extreme lengths to do so. THE PROBLEM is that most of society is not looking at the MISUSE of medical technology and drug use in birth (and all specialites). The root of the problem is that this society (the leader of the world) has little regard for the sacredness of birth. Society had little regard that this is a SOUL, a being, being born, and she or he will be impacted for his or her entire life by his or her experience of birth. I'd even go so far as to wonder if medical birth is not Biblically supported.

Originally, the use of drugs at birth were condemned and part of the women's movement was to get the right to use drugs during labor. The Pope had to say it was ok. The leader of the women's movement died during birth using Twilight Sleep.

We today are living the legacy of decisions such as this. The experiment could have gone quite differently had women/midwives not been hung and burned for their spiritual and midwifery gifts in order for male dominated medicine to take over ... if women had not had to rise up in this country and fight like men to just to get their God-given right to liberty and freedom and prosperity ... if we were not controlled by religious men and dogma ... if birth and motherhood were honored as the core, roots of harmony and family. Our world would be different today.

But finally, today, again because of very strong and brave and outspoken women in America, a woman can go within and claim her femininity and all that it means ... she can claim her body as her own, and she can claim her motherhood as her own. She can claim motherhood as a worthy path. It is between her and that soul, coming into her body, and the father how they choose to bring forth that life ... on their terms, in their home, or in a drugged stupor, overexposed, managed on someone else's time table, protecting some doctor or nurse or hospital's assETS or protecting her baby's soul and brain from unnecessary stress, trauma, noise, agendas, germs, time tables, sacrificing her baby's cord blood for someone's agenda and schedule.

Hospital birth doesn't have to be so violent!! The gifts of medical care givers can be used to support a different kind of birth. They can learn from the midwifery model of care, just as the midwives, historically, have benefited from the medical knowledge, and antibiotics. A baby has a right, A RIGHT, to come into this world from the spiritual world, in a loving, safe, nurturing, aware way and to be treated like a human being. It's more likely to happen in a homebirth and very unlikely to happen at the hospital. Perhaps, there are moments in the hospital. At the homebirth the baby is more likely to be regarded as a fully sentient human. THIS is the what makes birth safe FOR THE BABY. The blatant disregard of the baby by the majority of medical staff that allows for horrific treatment of the baby, which DOES NOT HAVE TO BE!, is what makes birth UNSAFE.

A skilled practitioner who has regard for the sanctity of birth and this baby, a soul, and who has supportive medical backup makes homebirth the safest place to birth on the planet. I am in association with a birth center in MO where a Family Practice doctor backs the midwives in the practice. Prior to the legalization of midwifery this year, she attended every birth with the midwife. I don't know if that continues to be the practice since it no longer legally required, but I know her well and I know if a woman wants her there, she would be. And, she doesn't pop in just in time to catch the baby and collect her payment. She is there from the moment the mother and father want her there and until mother and baby are established. Two hours or two days, the doctor and the midwife are there. They are not caring for others or running back and forth between office and hospital, or home and hospital, or church and hospital, or football game and hospital, or child's Christmas pageant and hospital. (MY ex is an OB). The midwife is there, nurturing and observing. Surprise events are rare ... it is the homebirth doctor and midwife who has been monitoring and observing, not a nurse or someone across town. Nurses monitor a woman and relay the info to the doctor who shows up when birth is imminent.

That is utterly stupid.

Hyper-Masculine Idea of Fatherhood

2008-09-23T02:35:00.007-05:00

I am very much enjoying the "break" from editing due to the emails, calls, and plans to go east to spend time with and film a father's group, all compliments of the trailer. I am very, very much appreciating the commenters and posters on lists talking about the film. I am finding it very helpful in preparing for the next phase.

crabgrass Says:
September 19, 2008 at

what really got to me was the way that the trailer was so focused on triggering the “protect” aspect of fatherhood/masculinity. there was a way that it was really working to appeal to this hyper-masculine idea of fatherhood. I don’t think the entire film will be more expansive, because I think that the baseline rationale for the film is that fathers need to be empowered (as manly men!) to step in and protect their wives and babies from the abuse of the medical system.

problematic, yet interesting.

Crabgrass:

What really gets to me about the film is how rich and giving it is -- every one has sees and experiences it their different triggers and see that that is what it's about. Based on who they are and "where they are".

I hope you'll go to my blog, www.theothersideoftheglassthefilm.blogspot.com and www.hospitalbirthdebate.blogspot.com and read about why the filmis for men and about men.

It is not at all about being manly men .. and it will expand beyond what one can imagine, beyond feminism. It has for me. It will look at what happens when men are able to heal their own primal wounding as baby boys -- born "under the influence of drugs" as were their mothers, "he cut me so bad" stories, separated and treated harshly by strangers, often women -- like the baby in the film who was brutalized by four strange women.

Most adult men --and only part of the male babies now - ere not breastfed, were brought to their mother on a schedule and cried in the nursery, and most often, their penis mutilated. This was often done by causing an erection. This is the story of most men over 25. Only episeotomy, breastfeeding and rooming in has truly changed significantly, Many babies are not circumcised, but there are still subjected to cord clamping before the placenta is birthed, and this suctioning for "meconium risk" that is now routine, despite the research showing there is no reason. NO reason. It makes no difference on meconium aspiration syndrome. 30% of all babies are born surgically. Circumcision is still done in a majority of cases.

There is a whole psychological phenomenon to be unfolded ... how it is that historically men whose innate need is to protect, yet they have taken us to war repeatedly, raped and pilfered, and until recently it was rarely a woman who would abuse a child sexually.

The men in the film were so the opposite of the hyper-masculine, manly men. They were vulnerable, tearful, speaking of their feelings that men rarely access -- helplessness, powerlessness, guilt, and shame. ALL of it related to THEIR experience of their babies births. ALL of them embracing their earliest parts in order to be better men, and one the ways they do so is to support their partner's biological and physiological needs in birth.

Most women, varied by many comments around the web, are totally unaware of their partners need to have their story heard, to have their perspective of the experience of birthing their child heard, felt, and acknowledged. Honored. It is not just women who experience the birth of their baby. And, when they can figure that out, they can "be with" their baby to tell his or her perspective of their birth. The baby has a story. The baby girl, and the baby boy. It starts there. It changes there.

The film is about healing the masculine, and doing so by being embraced as also wounded, by women. Women and men need to work together to heal the wounding of the feminine and the masculine.

It's about the phenomenon of how men - a Marine deployed to Iraq three times - can be giant in the world and yet be brought to his knees by an obstetric nurse.

It is about the inner healing that creates gentle protectors --

The father who pounded on the glass is one of those. His story, in full, is about how he gently, and powerfully, protected his daughter ... he was watching a circumcision when he pounded on the glass. When a LD deliver nurse insisted that he leave his wife and go to wait in the waiting room and he refused, and she began to push his chest, a 6'4" man, he simply, "Oh, no, I am not going anywhere" and their doctor happen to come by at that moment to "ok it."

You leave me with a pondering of how "protection" is equated with hyper-masculine and the "manly man.' Good information for me ... thanks for the post.

Homebirth: A Part of the Truth

2008-09-02T14:47:00.005-05:00

The truth is, sometimes birth hurts and sometimes it's easier, no matter where you are. We all know or have heard of women like my sister-in-law was notorious for hardly making it to the hospital. We glare on the inside with our fake smile when we hear their story, while our own is about days of labor (back in the day before ACOG put a time limit on our labor). Many women who gave birth easily at home also listen silently to others stories because they also upset women with horrible birth stories. If they share their positive experiences it is felt by those harmed women as gloating. No one can win.

My friend, Nellie, gave birth to her daughter at home about six years ago. After viewing my video, "The Red Tent Event" that was held in Columbia, MO last year, and featured eight women who shared their stories of giving birth she shared with me how hard her daughter's birth was. One complaint about birth for first time moms is the glorification of how easy it is -- homebirth is so empowering and epidural makes birth a breeze. Both of these are wrong.

In my video, "The Red Tent Event", seven of eight women had given birth by surgery and six of them went on to give birth vaginally. I was surprised. I thought the storytellers would be the woman that Dr. Amy rants about -- the natural birthers who want to gloat to other women about how successful and great their births were. Instead, it was mostly women telling their stories of giving birth surgically and then having a vaginal birth. Like Nellie, even when the vaginal birth was challenging, painful, and long, it was preferable to surgery.

The seventh woman who gave birth by cesarean was still too terrified after seven years to give birth again.

Nellie was inspired to tell me her story of how hard and how painful it was to give birth, at home, with no drugs. She wished that people had been forthright about that. She will have another homebirth as she appreciates and honors the process. Ani De Franco's story here very much mirrors Nellie's story. Giving birth "kicks you in the butt" and builds you as a person.

My personal opinion about the difficulty of Nellie's experience of birthing her baby is that it has to do with the fact that her husband had been deployed, immediate post-911, the month before. He got to come home for the birth and several months later was to be in the first wave of guardspeople deployed to Iraq. Women need to feel safe bringing their babe into the world.

As a mother of a deployed man, I know the unimaginable, indescribable emotional roller coaster. I could not imagine giving birth and caring for a newborn in that circumstance. I am also posting Ani's song, "Self-Evident" put to images by a fan. I do so in honor of those who have made the greatest sacrifice in this country.

www.mfso.com.

Conscious Cesarean Birth

2008-09-01T15:09:00.007-05:00

When I interviewed Dr. George M. Morley, M.D., he shared with me the story of his granddaughter's recent birth. She was born by cesarean and the D.O. who attended the birth worked with Dr. Morley to allow the baby's placenta to birth before clamping and cutting the cord. Dr. Robert Oliver proposed Humanizing Cesarean Birth years ago.

Humanizing cesarean birth was poo-pooed by any physician that any woman I have known has tried to communicate to about her baby's birth. They don't want to do it. Now the UK, as usual, is promoting it ....

It is all about what I have been advocating here and on another blog that won't allow the posts about such things to stay up --- birth is not safe for the baby, at home or at the hospital, UNTIL the parents and caregivers embrace the knowledge that the baby experiences birth, feels it and remembers it, and UNTIL medical caregivers in particular acknowledge human physiology and realize that the baby needs it's full transfusion of blood, and to be at the mother's breast. No matter what happens, medically and morally responsible mother-baby care has this has it's core purpose -- making birth humane and safe for the baby. If obstetricians can do a humane cesarean surgery, anyone, including neonatal personnel can do it too --do whatever you do with the awareness and acknowledgment that birth is the baby's experience.

I would take it one step further ... prepare the medical staff and parents to communicate with the baby. In my film I'll feature a homebirth with baby who needs to be suctioned. In the hospital babies are routinely suctioned, but not in homebirths. This baby met the criteria established by the American Academy of Pediatrics (ignored by virtually every hospital including the BIG Kahuna hospitals that suctioned my grandsons under the GUISE of "meconium risk"), and that is a NON-vigorous baby who is not crying. The footage will show a midwife and baby doula preparing and talking to the baby and the pace is slowed down to accommodate the baby's needs while someone is talking TO the baby. This helps everyone in the room to slow down.

The following is from a poster, Sharon, on another blog (where homebirth and midwifery is constantly negated with false claims) highlighting what we would call a conscious Cesarean:

(Notice the "pace" of the surgery and feel your own sensations ... especially if you have performed, assisted, or experienced a cesarean ...)

... I could almost choose a caesarean after reading this article! I particularly like the description of the slow delivery of the baby, allowing him/her to establish breathing whilst still half in utero and attached to the placental circulation and the mother seeing her baby emerge and seeing their sex at the same time as the delivery team. There are some lovely pictures too.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.c...78270/ HTMLSTART

The natural caesarean: a woman-centred technique "Surgery starts with the screen up, and sterile routines observed as usual. After uterine incision, the drape is lowered and the head of the table raised to enable the mother to watch the birth.

As the fetal head enters the abdominal incision, the operative field is cleaned of blood and the partner is invited to stand to observe the birth. The principle for the surgeon is then hands-off, as the baby autoresuscitates: breathing air through the exteriorised mouth and nose, while its trunk still in utero remains attached to the placental circulation. This delay of a few minutes allows pressure from the uterus and maternal soft tissues to expel lung liquid (Figure 1), mimicking what happens at vaginal delivery. Once crying, the baby's shoulders are eased out, and the baby then frequently delivers his/her own arms with an expansive gesture.

Concurrently, the baby's torso tamponades the uterine incision, minimising bleeding. The baby is next left supported for up to a minute, allowing the mother to observe her child. The half-delivered fetus frequently cries but if not, the obstetrician observes its breathing, colour, tone and movement to indicate wellbeing. The rest of the delivery is achieved through a combination of passive expulsion by the contracting uterus and active assistance: the baby wriggles out while its head and torso are supported by the obstetrician. This enables the mother to watch the birth and ascertain the sex of her baby at the same time as the delivery team, replicating the situation at vaginal birth.

Early skin-to-skin contact

Once the baby is finally 'born' and wellbeing again confirmed, the cord is clamped and cut in view of the parents. The anaesthetist/anaesthetic assistant clears the mother's clothing from her chest, and the midwife positions him/herself at the top of the bed beside the mother's head. Still scrubbed, the midwife receives the baby directly from the surgeon to prevent contamination (Figure 3). The woman should be warned not to reach out for her baby, as this risks touching the obstetrician. The baby is laid prone between the mother's breasts, dried with a warmed towel and kept warm with fresh towels and bubble wrap. After a plastic clamp is applied, the partner can cut the remaining cord if he wishes.

Labelling and vitamin K administration are accomplished with the baby on the mother's chest. The baby is positioned so that he/she can begin to suckle. The midwife remains near the head end to monitor the baby and reassure the parents. The baby is only weighed when surgery is finished, and given to the partner while the mother is transferred to her bed. Skin-to-skin contact is then re-established with the baby in the same position."

Amazing new research from AJOG

2008-09-01T13:48:00.006-05:00

From the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, August 2008:

FINALLY ... someone in the US, in obstetrics is looking at the need to create a Standard of Care. This was done in Nashville, where there is an alarmingly high number of neonatal deaths. Why does it always wait that long before the system responds?

Improved outcomes, fewer cesarean deliveries, and reduced litigation: results of a new paradigm in patient safety

Steven L. Clark MD^a, Michael A. Belfort MD, PhD^a, Spencer L. Byrum LCDR (ret.) USCG^a, Janet A. Meyers RN^a and Jonathan B. Perlin MD, PhD^a

^aHospital Corporation of America, Nashville, TN.

Received 16 October 2007;

revised 26 November 2007;

accepted 14 February 2008.

Available online 12 May 2008.

(My comments in italics and parentheses)

In a health care delivery system with an annual delivery rate of approximately 220,000, a comprehensive redesign of patient safety process was undertaken based on the following principles:
(1) uniform processes and procedure result in an improved quality;
(no mention of whether that is code for "practice according to evidence-based science).

(2) every member of the obstetric team should be required to halt any process that is deemed to be dangerous;
(woo-hooo, maybe someday they'll even include the parents as members of the team who can halt any process, OH! wait, after I reveal the information from a obstetrician about parents rights -- in my film -- they will!!)

(3) cesarean delivery is best viewed as a process alternative, not an outcome or quality endpoint; (Dang!)

(4) malpractice loss is best avoided by reduction in adverse outcomes and the development of unambiguous practice guidelines;
(Double Dang and Holy Sh--! this is getting mightily close to actually being about the BABY!) and

(5) effective peer review is essential to quality medical practice yet may be impossible to achieve at a local level in some departments.
(Whaaaat ... more PEER REVIEW? How about some effective NON-PEER review and law enforcement? How about some supervision of them foxes who are in charge of the hen house?)

Since the inception of this program, we have seen improvements in patient outcomes, a dramatic decline in litigation claims, and a reduction in the primary cesarean delivery rate.

I'll be getting the full article and reporting back ..

Cesarean Section Research

2008-08-31T01:00:00.003-05:00

In late September of this year, researchers in the US dropped a bombshell onto the cozy world of obstetrics.

After analyzing the records of nearly six million births, they advised that mothers should think twice before choosing a caesarean section (CS) over a natural birth.

Quite simply, an artificial surgical delivery could be putting the life of the newborn at risk. What the stark American statistics revealed was that caesarean babies are almost three times more likely to die within their first month of life than naturally delivered babies (Birth, 2006; 33: 175).

The article continues here in C-section Aftershocks by WDDTY What Doctors Don't Tell You, a UK site. On the right side of the page on the WDDTY site are numerous articles about cesareans.

Towards the end of the article is this bit of research comparing the safety of breech birth and cesarean.

The most common emergency situation is with so-called breech births—where the baby has its bottom facing the birth canal rather than being head downwards. In the days before anesthesia and surgery, all manner of complex devices were invented to extract the baby from this difficult position—one that is potentially dangerous to both the mother and infant. Some doctors have also attempted to solve the problem by developing techniques of turning the baby in the womb from the outside. More recently, the trend in these cases has been to perform a CS rather than risk a natural delivery.

But here again, this issue has divided the world of obstetrics, with some arguing passionately that CS is not necessarily the safer option for breech-presenting babies.

In an effort to resolve the controversy, Canadian researchers set up a huge international trial, involving over 2000 breech births in 121 maternity units around the world. Roughly half of the babies were delivered naturally, with the other half by CS. Although the absolute risks to the infants were relatively small in both cases, the differences appeared to be clear-cut: whereas 1.6 per cent of the breech babies either died or were damaged by the CS operation, that figure leapt to 5 per cent for those born without it. In both scenarios, the mothers fared equally well (Lancet, 2000; 356: 1375–83).

Giving Birth to Junkies

2008-08-31T00:31:00.003-05:00

Following up my previous post on epidural anesthesia which contains Fentanyl, a synthetic opiod, Dr. Mia Kalef interview, "The Secret Life of Babies", in which refers to the research by Dr. B. Jacobson, Sweden. Dr Jacobson found connections between drug use at birth and drug addictions later in life.

When will obstetricians, pediatricians, and psychologists in the United States do or respect the work of those who are exploring the impact of drugs and violations during birth?

From WDDTY What Doctors Don't Tell You ...

Giving birth to junkies

In wealthy countries a majority of children are born with the use of pain relieving drugs. In wealthy countries drug addiction is increasing.

Bring these two facts together and you will wonder why thousands of researchers are not trying to confirm (or invalidate) the conclusions of the studies by B Jacobson and his team in Sweden about the relationship between opiate or amphetamine addiction in adult offspring of mothers given pain medication during their births ( BMJ, 1990;301:1067-70). These researchers studied the birth records of 200 opiate addicts born in Stockholm between 1945 and 1966. The control group consisted only of siblings of drug addicts, also born in Stockholm during the same period to reduce possible bias caused by such factors as socio economic levels.

Continue reading here

My Letter to Dr. Phil

2008-08-30T15:02:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago I wrote to Dr. Phil when I hear that he wanted to do a program about birth. Then I heard that a second show request had gone out; one that appears to be biased towards showing that homebirth is dangerous. So, I cranked out another one ....

Dear Dr. Phil:

I implore you to see the opportunity you have to make a profound difference in our society. Please consider your moral obligation to have the same question posed for hospital birth and to take this issue to a level very few have the courage to do.

Will you share how the US has higher infant and maternal mortality rates than any other industrialized nation where they have a NATIONAL STANDARD OF CARE that includes homebirths and midwives? The US has no standard of care and physicians have no one overseeing what they do, drugs they use that were never shown safe for the birthing baby. Will you discuss the rights of a woman to choose where and with whom she gives birth? Will you discuss how relinquishing responsibility for birth to doctors and hospitals leads us to accept that US birth is safer?

Will you discuss the decades long research showing the epidural is dangerous to baby and mother? And, that the drugs used are dangerous to anyone -- fentanyl is classified as a potential chemical weapon. Will you discuss how NONE of the drugs EVER used in obstetric care were ever tested and researched to prove safety before using on laboring and birthing women and BABIES. Will you consider that 90% of our population was born 'Under the influence" of drugs and born with lack of regard for the vulnerability of the baby --- cord clamping requires the rough toweling of baby to stimulate it to breathe when nature has provided for the transition.

Will you bring on brain experts and pre and perinataly psychologists to discuss the impact of any birth on the baby? David Chamberlain, (www.bepe.info and www.birthpsychology.com), PhD. Marti Glenn, PhD (Santa Barbara Graduate Institute Pre and Perinatal Psychology Program), William Emerson, PhD (www.emersonbirthrx.com), Wendy McCarty, RN, PhD (www.wondrousbeginnings.com), Thomas Verny, MD (www.trvernymd.com), Ray Castellino, DC (www.beba.org). I suggest you include Allan Schore, an expert in early brain development, Peter Nathanielsz, PhD, MD (OB) a researcher in the prenatal and birth period and author of three books on the subject, and Bruce Lipton, PhD., a cellular biologist (www.brucelipton.com).

I hope you will do a whole series of shows ... while the epidural and cesarean section rate soar, so does the "failing" school issue and rates of addictions and other issues. Somehow, someone has to make the connection -- the connection between the most monumental day of life, the most dangerous, most joyful, and most challenging for the human being.

The experience of leaving the womb and coming into this life is the most profound experience of life. It is currently controlled by medical systems and unnecessary, damaging, painful, intrusive, boundary violating practices are made routine for every baby. Many people are choosing homebirth in order to avoid these, in order to protect their baby.

The question should really be how can we bridge the two worlds, like in countries where more babies and women simply survive, and where they appear to go on to be physically and emotionally healthier and are smarter, by educational standards, than our children? One study compared normal Americans to incarcerated citizens in Europe and normal Americans score worse. The biggest difference between the US and these other successful countries is the way we bring our babies into the world.

This is so much more than the issue it is being made out to be -- someone needs to address it differently, holistically, intelligently, looking at the entire picture. Why not you, Dr. Phil?

Respectfully,

L. Janel Martin Miranda, MA
CranioSacral Based Attachment TherapistBirth Videographer/Filmmaker
www.bepe.info
www.SafeBabyResolution.com
www.hospitalbirthdebate.blogspot.com

120 Babies and 120 Hostages: Their common link is Fentanyl

2008-08-23T00:23:00.014-05:00

I cannot for the life of me, figure out how anyone today believes that epidural is safe for the mother and baby. I don't think a woman has the right to chose it for no damn good reason. I say that freely after making that choice myself. My fourth child was born in 1994 under the influence of epidural. I didn't have the luxury of the internet to research this; I just believed her father, a medical student, that it was safe. Nearly ten years later I found enormous information on the web about the dangers of epidural.

Since 1990 epidural anesthesia use has become widespread and promoted as safe. Women WANT to believe this, so much so, it is considered "natural birth" because now the definition of "natural" is vaginal. Women will resist sharing with other women that they are not going to use epidural because of the shock and pressure from other women. "Why would you want to go through all of that pain?"

One of the considerations of doing birth at home is to not have a medical person constantly badgering her to use epidural. What has happened to these medical people? Educated, caring, compassionate people who are supposed to protect our health and our baby's health.

Since the prolific research of the late 80's and early 90's clearly indicating the dangers of epidural anestheia (namely bipuvicaine) to both mother and baby, Fentanyl, another unresearched and dangerous drug has been added to the cocktail. Fentanyl is a synethetic opiod being considered as a weapon to use in Iraq and has been added to the epidural mix to counter affect the complications of bipuvicaine. Research on birthing babies determined the "appropriate" dosage. Fentanyl is responsible for the deaths of hostages in 2002 in Moscow and is dangerous for children. In the US the same drug could be used on our sweet, precious babies AND terrorists.

Reports yesterday from Moscow about the gray gas that was pumped into the Moscow theater bear out the assertions of American medical experts that Fentanyl is dangerous to children under 12. Survivors and relatives of victims said that at least 10 of the dead were children.

U.S. Suspects Opiate in Gas Used in Theater
By JUDITH MILLER and WILLIAM J. BROAD© New York Times, October 29, 2002
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/dll/knockoutgas2.htm

So, Fentanyl is the drug that the obstetric whizs decided was good to counter-act the detrimental and dangerous complications of bipuvicaine in epidural anesthesia. Where are the ethics committee who consider the rights of the birthing baby? What is going on that women who will use no drugs whatsoever during pregnancy will, without question, denying the long term impact on their baby, will demand their right to take Fentanyl during birth. And, some will allow their baby to be treated with less ethical care and consideration than a lab rat.

In this study by addition of fentanyl we tried to minimize the dose of bupivacaine, thereby reducing the side effects caused by higher doses of intrathecal bupivacaine in cesarean section.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1159169

Study was performed on 120 cesarean section parturients divided into six groups, identified as B8, B10 and B 12.5 8.10 and 12.5 mg of bupivacaine mg and FB8, FB10 and FB 12.5 received a combination of 12.5 μg intrathecal fentanyl respectively.

Women trust the medical profession. They would never allow harm to their baby if they were truly informed of the full risk; if they were informed that these drugs were never shown to be safe for their baby -- in any dose. Neither of these drugs were ever tested for safety for the birthing baby and certainly no research is being done to show the long-term impact to the human being.

The 120 babies in this particular study were not able to chose or be informed about their participation in this study. This is characteristic of all research done on laboring and birthing babies. It is a travesty that "ETHICS" committees and society do not regard the human baby in their research ... research that happens AFTER the use of technology and substance, not before using on babies. And, then to deny the need for research to see what the long-term impact is.

Fentanyl is considered a potential chemical weapon and has been studied for use on terrorists.

And on February 5th, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went a big step further. Rumsfeld, himself a former pharmaceutical industry CEO (1), announced that the US is making plans for the use of such incapacitating biochemical weapons in an invasion of Iraq (see News Release, 7 February 2003).

The Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) and the US Army's Soldier Biological Chemical Command (SBCCOM) are leading the research. Of interest to the military are drugs that target the brain's regulation of many aspects of cognition, such as sense of pain, consciousness, and emotions like anxiety and fear. JNLWD is preparing a database of pharmaceutical weapons candidates, many of them off-the-shelf products, and indexing them by manufacturer. It will choose drugs from this database for further work and, according to Rumsfeld, if President Bush signs a waiver of existing US policy, they can be used in Iraq. Delivery devices already exist or are in advanced development. These include munitions for an unmanned aerial vehicle or loitering missile, and a new 81mm (bio)chemical mortar round.

Many of the Pentagon’s so-called "nonlethal" (bio)chemical weapons candidates are pharmaceuticals. Different names are used for these weapons ("calmatives", "disabling chemicals", "nonlethal chemicals", etc.). Used as weapons, all minimally aim to incapacitate their victims. They belong to the same broad category of agents as the incapacitating chemical that killed more than 120 hostages in the Moscow theater. That agent was reported to be based on fentanyl, an opiate that is also among the weapons being assessed by JNLWD.

In the US, pharmaceutical fentanyl is sold by Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceutica. Remifentanil, a closely related drug, is a GlaxoSmithKline product.

WHO is allowing the field obstetrics to go unsupervised? WHO is allowing the same drug to used on terrorists to be used on our birthing babies?? The FDA has approved this? Or, any drug is ok as long as an OB want to use it?

I don't know who wrote the following, but I did find some references that are listed at the end.

Russia's top health official Yuri Shevchenko reported that the gas used in the storming of a Moscow theater held by Chechen gunmen was based on fentanyl, a fast-acting opiate with medical applications. Shevchenko said the deaths were caused by the use of the chemical compound on people who had been starved of oxygen, were dehydrated, hungry, unable to move adequately and under severe psychological stress.

Injected, skin-patch and oral doses of fentanyl sold in the United States carry warnings that the anesthetic can be fatal if administered in too high a dose and that doses must be customized, taking into account the patients' size and any previous exposure to similar drugs.

Fentanyl was among drugs that Pennsylvania State University researchers suggested two years ago that the U.S. military explore as weapons to subdue angry mobs. The Pentagon has put such research on hold, however, because of worries that it would violate the international ban on chemical weapons.Fentanyl is one of the drugs used in epidural anesthesia for childbirth ("hungry, unable to move adequately, under severe psychological stress" sounds familiar). It certainly has worked wonders on the women of this culture as a chemical weapon in the war against spontaneous, unimpeded, empowered birthing.

http://www.sunshineproject.org/publications/pr/pr110203.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/31/world/main527614.shtml

Oprah says we should be uprising over the dismal state of our education system. We are 25th in the world science and math. Oprah also still promotes epidural anesthesia and drugs in birth -- she does so as most women do, laughing and saying it is the only way to give birth. No regard for the human baby. Oprah gave birth at age fourteen, reportedly she was pregnant by rape. No amount of drugs will help a woman give birth in that circumstance. Oprah's experience is not the correct measurement of what is scientifically wrong for babies. She does not even crack her psyche a fraction to allow the possibility that our failing schools ... failing children ... struggling children are the consequence of the rising use of induction of babies and the use of narcotics, opiods for the birthing brain. As the incidence of drugs in birth and cesarean birth rise at an alarmingly similar rate as the failure of our children in school, we need to rise up and say no more. No more routine drugging of the human newborn at birth.

Based on what we know, the routine epidural anesthesia during labor is not the right of a woman over that of a baby. I don't care what Obama says.

Breastfeeding and IQ

2008-08-22T23:35:00.006-05:00

Smarty Gene: Breast-fed kids show DNA-aided IQ boost
by Bruce Bower

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough in deciphering the genetics of intelligence. Ironically, they did it by accounting for a key environmental factor.Breast-feeding boosts children's IQs by 6 to 7 points over the IQs of kids who weren't breast-fed, but only if the breast-fed youngsters have inherited a gene variant associated with enhanced chemical processing of mothers' milk, reports a team led by psychologist Avshalom Caspi of King's College London.

The new finding supports the controversial hypothesis that fatty acids in breast milk enhance newborn babies' brain development.

Moreover, the results demonstrate that intelligence researchers must examine how children's genetic natures interact with the ways in which they're nurtured.

Continue reading at: http://sciencenews.org/articles/20071110/fob1.asp

I liked this quote at the end:

Adds psychologist Jeremy R. Gray of Yale University, "An IQ advantage of 6 to 7 points is unquestionably large enough to have a real-world impact on individuals."

I visited a website that rants about the unsafety of homebirth. I hadn't been there for about six months. Nothing has changed. I added comments about what the baby feels and experiences at birth and people got so jiggy -- I advocated for gentle, respectful treatment of the baby. WOW, mother's of NICU babies went ballistic, folks got rude and ridiculing, and basically saying that babies don't remember so it doesn't matter. You'd think I'd said the world is round.

Really, it's such a spiritual experience to go that blog. I always think of Gandhi:
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

Although winning doesn't really sound like something Gandhi would seek. Did he really say that?

Anyway, that's how the folks who trash homebirth, natural birth and who support cesarean as a less painful, healthier way for humans to be born, and adamantly resist and attack one for the concept of the human baby being a fully conscious, aware, and learning baby act when one introduces research or logic to the contrary. Contrary to what they are doing, making a living doing, or experienced as a patient. They got so jiggy about me saying that the baby could be treated gently and with respect EVEN if s/he needed to have an intervention. They even said that there is no research to support prenatal learning. They must live in caves! I suggested they Google: fetal programming and development and suggested they look at the mainstream researchers, Janet Dieprieto, PhD, Peter Nathanielsz, MD (OB), PhD (Vet), and Peter Hepper, PhD (Ireland).

I remember when breastfeeding was as opposed with the same flimsy science that convinced women to use formula, while the logic and science that said Mother Nature or Divine Design has provided what the human baby needs was vehemently denied by the medical caregivers. I breastfed my son in 1975 when it was not at cool to do so. They kept my baby from me for hours until my family was gone. Two nurses tried to talk me out of it. They said they had already fed him and he took the bottle just fine. Something deep rises up within me (and the B word too) just writing that. How did they get the "right" and the "power" to impose their MISbeliefs upon MY BABY!?!? It is not to be taken lightly since we once again know as a society that breastfeeding is so critical. The first feeding primes the baby's stomach. HOW DARE they take that away from him. WHY do we continue to allow medical caregivers to perpetrate their opinions and beliefs that are shown over and over and over to be NON-Science based? And, that translate into disrespectful, dangerous, and violating treatment of our babies?

Oprah and everyone else is talking about how the US compares in math and science. One woman on Oprah said that this is the number one issue? Yet, Oprah continues to support epidural .. with all the research that shows it is dangerous and WITHOUT any longitudinal or retrospective research to show it is safe and without consequence. Is the education rate of failure corresponding to the increasing rates of induction, epidural, and cesarean? Doesn't anyone in power THINK and connect?

We are told that induction is safe, drugs are safe, even Fentanyl and other narcotics, during labor and birth, but we should not use them at other times during pregnancy. We are told that cesarean birth is safe for the mother and baby and yet, the obstetric field will not do any long term research. Those doing the research are psychologists and their credibility -- because they are psychologists -- is discredited by medicine, and the women they violated, who must believe, believe, believe that whatever was done to them was done for the right reasons.

Someday, the majority will see that the human being does remember every experience, including birth, and that we can be gentle and respectful doing lifesaving maneuvers. But will we ever be able to just say: Babies are emotionally, physically, and spiritually impacted by their birth experience? How's come we can't seem to overcome the medical power and control and just say it -- poor treatment of the human by doctors and nurses at birth causes X, Y, Z. Like, medicine causes low IQ.

My friend, Rich concurs,

How about a new headline: "Medical research demonstrates IQ cost of hubris and recklessness in pediatric practice".

Or "90% offormula fed children would have higher IQ's if their parents had ignored a century of conventional medical wisdom". The admission that "formula-fed infants typically received no fatty acids in their diets" is an indictment of american quack pediatric/industrial medicine if there ever was one.

This is just one more in a long stream of findings demonstratingthe immunological, nutritional, psychological and now intellectual deficits suffered by formula-fed babies. Yet there is no outcry, no call for banning over-the-counter formula, no push for facilities to breast-feed and co-habitate in the workplace, no press releases attempting to undo the effects of over a century of medical trivialization and denigration of breast feeding. No doubt children are better off not being held by their mothers anyway. I'm sure sensory deprivation does wonders for their growing brains.

http://www.violence.de/tv/rockabye.html

It wasn't so long ago that new mothers were routinely given injectionsto dry up their breasts. Now at least they can sometimes breastfeed in public without going to jail. Will wonders never cease?Perhaps some day there will be room for human nature in medicalideology. That is, if they can think of a way to make it profitable.

Babies Remember Birth Guest writer, Rich Winkel

2008-08-16T21:16:00.006-05:00

The discoveries that are being made in birth psychology are perhaps obvious in retrospect but still widely denied in obstetrical circles because of their devastating implications. If humans had never developed written language and all the diversions and false authority that comes with it, we probably wouldn't have forgotten the timeless intellect and wisdom encoded in our genes and bodies.

The lessons are simple: first, babies and fetuses remember EVERYTHING. The memories are apparently imprinted in the neural nets distributed throughout their bodies and brains, and can affect their perceptions and behavior for the rest of their lives. Adverse events, if left unresolved, can repeatedly resurface in a pattern of trauma-reenactment which ensnares following generations in an expanding cycle of suffering and victimization which could be (and probably has been) responsible for engulfing entire societies in epidemics of sociopathic cruelty.

Second, being born is the baby's first deliberate act, its first expression and celebration of its newly discovered life. Whether it is lovingly received and empowered or objectified and subjugated will profoundly affect its self-esteem for years to come. Birth trauma can even affect a female baby's future births, again setting the stage for self-perpetuating intergenerational patterns of dysfunctional behavior.

Third, birth is only one step in a process of being born, of evolving from a fertilized egg to a physically autonomous child. After birth, the umbilical cord is replaced by breastfeeding and all ofits physical and emotional attributes, which are no less essential to a healthy outcome than the cord itself. The mother-baby is a biological/psychological/social complex which must be inviolate if the baby and mother are to reach their full human potentials.

All of these principles, which appear to be obvious to other primates, have been routinely ignored in centuries of western obstetrical and pediatric practices.

What all this boils down to is that western "civilization" is suffering from a centuries-old psychosocial epidemic involving the systematic and traumatic severing of this cosmic physical and spiritual mother-baby connection to ourselves and each other. We are a society of orphans, alienated from our roots and perpetually in search of pale substitutes for this connection. We are living in abject spiritual poverty in the midst of boundless meanings and possibilities, having forgotten our own divine essence.

The relevance of all this to the search for peace and harmony should be obvious. I believe this issue may be at the heart of the social pathologies of monotheism and patriarchy.

Salmonella or Staph?

2008-07-10T22:58:00.004-05:00

In passing today I saw a few moments of The View on ABC. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who co-hosts was talking about tomatoes. She is apparently freaked out because of the salmonella outbreak about "certain tomatoes" and is not eating any tomatoes at all. She was quite adamant about the topic. I had to laugh ... she is also the one I saw interviewing Patricia Arquette.

Ms. Arquette gave birth in the hospital and then had a homebirth. She was quite eloquent, though simply matter-of-fact about her experience, while the Ms. Hasselbeck was anything but an "objective news woman". She just couldn't "wrap her head around" the idea of a homebirth ... birthing outside of the hospital? She couldn't imagine not giving birth, not being safe in the hospital ... the germiest places on the planet where salmonella is the lessor of the evils lurking there.

A local news woman said this week about giving birth, "give me the IV and prop me up on the pillows". If not so sad, it would actually be funny. These women have so much influence and their "empowerment" is so shallow.

Modern Birth and Torture

2008-06-27T21:49:00.004-05:00

By Rich Winkle

This country has a psycho-social parallel with pre-Nazi Germany which may be surprising to you.

First check out Democracy Now's interviews with Alfred McCoy, author of "A Question of Torture" (and earlier, the indispensable "The Politics of Heroin")

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22a+question+of+torture%22+site%3Ademocracynow.org&btnG=Google+Search

See especially his description of the CIA's current state of the art "psychological torture" technique, which consists of two components:

-Sensory deprivation
-Self induced pain

When you understand how this combination works on the psyche, consider the fact that standard American obstetrical and medicalized pediatric practices have subjected a majority of native-born Americans to a slight variation of the above:

-Sensory and pleasure-sensory deprivation
-Other-induced pain

This is the "parenting" technique which was widely utilized in pre-Nazi Germany on the children who grew up to become war criminals and sadists. Those Germans who were spared this treatment were often part of the resistance to the Nazis.

The Political Consequences of Child Abuse
http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/politica.htm

What are the psychological consequences of the latter variation of torture? The destruction of empathy, the social glue which humanizes us and makes for livable societies.

The Womb is a School and All Babies Attend

2008-06-17T00:57:00.003-05:00

The Womb is a School and All Babies Attend

By David B. Chamberlain, Ph.D*

The womb of a mother during pregnancy has been thought of as a veiled, largely silent refuge where babies develop in peace and safety for about nine months before birth. Construction was considered an assembly line process in which all babies got built from genetically-influenced, but basically similar parts. In this scheme, mothers had little to do beyond eating sensibly and taking prenatal vitamins while dads, having made their unique gift of sperm to start the process, were basically in a holding pattern until the real baby materialized at birth. Babies, on the other hand, were regarded as passive passengers, incapable of sensation or communication, without passion or purpose, and clearly beyond reach. In that ancient 20^th Century culture (actually not long ago) everybody knew that parenting began after birth.

Today thanks to lots of new science surrounding human gestation, pregnancy is a whole new world for parents and babies! It turns out that just about everything from conception to birth depends on a matrix of interactions between all parties, is fraught with both physical and psychological hazards, charged with motion and emotion, and the final outcome is more heavily influenced by the immediate environment—principally the intimate world of the parents—than by the genes involved. It turns out that babies possess powers of awareness that were overlooked, have senses nobody counted, and a vulnerable psyche absorbing information from all its experiences in the womb. And surprise, surprise, in this school room, parents are the teachers--ready or not.

In this precarious situation, here are some quick tips for parents who sense they are out of synch with the new facts of life before birth. First, reorient yourself in time to the fact that parenting starts before conception (not after birth) when you still have a chance to clean up your act before the sperm meets the egg. You will know what you need to change to get ready. Second, unload any ideas that clutter your mind about the pitiful ignorance and incapacities of babies and gamble on the opposite notion they are amazing humans who would like to grow up in your family. Third, don’t be fooled by their size, including the size of their brains, and immediately begin looking for their heart and spirit. Fourth, get right to work communicating with all the babies who cross your path; you need practice in communicating one mind to another. Your words, so communicated, will explain, support, and heal through every challenge life brings. Fifth, and finally, turn on daily the high energy nutrients of affection and laughter, the secret “glue” that holds families together.

*David is a psychologist and member of Birth and Early Parenting Educators. More about that group at www.BEPE.info. David is also editor of birthpsychology.com and noted for his popular book The Mind of Your Newborn Baby, now in 12 languages.

David also is co-founder of the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH) at www.birthpsychology.com

Happy Father's Day

2008-06-15T17:51:00.003-05:00

Happy Father's Day to all of the fathers out there ...

especially those fathers who have committed to being in their children's lives and being a dad, not just a father, but a Dad ...

especially to those fathers who have, for whatever reason, lost their relationship with their children.

and, to everyone in between.

"The greatest gift you can give your children is to love their mother."

Author Unknown

From the Other Side Now

2008-06-14T09:27:00.007-05:00

Two great people I admire and appreciate, Tim Russert and Edwina Froehlich, passed away this week. I doubt that Edwina will get the extensive coverage that Russet gets, but she should. Wouldn't it be a great world if the pioneers of promoting what mamas and babies need would be elevated to that of politicians, warmongers, wrong-doers, journalists, and oh, yeah, Hollywood stars?

Who is Edwina Froehlich, most people ask? She is the founder of the Le Leche League.

When I gave birth to my first child in 1975 breast-feeding was discouraged and it was socially the wrong thing to do. I was breast-fed, as was my mother, a twin, in 1930. I know now that ancestral memory is a contributor of success in breast-feeding. Thank God, because two nurses kept my baby from me and waited for my husband and mother to leave (I believe now). They worked very hard to discourage me ... "You are too young. It will tie you down." (Edwina was too old! What is the perfect age? How absurd that the childbearing body would be too anything to finish the task.) They said, "Formula is better." As they continued to brow-beat me and I resisted, one said smugly, "We already gave him formula and took it just fine." Fortunately, my sweet baby latched on like he'd been doing it forever. (So glad I had nursed my dollies along with my sister being breast-fed). I suspect (in my feeling, sensate awareness now) that my eighteen-year old look (or smirk as my mother would call such a look) said, "SEE!!! So F-you and go away," because they did. Thankfully. Twenty-eight years later I was at a lactation training and when I heard the instructor say that the FIRST FEEDING COATS and PRIMES the gut system, a rage rose up in me. THAT feeling is the expression of the feelings and knowing of my body at the time ... that were suppressed and denied. How dare they? How dare they take away something so fundamentally necessary and simple. Were his hospitalizations at age four for bowel issues related? What do we women (and men) do with our stuffed emotions about our violations during this most profound human experience -- birth? Woman have to stop doing this --- betrayal --- to other women.

Thank YOU, Edwina -- for you have contributed to my life personally and you have surely made the world a better place for eons to come.

June 13, 2008

Edwina Froehlich, 93, La Leche League Pioneer, Is Dead

By RONI CARYN RABIN

Edwina Froehlich, who was inspired to help found La Leche League to support breast-feeding after being told at the age of 35 that she was too old to make breast milk for her baby, died Sunday in Arlington Heights, Ill. She was 93 and lived in Inverness, Ill.

Her death followed a stroke two weeks earlier, said her son, Assemblyman Paul D. Froehlich.

A pioneer on several fronts of motherhood, she worked for Young Christian Workers, a Roman Catholic lay organization, before marrying John Froehlich when she was in her early 30s. She had her first child a couple of years later, making her comparatively old to have a first child at the time, and she made the controversial decision to forgo giving birth in a hospital in favor of a more natural delivery in her Franklin Park, Ill., home, with an obstetrician attending.

At a time when most pediatricians encouraged formula and bottle-feeding and when there were few scientific studies demonstrating the health benefits of breast milk, Mrs. Froehlich chose to breast-feed all of her babies, said another La Leche founder, Mary White.

"We used to tell the mothers the three main obstacles to successful breast-feeding were doctors, hospitals, and social pressure," Mrs. White said.

In 1956, when Mrs. White and a friend, Marian Tompson, decided to start a community organization to support and educate local breast-feeding mothers, Mrs. Froehlich was one of the first women they approached. Soon, monthly meetings were being held in Mrs. Froehlich's home, and a new phone line was installed so she could answer questions coming in from mothers across the country, Mrs. White said.

"We didn't have any information, " said Mrs. Tompson, another of the original group of seven La Leche League founders. "There weren't any books out there, and women just didn't talk about these things. Only 18 percent of women in the U.S. left the hospital breast-feeding at that time."

As La Leche League of Franklin Park grew, becoming La Leche League International in 1964, Mrs. Froehlich took on additional roles, including serving as assistant executive director for many years and, more recently, as a board member and a member of the Founders' Advisory Council.

She was one of the authors of "The Womanly Art of Breast-feeding, " the league's manifesto, which was first put together in loose-leaf form in 1958 and later published as a bound book in 1963. More than two million copies are in print.

Mrs. Froehlich was born Edwina Hearn on Jan. 5, 1915, in the Bronx.

In addition to her son Paul, of Schaumburg, Ill., she is survived by two other sons, Peter and David, who live in the Chicago area; a sister, Pauline, who lives in North Carolina; and nine grandchildren. Her husband, John, died in 1997.

Mrs. Froehlich donated her body to the University Of Illinois for research; her children think she wanted to continue serving science even after her death.

Guns Don't Kill People, Doctors Do

2008-06-06T13:13:00.009-05:00

Or should I title it, "Stats to Blow Dr. Amy's Away?"

.. doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.'

I have decided (for now, anyway) that the focus of this blog will be to talk about how it is PEOPLE who make birth dangerous ... whether doctor, nurse, or midwife (or cabbie or EMT). Medical interventions meant to save women's and babies lives -- antibiotics, drugs, instruments to extricate stuck baby, and surgery -- are used indiscriminately, unnecessarily, and for self-serving
reasons.

In addition to that, THE MAIN POINT of this blog is to talk about how the human being -- the baby, me, you, and all of our babies -- are sentient, feeling, and experiencing beings from the moment of conception. Before that we were consciousness, a soul, something .... that came into this physical body. So, certainly during labor and birth we are feeling, sensory, and aware of our
surroundings.

The people in the mother's environment MUST be aware of this --- Awareness and honoring of the baby as a conscious being coming in, a being who is FEELING, SENSING, and IMPRINTING the experience in his or her body and brain, THIS is what makes birth SAFE FOR THE BABY!!!!! ...

Where ever birth is .. home, hospital, woods, or car, regardless of whoever is there ... doctor, nurse, midwife, paramedic, or father, the awareness that this event, BIRTH, is sacred, that this event is tantamount, life defining, this is what will create in "them" a reverence for the baby. This is what will make birth safe, even when they need to use interventions.

So, here's a little humor to make a very strong point ... this is from a friend, and the author is unknown. Thank you whoever you are.

(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.

(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.

(C) Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171.
Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept. of Health Human Services.

GUNS

(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S is 80,000,000. (Yes, that's 80
million)

(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is
1,500.

(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .000188.

Statistics courtesy of FBI

So, statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.'

FACT:

NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR.

Please alert your friends to this alarming threat.

We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!!!

A Little Edgy -- about Doctors And Where Birth is Safer

2008-05-27T12:22:00.014-05:00

The most important thing that you can teach your children is that Well-being abounds. And that Well-being is naturally flowing to them. And that if they will relax and reach for thoughts that feel good, and do their best to appreciate, then they will be less likely to keep the Well-being away, and more likely to allow it to flow into their experience. Teach them the art of allowing.

-- Abraham

ANYONE who attends the birth of babies ANYWHERE ... should be emotionally, mentally, and spiritually qualified. THAT is what makes birth safe .... technology and knowledge in the hands of those are emotionally and psychologically fit.

-- Janel, Baby Keeper, in the film, "The Other Side of the Glass."

While the debate rages on about where birth is safer -- home or hospital -- the biggest reason that birth anywhere is unsafe is the people who attend ... the people who misuse technology ... the people who have forgotten that birth is a sacred event ... people who have forgotten that birth is the human's most singularly critical experience of life. And, that is, birth is a critical experience physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually.

When we look at PEOPLE ... it is hospital birth that is most unsafe for women and babies ... and men who find themselves disempowered and unable to protect their partner and child. It is the PEOPLE attending birth that make it dangerous.

PEOPLE who work in hospitals ... especially doctors ... are as a stereotypical whole clumped together ... numb, morally dysfunctional, control freaks ... and there's a reason for it. The System. And, another reason is their choice to be in and stay in a system that is so dysfunctional (and lucrative). See link below.

I'll admit my prejudice and rancor here ... I was raised without insurance and using natural ways and aside from being brutalized at age eighteen in the birth of my first child ... and mislead and over powered in the other three ... and mislead that an angiogram was reasonable and safe way to explore my headaches at age 23, I have had little medical care. Until, I was later married to a man who was a medical student and then did five+ years of residency who thought everything needed to be medically checked out and managed.

Two and a half of those residency years were in obstetrics ... and then I got out with my life. I worked most of those with the exception of having a baby and taking time off to be with her, Brazelton style. He was a control freak to begin with, but he became progressively more so and extremely violent ... all based on money, and he began to hide money, which continues today. He is currently trying to get out of paying the percentage of what the state of Illinois says every non-custodial parent should pay. He believes it is unfair that someone who makes $50,000 a month should pay so much more than one who makes $50,000 a year. Math, logic, and ethics must not have been his forte. The same percentage is what makes it fair. I and my daughter sacrificed and helped him get there.

During the year-long proceeding, rather than work on the income tax forms he can't find, he did find time to divorce his wife (also a physician) but they still live together, and he found time to put over a million dollars worth of property in hers and his sister's name. That takes finesse and balls, and an "I have to manage everything" mentality. He has defied a year's worth of court orders and has even gone to jail once but continues to defy court orders. He still refuses to turn over his income tax returns for several years. Last year during the deployment of my son (his step-son) when my life unraveled and I was unable to work with babies for that year, he paid partial payments or none for two months at a time, because he felt I was "living off him." Now, as the proceedings wind down to a inevitable showdown and completion, he is mad. He is mad that I am doing this film, living off him to do so, and this month again, he paid a partial child support payment. Routinely paying it three weeks late is usually enough satisfaction for him. A partial payment of the support based on his residency income, far from what he should be paying like every other parent in Illinois has to. Have you also noticed that those with the most money never seem to have enough? He works in obstetrics, emergency rooms, and does aesthetics.

Is this who you want caring for you in the ER or in your child's birth or doing your skin abrasion? To be fair to him, he is not alone. He is not the exception, I suspect. He is not the physician who values money above humanity and that of his loved ones. He might or might not be the worst, but he is certainly, most likely, not so different from a lot of people in his profession. The perceptions we hold of these giants is an illusion, built and perpetuated by them and their control over our health and wellness. In fact, I was telling a friend recently that he was never required to take any sort of psychological evaluations or tests. He was shocked. I thought everyone knew that, so I thought you ought to know it too.

While the US Congress seeks to make all pregnant women be psychologically evaluated for depression, medical people continue to "self-regulate" themselves. They don't seem to self-regulate their own lives, but certainly do their profession. No one oversees them, not the CDC or Congress. AMA and ACOG are peer organizations, not regulatory entities. Congress is controlled by them, via the purse strings, via Big Pharm. Doctors are the holders of all power over our health and wellness, even psychologically, and yet, are not ever evaluated themselves. Again, let me remind you that that the fox is in charge of the hen house. Worse, they are not overseen by anyone. They do as they wish. So why wouldn't such a person believe that he makes all rules and that he is exempt from what others must abide by.

So, yeah, physicians are not deemed EMOTIONALLY, PSYCHOLOGICALLY, or SPIRITUALLY worthy of the station they hold. They are not certified. They just are of a mind and personality that can endure years and years of lectures and retaining the rote information and spitting more back than anyone else. They are good standardized test takers.

All one has to do to become such a powerful person in our society is to be able to memorize the information needed to graduate from college and medical school. He, like all physicians, LEARNED ON THE JOB ... in residency. The information, practices, and procedures were passed from attending to chief resident to resident. They take ethics courses but are not expected to abide by ethics. Medicine has it's own ethics ... meant to self-preserve regardless of the cost to society and to individuals. Nowhere is this more egregious than in the birth of humanity ... one baby at a time. It allows horrors to occur ... and in obstetrics this is serious.

In obstetrics women are allowed since the beginning of medicine, a few short centuries, to control women's physiological processes ... which is violating of women and babies during labor and birth.
Obstetrics is considered to be the most misogynistic and the most UNscience based off all specialties in medicine. From my experience, medical training took a fairly decent, but profoundly wounded person and turned him into a monster. They learn how to deny what is morally and heartfully right ... and how to focus on personal gain ... how to deceive ... how to create elaborate webs of denial and blame of others .... I could on ... but check out this research piece here sent to me by the fellow who donated a MAC to me ... to get this film done ... to stop the abuse of babies.

Link is at the end.....

"The majority of 1800 third year medical students surveyed reported doing something they believed was unethical.[564] One student admits, "What I learned was how to survive as a medical student by forcing myself to believe that what I was doing was all right, when deep
inside I knew it was not."[565]

"Sixty-seven percent felt "bad or guilty" about something they had done in third year. Of these students, three quarters had, "succumbed to that pressure against their better judgment." Sixty-two percent believed that some of their ethical principles had been "eroded or lost."[566]

Another student: "I live in a world in which I do not trust or believe in what I am doing, and where I have grave doubts about what I am inflicting on other human beings."[567]

"At present it is a rare person that emerges from medical training with his or her humanity intact."[568]

"In studies of third year medical students, ethical dilemmas mostly hinged around subservience to authority."

There you go ... and we all know that shit runs downhill .... the powerless exerting their power upon people who are just in need of healing ... and getting rich doing so.

Medical Students

to be continued .... in support of the midwifery model of care, and that ANYONE who attends the birth of babies ANYWHERE ... should be emotionally, mentally, and spiritually qualified. THAT is what makes birth safe .... technology and knowledge in the hands of those are emotionally and psychologically fit.

For that matter, wouldn't you like your heart doctor, pediatrician, and even your podiatrist to have been "certified" sane before they work on you, cut into you, prescribe drugs for you? Have you ever thought about the physician attending to you and what has been going on in his or her life? They and their personal lives are often stressed and compromised ... they are "compartmentalized" in order to do their jobs. The research above gives us insights into that ... how they are compromised and how they become those who compromise others for their own gain.

Want to hear something even more scary? My ex's medical school test scores were highest in PSYCHIATRY!!

Just a reminder .... stop the craziness ... check out the Petition against The Mother's Act

My GI Joe is Coming Home

2008-05-05T23:12:00.024-05:00

He has his limbs, his eyes, his head, he is not burned or mutilated. He is ALIVE. He is coming home to the U.S. How blessed am I and how grateful I am. So many mother's wailing will never end and their hearts will never mend. These mothers who have lost their child to war need our loving thought and prayerful arms to hold them. I feel, I think, as if my child has been through a tragic event, like a bus wreck, and is one of the survivors. With all of my gratitude, I am a bit numb right now. Bless my other sisters.

I can not think only of my happiness, without feeling shared emotions with the mothers with whom I have so much connection and especially those who will never greet their child again. Never has anything connected me so deeply with other women ... birth comes close.

Can it really be after all of this time? Twenty-two months in a war zone -- two and half years since I have seen him -- smelled him, felt his soft neck when I hug him, an experience that transports me, and then his whiskered face that brings me back to the present.

Please keep our men and women and their families in your prayers.

Below are some pictures of my GI Joe in Afghanistan. He is an officer embedded with the Afghan Army. My favorite of him is him being hugged by an Afghan man. It brought me much joy to see him happy and being the goof we all know him to be. The picture is a stark contrast to night time maneuvers, long mountainous roads, and him standing, honoring his friends, fallen soldiers. How can a mother's heart but break when her child sees and endures such experiences and losses? How can we as women, not reach out to other women who experience such losses ... whether it be to war, or to the egregious violation of her body, soul, and baby during managed, manipulated, medical birth.

If you've been reading my blog since I began it in November 2006, you know that my son was deployed in the months prior and it started out initially to counter Tuteur's attack on homebirth, midwifery, and natural birth when she banned me -- when my son had just left and I was clinging to his sacrifice, possibly dying, being not in vain if it protected our rights here. I was taking my right to speech pretty damned seriously.

You know that I am passionate about birth, the empowerment of women and men in birthing their babies, and more importantly, that I am a fierce advocate for the baby. You'll know that writing six hundred pages in the first seven months on this blog, entertaining you with my colorful and very passionate weavings (rants) about obstetric abuse against women, the history of midwifery, circumcision, and the consciousness of the baby, is what got me through the hardest year of my life. Have I mentioned lately that the drugs used in American medical birth have NEVER been shown to be safe for the birthing baby and woman?!? And! that women and babies are one long experiment on NON-consenting and NON-informed women and babies?!

"In the cave," "over the cliff", "thrown on to the train tracks", and the "dark night of the soul" are some of my more graphic descriptions of my experience as a mother of a deployed soldier in this war. Thanks to you all who faithfully tuned in, I found a wonderful place to channel my energy and emotions --- as I unraveled a lifetime of ... of ... shi-stuff. And, then began to re-weave my life. Many days I would marvel at that amazing soul, my son, the one I saw come in at conception, and how we came to do this profound journey. Oh, how I would have given anything for a few days back ... so many would be "do overs", most would just be a day to enjoy him ... a baby, four years old, or fourteen, or 22. Mamas, hold them close and cherish every moment you have. Time slips away and all you have left is your dreams and justifications for why did what you did or didn't do what you didn't. Deployment dredged up all of those losses to be reviewed and joys to be appreciated.

Some days I was grateful that I was able to experience such depths of emotion ... even though much of it was very old and unfelt from days of numb living. That mechanism that most of us have that allows us to endure hardships, abuses, losses and to suck it up to go to work and put on the "happy public face" ... well, that mechanism goes haywire when we face losing our child, whatever the reason. I found all of the times, all of the years that I didn't feel what I felt (like getting out of an abusive marriage to an obstetric physician) demanded to be heard and felt. All of those years living in Denial ... focused on worldly things not of that much importance really -- in the end when all is said and done.

Some days I felt, and do feel, profoundly blessed that I had this opportunity to recognize my child, the man, who is his own soul and who came for a purpose. I am blessed to be called to "let him go" -- as mothers must learn to do -- at a level I never knew possible. It's at the bottom of the cliff, in the darkest recesses of the cave, and in the darkest place of the soul. It is the moment one realizes, lying on the tracks, the light at the end of the tunnel is not a freight train after all.

My only sadness I will likely never lose is the realization that my son will never be the same ... for this war. He is expected to come back and live a normal life, where the majority remain numb to his (and his colleague's) experiences and sacrifices. They are so young and have so many years to live. I can't quite shake my resentment at the majority in this country who merrily on their normal way, while ours will never be normal again, and my outrage at what you ... this country ... owes him and every veteran of this war. How can you continue to do nothing to stop the madness?

I went through what is as close to losing a child (to death) that I wish to experience. When your child goes to war you have to feel the very real possibility of his or her death AND you have to have the most hope you've ever had. You have to find it. I likened it to things like getting the news that your newborn is in NICU and for that time when you don't know if they will live or die, you live in panic ... then numb .... then panic .. then numb ... then panic. You live that way everyday that your child is in danger or at risk of dying. Everyday ... until you just have to adjust in order to survive, and the overwhelm is always just right there, ready to spill at any moment. Life unravels.

I realized the panicked scream I felt was exactly like the time my older son almost got hit by a car. Almost, so close, that it is our angel story. I couldn't get to him and all I could do was scream his name ... so loudly that people came out of their homes 1/2 block away. My scream came from my core and it seemed to have summoned an army of angels or a very big brave one. After my younger son left the US I realized that I was in that very same scream ... watching my child go off to war all pumped up to do what is right, to do what soldiers do for their country, was like watching him run gleefully to the street with zero regard for the danger. He was so trained, so prepared, and so honored to go to protect what most of us (not me, mama) take for granted.

The scream was unscreamed, stuck in me; numb and panicked, numb and panicked, all stuck because there is no place in our society for mothers to just lie down and wail for their babies. No place, no time for days of crying, or time to rest from the exhaustion, and there is no one to pick up the pieces of modern day life that come undone so quickly and that undo us until homelessness, until cancer, under drug use, until divorce ... or whatever symptom emerges from stuffing numb powerlessness and the panicked grief.

There is no time to grieve our babies we lose in birth, or to war, or in accidents, or to cancer, or to strangers, to DCFS, to the other parent, and not even our babies who are born by cesarean. There is no time or place to grieve our babies and children's experiences when they and we do survive. Our bodies none the less wail. Our mind wails. Our soul wails. We women have no place to grieve, to FEEL, and to process our guilt and abandonment and violation. It is all stuck inside and it gets called "Mother's Guilt" or women get ill, sometimes, deathly ill.

I took the time to go through the pain ... with zero drugs. I have a license that allows me to be the "expert" talking head to help others "talk it through". Nothing I ever learned and experienced prepared me for my own experience ... except the group of parents who had lost their children to death. I didn't talk to someone about my feelings and it would do no good to talk about how my life was unraveling without real empathy and without going into my body and the experience. FEELing it, living it, moving through it. I used yoga, Tai Chi, and I wrote, movement, trance dance, and I wrote, African dance, massage, and wrote, and the Mother Earth. And, I wrote. It was the Great Mother who sustained me and deepened my faith and trust in Her Son and in His Father. My son's deployment gifted me with the most difficult and blessed journey of my life. I have come through it a much better person. Thank you for sharing it with me. When I picked myself up and dusted myself off, I realized that I had progressed, quite surprisingly towards some long-time goals and dream. The most amazing of those is the film I have wanted to do for four years now.

Thank you for your prayers for my son, my GI Joe, and for all of the men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Thank you for your prayers for me and my daughter and my family. Please remember that the needs of our men and women serving are great - before, during, and after. Our veterans deserve our care, appreciation, and our attention. Their families are suffering and need your support.

More Truth About Cesaran Deliveries -- From the Baby's Perspective

2008-04-16T13:44:00.005-05:00

I like to post comments I recieve on previous posts. "The Truth About Cesarean Deliveries (C-Sections) was a post by Heather a year ago.
Leavinglascrunchy has left a new comment on your post "The Truth About Cesarean Deliveries (C-Sections)":

While I agree with you that there are many risks involved in having a csection, there are also very valid reasons for having a csection. Each mom has to weigh in the risks of having a csection against the risks of waiting or not having one. I went into labor with my son early due to placental abruption. My son went into distress when I was about 8 cm dilated and they had to get him out quickly. In my case, I think the risks of doing nothing outweighed the risks of having a csection. Of course, I don't think that all csections are medically necessary but I think that doctors and patients can work together to decide when the benefits of having a csection outweigh the risks involved.

Of course, this is one of the few true emergencies and reasons for a cesarean delivery. I don't know anyone who debates that.

This is another opportunity for me to point out the main purpose of this blog --- to bring awareness to the needs and human rights of the human baby. EVEN when cesarean birth is done for medically necessary reasons, it is disruptive to the baby on the physiological, psychological, emotional, and spiritual levels. I know this will make many a woman rise up in anger to defend her child. That's a natural and normal, and desirable response. It still remains a fact that is logical, emotional, and scientific -- that the baby, child, or adult born by cesarean was disrupted and wounded. Disruption is a wounding. It has consequences. Long term consequences. Only one hundred years from now with the magnitude of that be known as common sense. People will look back and shake their heads at what humanity was doing to their newborn.

The baby born by cesarean doesn't get the lung compression needed to physiologically expel fluid and become an air breathing being. And, if the cesarean was done without labor, the baby didn't get the necessary compression of the scull and brain. Of course, vaginal birth is challenging; apparently, it was meant to be. However, it was not meant to be as challenging as it is made to be in modern hospitals. Every mammal is born this way. Pitocin induced labor is brutal and likely to be damaging to the baby, but undrugged birth is unlikely to be brutal.

It is a miracle that women are able to give birth at all when one considers the conditions that every other mammal requires and seeks out. A mama cat will typically not give birth even around her trusted humans. Women in hospitals give birth under the most dire, invasive conditions.

During a cesarean birth the baby is pulled through an opening that is not larger than the cervical opening -- partly to minimize damage to the mother's uterus and to minimize her scar. That is very important these days and it is part of the "maternal choice" movement that feigns feminism and women's rights. A woman has "a right" to choose to labor "under the influence" of narcotics and to expose her birthing baby to Fentanyl, a very dangerous synthetic opiod. It is used to counter the effects of the "caine" family drugs used.

Often forceps are used with ceserean birth -- see Anna Nicole Smith's video. An obstetrician who is foremost a surgeon, pulls the baby through very quickly with whatever body part presents ... arm, hip, shoulder, head. OR, she/he reaches in and moves the baby. Talk about pain and intrusion. This is baby's FIRST TOUCH. It imprints a message in the brain about touch, this world, people and lots of things. The mainstream research in multiple fields, including prenatal life and postnatal period tells us that the laboring and birthing baby's brain is as astute and experience and development is as critical as before and after birth. The brain is taking it in.

Many major universities have research lab and experts who are researching the prenatal period and how the prenate learns and interacts with the environment and how this IS the WAY in which the baby's brain is developed. Other major universities have infant labs that study the first hours to weeks to months of life and how the newborn human is aware and learning. It is ILlogical then that this society continues to promote that the human laboring and birthing human baby is not also engaging with the environment and making decisions, responding, and imprinting on a PRE-verbal and NON-verbal level of development.

So, every single word said, feeling felt, action taken by ANYONE in the environment of the laboring and birthing mother and baby is felt by both and their systems will react and respond, learn and grow, or survive and protect. The baby feels what the mother feels as well as what she or he himself feels. We know this about the prenatal baby and we know this about the newborn.
Physiologically, the baby is experiencing separation from the mother and will in a short but profoundly critical time of development, become a separate physiological being. Everything done during labor and birth has a physiological, emotional, psychological, and spiritual impact on the baby.

The separation from the mother and the placenta is a profound change for the baby. During cesarean birth the baby's cord is cut immediately and the baby will begin life outside the womb with up to 50% loss of blood volume. The cesarean born child has two major disruptions of a process designed by nature to ensure a healthy being. BECAUSE of the lack of compression on the chest and BECAUSE of the extreme blood loss, the baby must be forced to breath with fluid still in the lungs. It is well-known that cesarean born children have breathing and asthma issues, yet cesarean is still promoted as "safe" and even more desirable by many, especially doctors, emissaries of the medical and pharmaceutical systems.

While fluid in the lungs and minus their blood intended to start their lungs to breath air, cesarean born babies have to be stimulated to breath. In any other situation, this treatment of a newborn would be seen as at least painful, if not abusive by observers. I attended a surgical birth where the baby's skin on his chest was rubbed off by the neonatal doctor and this baby was doing well for a surgical birth.

During this process, separated from his or her mother, the baby is surrounded by masked and gloved strangers who are doing something that is violating and abusive. It is. It doesn't matter to the baby in that moment if it is for life saving reasons. It doesn't matter to the baby in that moment if the medical person is a nice, caring person. All one really has to do is try to imagine if the very same thing happened to them, right now, as an adult. Most of us would FREAK out about it ... and we would cry and rage about it trying to get someone to understand, until our friends and families would just send us to the counselor or the doctor for some drugs to calm us.

What the baby needs NO MATTER WHY THE BIRTH WAS CESAREAN is someone, ESPECIALLY the MOTHER and father to GET IT. The BABY needs the adults who brought him or her in to this world to understand that they EXPERIENCED their birth and it is now a part of their brain programming. They see, feel, and experience the world differently. They need the mother to deal with her own loss, disappointment, anger, violation, etc. that all leads to mother's guilt. Ironcially, mother's guilt also leads her to not be able to see how the situation impacted her. She is usually just left to believe that she should be happy and thankful that she had an alive baby.

Embracing the good and the bad ... the trauma and the joy ... acknowledging what happened, processing what happened is what allows whatever happened ... at birth or anytime in life ... is what facilitates healing and integration. Babies are not allowed this. So wherever birth is, with whomever birth is, and whatever happens, babies just need to be acknowledged and seen. Every time the mother or father tells the child's birth story and the REAL experience has never been shared by the baby and heard by the parents, the baby (whatever age) within is silenced.

We have profound new techniques and therapies to facilitate healing of our earliest woundings (i.e., unwanted at conception, stress and diet during gestation, trauma and separation at birth).

www.birthpsychology.com
www.bepe.info
www.myrnamartin.net
www.beba.org
www.wondrousbeginnings.com
www.healyourearlyimprints.com/
www.pnri.net
www.transformingdragons.com
www.emersonbirthrx.com
www.castellinotraining.com

Struck me as funny

2008-04-15T00:43:00.017-05:00

One in four Americans is affected by mental health issues each year. Become a mental health counselor and start making a difference.

I saw this on a website for a counseling program today and it really cracked me up. Is the presumption that one of those three mentally healthy people withOUT mental health issues should and will become a counselor? Now, is that likely? Wouldn't they be more likely to become a doctor, lawyer, or a judge? Or, is it an invitation for that one with mental health issues to turn that mental issue into something more profitable and engaging? Figure themselves out AND make a livin' at the same time. Recreating their dysfunctional relationships over and over when they don't figure it out? Cool.

I have a Master's in Counseling and I think that entitles me to make fun. I admit I was online looking for an online program to pick up some classes for licensure.

Ever think about what leads people to their life's work? Even psychologists know that people trying to figure themselves and their own lives out go into psychology (my undergrad degree is in psych!) One of my professors, a clinical psychologist, said she got her BS in Psychology. BS stood for Bull Shit. Then she got her MS -- More Shit, and finally she earned her PhD -- Piled Higher and Deeper. Pretty funny.

Why do you do what you do? Do you think it has to do with your earliest prenatal experiences and how you were born? Does it have to do with your innate talents? Pre-conception plans? Early childhood? Or, was it by chance? Did you choose it? Why does a person decide to become a caseworker in the state system? Is there a reason they want to "save all the abused children" but yet end up harming so many families? What about police? Pharmacists? Chefs? Midwives? Nurses? I heard in Counseling that nurses make good Co-dependents (high number married to addicts). Have you ever wondered if someone who is rabidly against abortion just might be someone who survived an abortion attempt? Or, if someone who was abused might become a state case worker?

And, why do you suppose a person spends four years in college, four more in medical school, and then four more in obstetric residency (aka as Hell) only to be tired, in debt, and disillusioned? Do they do it all because they love women and babies? And, "they love women" can be interpreted several ways, now can't it? Do they just want the best for women and babies, for them to never have pain, and for them to be safe and have a sacred experience? Some believe obstetricians are misogynistic. Some believe they are control freaks. It is part of the training. Some believe they are more interested in power and money than a baby and woman's body, mind, and soul.

So, I was just wondering ... it's that psych and counseling training, darn it; if a woman and a man go to the hospital for the birth of their baby and there is a nurse and a doctor ... which one is the ONE WITH mental health issues?

If a woman goes to court regarding her child and she has a lawyer, there is a caseworker, another lawyer, and a judge, which one is ONE with mental health issues?

Is it a coincidence that it always happens to be the disempowered woman?

Is mental health like pregnancy and potty training? A caseworker told my friend that it was impossible that her handicapped grandson was partially potty trained before the state took him. The older gent said there is no such thing as "partially potty trained." She told me that he said it's like being pregnant. Either you are pregnant or you aren't pregnant. Obviously, he's never done either. One out of four, eh?

Hmmmmm.....

YIKES!

Doulas, Obstetricians, and Whistle Blowers

2008-04-12T13:57:00.005-05:00

I read a couple of posts on BOLD Thoughts, Birth the Play Blog
and I posted a response.

The BOLD blogger wrote about a NY Times article trashing Doulas and about a showing of the "Business of Birth" at Cornell and how one obstetrician set the tone for a negative discussion, but a labor and delivery nurse was a "whistleblower." I wove my responses to both into one post ...about the baby in all of us:

Your posts on Doulas and the two comments raise real concerns. For every baby there is a story and observers will interpret it according to their beliefs and needs. The baby's story goes untold, unacknowledged, unprocessed, and unintegrated.

The story here illustrates a common situation --- the birth women wish for is unattainable in the hospital and most women who prepare for and expect an empowered, natural or whatever birth in the hospital, are profoundly disappointed in their experience after they have prepared for the ultimate birth experience. It has women from the different perspectives at each other's throats.

Women are in the process of reclaiming their power through birth -- and the experience is rarely as was idolized. The truth is that the empowerment comes from embracing was is, what happened, and resolving and integrating the experience ... whatever it is that one co-created. It involves also embracing that the birth is the baby's birth into this world. It is not the mother's birth. She had her birth. This is another soul's journey into this physical world through her. It is her experience of birthing her baby, but it is the baby who will have to live with the choices and consequences of every single moment provided by the mother and her caregivers. The baby and the mother will forever live with the relationship dynamics of birth and attachment that happen during birth.

The human baby is a sentient being who is experiencing birth and that the experience is imprinted into the soul, body, and brain of the human. It is illogical that a society of people would promote that prenatal development is critical, but that the labor and birth is not -- so that well-educated, well-intended professionals can do whatever it is that they happen to believe is right, all based on their own science and research.

With that said, my observation is that many doulas are well-intentioned and good-hearted people who are hardly in the work for the money. They have a burning desire to help other women have the birth they desire, and their unacknowledged fire comes from the need to heal the birth they did or didn't have. This is a huge issue in the doula profession. Doulas (like nurses and doctors), like doctors and nurses, are not aware of their own experiences of their own birth, and they have usually not processed and healed their experiences of giving birth. Witnessing the manipulation and brutality, an LD nurse is a rare one if she can stay aware and receptive to the real needs of a laboring woman. Ninety percent of the current population was born in a hospital. Since the thirties that has involved excessive drugs and inappropriate positions and brutal treatment. Generations of denying this has profoundly numbed the majority of people, so that they will smile and coo at a baby who is being brutalized with an intervention, such as bulbing and scrubbing to stimulate, both of which are shown to be not only ineffective but disruptive. Some of add to that unduly emotionally and spiritually traumatizing.

Regardless of the role of the person at the birth, they bring to that space and time their own unresolved birth trauma. People at the birth are actively trying to heal their own trauma. Women don't get to choose the majority of the people who will actually be in their space during birth. The most important event of their baby's life so far, and it is left to fate and is a cacophony of strangers crap into which a newborn enters.

It is not surprising that doulas are not regulated --- there is no standard of care in obstetrics in the US. Obstetricians are self-regulated. There is no oversight of what obstetrics do. Most drugs that they use freely are off label use, but promoted as safe under the guise of "maternal choice" until the social tide promotes the myth as well. I.e, induction and epidural anesthesia.

A woman can go through multiple shifts during a labor and birth and every nurse will enact her version of is supposedly scientific. It is mostly based on her personal preferences, that particular hospital's policies often formed around previous lawsuits and prevention of lawsuits, and the attending physician's quirks, needs, and preferences. The power over patients is so profound as to totally disempower a man who was prepared and educated. A man will know remember that this baby is HIS baby and that he say no and he can hold his baby.

Enter the doula into the mix. Everyone has their agenda and baggage .... doctors have an agenda to manage and control stress, time, and litigation. Doulas have the agenda to support a woman ... often to support her to do that which is the mother is not even prepared to do or truly aware of.

Bottom line, there is a profound black out in our society about what is best for the human being who is coming into this world. It is the baby's birth into this world.

It will surely come to pass that obstetrics will use credentialing and licensure as a means of controlling doulas, and they will fight, like the nurses and midwives.

It's the human baby that will continue to get hurt in this fighting and warring environment.

We are in a collective denial about the impact of labor and birth on the human and it allows atrocities to be done to babies. Until we embrace the truth that the human baby is aware, sentient, engaging, developing and learning being in the womb AND during labor and birth, the war will continue.

I agree that nurses see and know what is happening, and they are key people and need to speak out. But they are trained to think a certain way and it will be a rare person who will is willing and able to be a whistle blower and is able to pay the price. Squeaky wheels and whistle blowers will most likely still be lone voices and suffer ongoing consequences such as loss of jobs and livelihood until the masses begin to unnumb and wake up. As we incite and insight women/nurses to be whistle blowers we are not ready to support their process and their losses that result. One may want to blow the whistle loud and shrill, but can rarely continue to make a living. I was a whistle blower nine years ago and the losses have been great. All I have left is my ongoing mission to bring attention to the fact that the newborn human baby is conscious and aware and has rights.

My baby was born thirty-three years ago today

2008-04-08T16:45:00.013-05:00

That makes him thirty-four years and nine months old.

I called him this morning to wish him happy birthday. However ... I have to say that I have been disillusioned with this cultural concept of celebrating one's life on the anniversary of one's birth.

Traditionally, so I am told, the survival of the first year of life was something to celebrate; hence, now it is the modern version of one's BIRTHDAY and false way, an archaic way of counting time. On our birthday it is ANNIVERSARY of our birth. But it doesn't accurately count how much time we have lived in a human body.

I developed this line of thought as I was celebrating big anniversaries -- first, my fortieth, and then my fiftieth anniversary of my arrival to this planet (birth from the womb) and while studying the fetal life and psychology. We know now that the gestational period is the beginning time of life, a critical time in development, as is the experience of labor and birth and first moments living outside the womb.

My friend was turning fifty almost exactly a year before me. Trying to console her, I pointed out that, in fact, she was celebrating the COMPLETING or ending of her fiftieth year, not the beginning. For some strange reason, I pointed out, (totally serious and straight-faced, because I both think about these such things, AND, I wanted to console her), we don't count the first year, (or the nine and a half months in the womb. Nine now that they induce routinely). Sooo, I happily shared with her that technically, she was celebrating the completion of her 50th year and the beginning of her fifty-first year. I concluded that, "Hey, you've been fifty all year, so why worry about it now? Let's have some fun." No, it didn't work for her like it worked for me, even when I pointed out, I was the one actually turning fifty, (starting my fiftieth year as I would be "turning 49" in a few weeks). I was actually turning 50! at the end of my forty-ninth year.

It didn't comfort my friend at all, but I found completing my fortieth and then my fiftieth years to be quite fun and a celebration. (My 30th was another story, as the said birthday boy was old enough to go to Junior High and I only freak out about his age!) A few days before my "49th Birthday", my daughter and I rode AMTRAK from Chicago to Disney Land, with stops in Philadelphia and Washington, D.D. (homeschooling is so awesome!). So, the completion of my 49th year and beginning of my 5oth year happened in Washington, DC. What fun we had. I don't even remember what I did on my "50th Birthday", the completion of my 50th year.

Ok, so my point, other than to till the ground for thinking about seeing that life of the human begins at even before conception? I was just reading some Birth to 3, zero to 3 literature and thinking about my son and his son who is about 144 days old, according to the ticker on his mama's blog. When he emerges from his mama's womb in late August -- all sweet, slippery, and wonderful, kicking, wide-eyed and turning his head when his mom or dad speaks, and smacking his lips and ready to crawl to his mama's breast, baby Jackson will be ten months old. He will be IN his tenth month of human development. So, why does we (we, as not as me, but as in this supposed intelligent, scientific society) say he is zero? Why will his time on this earth and his age go back to ZERO when he emerges from his first earthly home, his mama's womb? How is it logical or scientific to disregard the period of conception and gestation in development?

In reality, my son was nine months old when he was born from my womb on April 8th, 1975 so technically, he is completing his 33rd year; and, if we add the nine months I knew him in my womb (an amazing little being who was alive and kicking and responding to me, making me drink milk when I never liked it before) then he is actually 34 years and nine months old today. Judging from his reaction to my exclamation this morning, "Wow, you are gettin' old," maybe I shouldn't tell him?

What are we really celebrating on the day of the anniversary of our birth or our loved one's birth? Society doesn't even honor the event as significant for emotional, psychological, spiritual, or physical development; forget seeing birth as a sacred event in this medico-techno world.
What is up with this human culture that is supposedly so smart? That we wait for eighteen months of our babies' lives to pass before we say, "Oooooone." (How could I convey a duh tone?) Only the youth can get this and also be happy to be one year older already, like age matters anyway.

We need to see and celebrate our day of birth differently ... not as simply a marker of age transition but an honoring of our baby's presence. Today, when my son said birthdays aren't that big of a deal when you get older, I told him again how blessed I am to be his mother and how happy I am that he is my son. "I always have been," I said. He softly said, "I know, mom." How much greater thing is there than to be loved and wanted by the people who brought us into this world? Doesn't every human being deserve this?

Shouldn't we straighten this mess about Birth Days and Birthdays, and the disregard for the importance of wanted babies AND in calculating our ages which results in IGNORING the first 18 months of our lives and our babies' lives? How did we get so darned confused?? How did we come to dismiss the most foundational, critical, important nine months and first year of our lives as not counting? It's not logical to say the baby is alive and growing and developing in the womb and then dismiss prenatal development as not important enough to even count. It has lead us humans to dismiss the importance of gestation, and the labor and birth as critical experiences in development. God, we are collectively stupid about really important things, like human fetal and consciousness development. Turn on your television, if you still have one, and look at the consequence of doing so.

The story is unfolding

2008-03-30T11:13:00.013-05:00

My odometer on my old car with 180,000+ miles with new tires is approaching 8,000 miles on the "trip odometer. " I am having breakfast at "Big Boys" in Ann Arbor, MI where they have WI-FI. This afternoon I will be in Northport, MI, waaaaaaaaaaay up there, and interviewing Dr. George Malcom Morley about cord clamping. His site is www.cordclamp.org.

Dr. Morley has just returned from his granddaughter's birth. She was born by cesarean section and her cord was left unclamped and uncut. The placenta was allowed to release still attached to baby.

I have about 5,000 miles to go before I begin to edit the film .... and to present you here with a trailer. My producer friend in L.A. is also waiting for it ... we have a "celebrity" spokesperson in mind. She is an actor who has had a hospital birth and a homebirth.

The documentary is about the consciousness of the human baby and compares the experiences of babies born in homebirth and hospital. It transcends the debate over where the baby is safer -- home, hospital, or birth center -- and with whom -- doctor, CNM, CPM, or lay person, or Unassisted Childbirth. It is about what an aware being, a conscious human baby needs, where ever birth is to be safe. It is about the touch, the respect, and the scientifically based care the human baby needs from who ever attends his or her birth.

I am lamenting this morning that I did not keep an online journal of my journey to capture video for my documentary. I had no idea how profound the experience would be, but yet, of course, I knew it. I have an amazing story about seeing the risen Jesus the day after Easter -- on the road to Flagstaff (to be posted later). I am hardly surprised. The story has been whispering to me, guiding me to new places physically, emotionally, and spiritually for three years. The film organic and wants to be made and following my guidance, the unfolding has been amazing. This film has been waiting to be told (born) -- it is like stories women tell of their awareness of a soul hovering about, wanting to come into her. The "story" and my cat, Puddy, conspired with the Universe to create an opportunity for me to "just go do it." THAT is another story, of course, connected to my year and a half being in "in the cave" over my son's deployments to Iraq, and now in Afghanistan. I have emerged better and stronger ... and on this mission to complete the film.

As I put my belongings in storage and prepared for the trip, I thought about investing in wireless Sprint so I could be online where ever I had Sprint; but the expense was too much. This video is self-financed. I gave up my home to go on the road and interview people in the fields of obstetrics, family practice, midwifery, trauma healing, and pre and perinatal psychology. It is a venture in faith ... that all will be provided.

I have been on the road since late January and interviewed nearly forty people ... in California, Phoenix, Ohio, and now Michigan. I have interviewed Michel Odent, MD (France, UK); Sarah Buckley, MD (Australia); David Chamberlain, Ph.D.; William Emerson, Ph.D.; Raymond Castellino, D.C., Mary Jackson, CPM, Gladys McGarey, MD, Marti Glenn, Ph.D., and many others. I will make stops in Illinois en route back to Missouri before heading to Oklahoma and Texas and then Minnesota, South Dakota, Connecticut, and Boston. I have asked Dr. Amy Tuteur for an interview when I go to Boston ... hopefully in late April or early May. Her perspective can be a very important contribution to this project.

In Illinois I will be interviewing a couple of fathers and the Homefirst folks. In Missouri for a few days I will interview the physician who attended the homebirth of the baby featured in my documentary. I will also interview a couple of fathers ... and fathers-to-be, including my son Andy in Minnesota. His son, Jackson, has joined our family. He will be coming into his mama's arms in August. My documentary is for fathers ... I feel the urgency of getting the info all complied for my son and my grandson ... and his mama.

My video (baby) got a name last night .... since "she" is not yet born... just gestating ... I will not reveal her name yet. I will tell you it came from a father sharing the pain, the guilt and the powerless of his experience at his daughter's birth. Fathers are the audience for my documentary.

I wish I had the financial resources and techno savvy to bring you ongoing clips on the road. I expect to be back home in Missouri by the end of April and complete the trailer in May. I will be posting it here as soon as possible. I had planned to be set up to accept donations via PayPal when I post the trailer. As I wrote this, I decided to set up now, if you wish to contribute now. I appreciate any support you can give me. I figured if 1500 people donated just ten dollars - less than the price of attending a Hollywood movie with popcorn - I would have the resources to finish the trip easily and to do the editing. If I edit full-time I can finish it by my goal of March, 2009.

If 400 people donated ten dollars between now and May 1, I will be able to re-establish my home in order to focus on the film. If 1500 people would gift $10 I will be able to realize that March 2009 goal. Anyone who donates $100 will receive a free copy of the finished film. Anyone who contributes anything will be honored on the upcoming website. Would you consider joining me in this effort? If I had 24 more hours in the day ... and the financial resources I would do a marketing campaign that includes a relevant gift for contributing. Sorry, I can only offer gratitude and appreciation for your support and a warm feeling for contributing to an effort to make the world a safer place for the newborn human baby.

As I edit, I will be posting more information and excerpts. I would love and honor your energy and your company in this effort .... it is for all of our babies. It is to give consumers -- women and men -- the information they need to make sure their baby is safe where ever they give birth.

Thank you and bless you ....

Janel
Baby Keeper

Petition for Mother's Act

2008-03-24T13:13:00.002-05:00

Petition against The Mother's Act

Here's mine:

The Mother's Act is an outrage. Post-partum depression is a result of generations of brutalizing women and babies in medicalized, pathology-focused modern birth. There is every scientific justification for NOT using drugs in utero or post partum for the MAJORITY of women. We know that anti-depressant drugs contribute to heart problems in babies. These drugs have NEVER been researched to show the are safe for prenates at ANY TIME. Stop drugging women and babies with drugs already shown to be ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. Stop allowing drug companies to use women and babies in their research --- babies are non-consenting and uninformed subjects. Women who truly recover from PPD, or anyone who truly recovers from depression ... that is, they go on to be fully functional and fully emotionally beings as we are meant to be, don't do so with drugs or even talk therapy. It sometimes requires drug therapy and talking but the missing piece is that it takes healing at another level that involves body-mind-spirit and energy techniques -- those "new age" and "alternative" modalities, when in truth it is the medical field that is the alternative to eons of care that is focused on health, not pathology. When the Mother's Act include putting our resources into providing them with what they need to focus on prenatal parenting, proper nourishment, and lower stress, then it will be a Mother's Act intended to provide support and protection of pregnant and birthing women and new mothers. Mothers need the US to join the rest of the industrialized world and provide a safety net in the prenatal period and in the postnatal period -- fund a minimum of a one-year paid maternity leave for mothers.

Janel Martin Miranda
http://hospitalbirthdebate.blogspot.com/2008/03/mothers-act.html

Meet An Amazing Physician

2008-03-18T22:25:00.007-05:00

I had the honor and pleasure today of interviewing Gladys McGarey, M.D. in Scottsdale, Arizona. She is a family practice physician who specialized in providing care for pregnant and birthing women. The last two of her 6 children were born at home.

Dr. McGarey is the author of "The Physician Within You" and "Born to Live". On her publishers site:

Dr. McGarey is internationally known for her pioneering work in holistic medicine, natural birthing and the physician-patient partnership A founding member and past president of the American Holistic Medical Association, she also serves on a research committee of the Office of Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Dr. McGarey is a member of the International Advisory Board for the recently formed Institute for Natural Healing. Her work, through the Gladys Taylor McGarey Medical Foundation has helped to expand the knowledge and application of holistic principles through scientific research and education. Dr. McGarey is past president of the Arizona Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners, and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Holistic Medicine. She is on the Advisory Board of Arizona State University East.

From her website:

She knew who she was at a young age and dedicated her life to expressing it fully. Dr. Gladys McGarey, internationally recognized as the 'Mother of Holistic Medicine', was born to medical missionaries in 1920 India, and she grew up among lepers, elephants and Indian princes. Her adolescence was filled with awe-inspiring adventures of opposite extremes: attempted recruitment by the Third Reich for Hitler's youth army; travels through the Indian outback on medical safaris with her parents; and being on board a train that was stopped by chanting devotees, led by Mahatma Ghandi himself. Her extraordinary childhood was a precursor for an extraordinary life of breakthrough service to the medical profession. Dr. Gladys, as she is known by her patients and friends, has emerged to become a recognized innovator in alternative and complementary medicine.

I interviewed her for my documentary on the baby's experience of birth -- about the consciousness and awareness of the human baby during gestation, birth, and beyond. Dr. McGarey speaks about the baby's consciousness, the medical community's disregard for the baby as a whole person, for natural birth, and for woman's body and ability to give birth. She refers to modern medicine as a killing machine and shares her concerns of the misuse of interventions.

Read more about In the Womb project and the www.mcgareyfoundation.org.

The Mother's Act

2008-03-14T10:39:00.005-05:00

Have you heard about the new proposed legislation, The Mother's Act.

Be afraid ... be very afraid ... and then rise up and make your voices heard .... on behalf of all mothers and babies and families.

SC 1375: Mom's Opportunity to Access Health, Eduction, Research, and Support for Postpartum Depression Act.

"A bill to ensure new mothers and their families are educated about postpartum depression, screened for symptoms, and provided with essential services, and to increase research at the National Institutes of Health on postpartum depression."

That last phase is KEY PHRASE ... "and to increase research at the NIH on postpartum depression." Here we go again ... women and babies are going to be UNINFORMED and NON-CONSENTING research subjects.

Lord of Mercy, folks, this is terrifyingly wrong. Track this bill at:

www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill-s110-1375

(Sorry, I can't link this with html code as I am on the road and using someone else's MAC and having difficulty with functions I am not familiar with. I will fix it when I arrive at a destination tonight where I will have wireless connection.)

Even within the document itself it is recognized that the incidence of postpartum depression is moderate ... and yet all women will be subjected to anti-depressants during pregnancy? We already know that anti-depressant contribute to fetal heart abnormalities.

"Baby blues afflicts up to 80 percent of new mothers, postpartum depression occurs in 10 to 20 percent of new mothers, and postpartum psychosis strikes 1 in 1,000 new mothers."

So, a one-size-fits-all research project will not likely look at what causes new mothers to be blue (WHERE does the 80% come from anyway? Perhaps a paradigm shift is order? A shift to seeing that new mothers are not being served well in this modern world that requires them to go back to work within weeks, for example? This project will likely not focus on "alternatives" (the ways that have worked for eons) and will not see themselves (medicine and psychiatry) as the real and recent "alternative". So, then, this project will not consider what has and did work, nor will they attempt to figure out a non-medical, non-intervention, non-drug answer, like, oh ... say ... paid maternal leave for one or two years like every other industrialized nation, or, oh, yeah ... what about a mother and baby centered model of care during birth that normalizes and naturalizes birth, gives decision-making to mother and father, and provides the social and systemic support. No, they are going to do what they always do ... treat the masses who don't need it with the cure that doesn't even work well for the few who do need it.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

I will be revisiting my Safe Baby Resolution that was introduced in Hawaii last year. (www.safebabyresolution.blogspot.com) It supports social and financial support to be focused on the early, primal period where the baby is built to survive in a particular environment. It asks legislators to look at the current, compelling research such as the high incidence of depression related to medical interventions and disruptions, and to cesarean birth. It is insane to not create the safety net for birthing women during the primal periods and to then focus on resolving the consequences with drugs and psychiatry. The research exists to tell us much about depression in postpartum -- drugs and medical interventions are the cause. Good Lord .... I smell big Pharm.

WHAT IS GOING ON!?!?!?

The sponsor of the bill is New Jersey Senator, Robert Menendez. Co-sponsors are Durbin (IL has been talking about this for awhile), Snowe, Brown, Dodd, and Lautenberg. I had heard that Obama was a co-sponsor. He does not appear on the document.

Learn more about him at: www.govtrack.us/congress/person.xpd?id-400272

Contact him and let him know what you think about this proposed legislation to treat all women like depressed chattel at:

317 Senate Hart Office Building

Washington, DC 20510

202.224.47744

202.228.2197 (fax)

One Gateway Cneter,

Suite, 1100

Newark, NY 07102

973.645.3030

973.645.0502 (fax)

208 White Horse Pike, Suite 18

Barrington, NJ 08007

856.757.5353

856.546.1528 (fax)

Let him know what you think of this proposed legislation ... that could further disempower women and hurt babies in so many ways. There is no reason to mass-treat healthy women, to force them into mental health services and drug therapy that we know do not work, but do further harm. When I say, "do not work" I mean do not heal the source of the depression nor the symptoms of the depression for most people and we know that drugs have serious side affects. These drugs should be shown safe for the baby and mother -- heart, liver, brain functioning is impaired by the use of these drugs and should not be used during pregnancy. What are these people thinking? Oh, yeah ... I forgot ... they are getting rich from their money from big Pharm.

People who are not building a human being who will live their whole lives with the consequences of the side effects (the baby) and who take these meds may minimize some of their symptoms and even become more functional, but rarely are people symptom free and rarely is the quality of their life greatly improved. Their "normal" is typically still far from normal. However, we have non-drug and non-invasive techniques, based in energy psychology and spirituality that are proving more effective. Do we really want to see all pregnant women forced into the medical, psychiatric drug world? So a few senators and drug companies and all of their cronies can get richer?

Just Say No to Drugs .... and say YES to your Baby.

Freebirth Reflections: How Unassisted Childbirth Impacted My Life

2008-03-13T12:35:00.002-05:00

Freebirth Reflections: How Unassisted Childbirth Impacted My Life
Mother, Baby, and Family 6 Months Postpartum

It has been almost six months since my second son was born at home in our bed, caught by his father's loving hands before being passed into my own arms. I feel obligated as a proponent of unassisted childbirth to write about the impact freebirth has had on our lives. The birth of our son has been met mostly with positive reactions, and it has had a positive influence on our relationship as a family. My perspective has been forever changed by my son's simple, natural birth.

I healed very quickly from childbirth. I bled about half as much postpartum as with my first son, who was born in a hospital. With my oldest, I had second degree tearing and needed stitches. Being completely in charge of the birth the second time around, I sustained only tiny first degree lacerations. Besides the lingering baby weight, I was back to my old self in no time.

People have responded with fear and delight to our birth story, but always with surprise and questions. Upon telling a nurse that my husband "delivered" the baby, she asked snottily "WELL, what are his qualifications?" The ob/gyn who saw me just after my son's birth was rude enough believing I had a midwife that I opted not to even mention that it was a freebirth. The pediatricians at our clinic, although initially surprised and somewhat confused, were very accepting of our choice. They didn't give me any beef about it at all. The ER personnel we encountered the first and only time my son has been sick seemed confused, but indifferent, a reaction shared by the workers at the vital records office.

Getting a birth certificate was little fun. I had to clarify that my son was born at home without a midwife or prenatal care, when they told me proof of medical care was what they asked for as proof of pregnancy and birth. "Babies will come out without a midwife or prenatal care." My husband and I had to come in together with our newborn, a copy of his medical records, and two notarized affidavits from witnesses to my pregnancy. There were just two forms, one of which had to be redone due to my sloppy handwriting. Three weeks later, I was notified that they had forgotten our paperwork in a pile but were processing it immediately. After correcting a misspelling of his name, we finally received his birth certificate. His social security card followed a few weeks later.

I can't claim that freebirth has had an impact on my son's personality, because I don't know. He's as happy, easygoing, and social as our older son has always been. I do believe, though, that witnessing his brother's birth is one of the reasons why our sons are already so close. Our toddler has never shown jealousy, anger, or resentment towards his baby brother. He loves to play with him, make him laugh, and stroke his head, and he tries to help me care for him anyway he can. After the birth he began nurturing stuffed animals as we do the baby. When our toddler is in the room, our baby only has eyes for him. He watches him constantly, giggling at silly things his big brother does and brightening at all brotherly attention.

I am certain it has impacted my husband, though only he could tell you exactly how. He has expressed to me that catching his own baby, being the first to touch him, makes him feel more deeply bonded with him. It also seems to have strengthened his confidence in himself as a father and husband. Perhaps it put him deeper in touch with his paternal instincts. He views birth differently now, less like a medical emergency and more like a simple, normal, natural life event. The man who was once hesitant about having a homebirth now recommends homebirth, even freebirth, to all. His military colleagues think it's extraordinary that he "delivered" his son, though we've tried to explain to them that it's as simple as playing catch! One thing I know for certain is that it has brought my husband and me closer together. It is a testament that together we can do anything.

As for me, I am forever changed. I remember feeling invincible for weeks after the birth, euphoric, like super woman. I felt like I could do anything. I still look back and think, "God, I can't believe I really did that!" It was truly an amazing experience. It put me more in touch with myself, with nature, and with my instincts. It certainly made me feel more confident as a parent, to have taken complete responsibility for my son from the moment of his conception. The bond I have with him is as strong as the one I have with my older son, and yet different because of what we experienced together. I am in awe of my body, of birth, of life, and of the world, my respect and faith in each stronger. My house has a whole new history now, and each night I feel a new sense of safety and belonging as I fall asleep in the bed where my son was born.

Contributed by Heather B. If you enjoyed this article, please read more of my writings by visitting my homepage. I can also be found on Myspace. :)

Baby remembers birth: Hospital, Birth Center, or Home

2008-02-24T01:11:00.009-06:00

Meteyer resolved to stay out of the hospital when she gave birth, but it wasn’t easy. When her son, Ambrose, was born three years ago at the Greenhouse Birth Center in Okemos, Meteyer toughed out an epic 48-hour labor without drugs. She said it was worth it to avoid a hospital-managed birth, which she thinks would have involved a “failure to progress” diagnosis, Pitocin and a possible cesarean section.

Hey! Meteyer is a physician ...

Read the full article at Outside the Hospital: Local women discover natural birth

" ... epic 48-hour labor without drugs." As genuinely impressed as I am with the article and with Dr. Meteyer's awareness and commitment to natural birth, including her own, I have to post an article I wrote last week. It is about the baby's experience of birth, the baby's perception of his or her experience of birth.

One of my major complaints about both of the fields of obstetrics and midwifery is that few of the highly trained people in either profession consider the impact of the birth on the baby. Whether the birth is at the hospital, birth center, or home, I found the caregivers are oblivious to the baby. The single, desired outcome is, "Live baby." Their focus seems to be on showing that the birth choice and process was just fine, because, "the baby is ok." Baby is alive, baby is ok, and baby looks good, that is the language, regardless of what happens. No one asks the baby, or considers the baby ... as the general belief is that babies are resilient, and babies don't remember; so, adults trained in the medical field, wearing scrubs, licensed by states, and insured can do whatever they want or need.

I wrote the article after several days after learning from my friend/colleague who is writing a book on the experience of Csection and VBAC birth. She said out of two hundred stories, none, not one of the women talked about how the birth impacted their baby. I had been chatting over a period of days with David and Donna Chamberlain about this phenomenon. David is a pioneer in the field of prenatal consciousness. I contend that doctors, nurses, men, and women ... they can't allow themselves to consider that the human baby is fully aware and recording everything. To do so means they have to acknowledge what they've been doing to babies, sometimes for years and years. Mothers and fathers can't acknowledge the traumatic aspects of their baby's birth because our mainstream culture doesn't yet accept the science and techniques to heal the experience. Major abdominal surgery which prevents the baby from experiencing what humans have experienced for eons is touted as perfectly safe for the baby.

I have also been editing a documentary-style piece for the Columbia, MO Red Tent Event (www.birthonlaborday.com). Six of the seven women who shared their stories gave birth by cesarean section. I was so surprised; I expected it would be a lot of "natural birthers and homebirth mothers bragging about their experience to make other women feel bad," as another blog about homebirth rags about. Five of the 6 women also did a VBAC. They shared the traumatic experience of surgical birth and the triumph of completing themselves, healing themselves after a vaginal birth. During neither the surgical birth or the vaginal birth story did women talk about the impact of the experience on their baby. Women rarely do .....

So, here's my draft of an article I started for the www.BEPE.info group:

In our culture we speak of a baby’s birth as if it were the mother’s birth. When mothers give birth to their babies they are aware of their own experience and love to share it with everyone. But, do we consider the baby’s experience? Do we consider that as the mother speaks of her experience – joyful or painful – that the baby also has a perspective? His or her own story? Whether we acknowledge it consciously or not, we mothers naturally and intuitively know on a deep level that their baby also experienced their birth. We have never had the acknowledgement or support to truly “go there” in order to consider that that birth that profoundly affected us negatively also affected our baby.

When birth has been long, challenging, and painful, it has also been the same for the baby. In fact, it is even more so for the baby. The baby’s physical experience of being stuck, for example, is as terrifying as the mother’s experience, or maybe more. Unfortunately, society hardly acknowledges the life-altering impact of even a great birth. Women are not supported to celebrate the beautiful birth or to process a dangerous or terrifying birth experience.

The baby is also experience the most profound experience of life: the transition from the warm, wet, safe environment to this world. Within seconds or preferably minutes, the baby’s connection to the mother – his cord – is severed. She or he immediately goes through astounding physiological changes to become a totally, separate, and independent person. For almost ten months she or he has been symbiotic with his mother in every way .. physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, and physically.

The physical change alone is monumental. Within seconds the baby’s heart chamber closes to reroute blood, the liver begins to filter, the lungs expand.

Whatever is going on in the environment will either support or interfere with the baby’s process. This is all recorded in the baby’s brain. From the moment of conception, the creature we now know is our baby, has been growing in reaction to our environmental experiences and reactions. She or he only knew the world through us – our emotions, our hormones, our choices and behaviors. Now, his or her body (and brain) will begin her own life.

This is the moment as well when our new relationship begins with our baby. We have known this baby for months. We have felt our baby stirring within us. We can feel the difference between our baby’s personalities during gestation. We have talked to the baby, told her of our dreams of her and for her future. We have told her we can’t wait to see her. Some mothers have not wanted their babies and their gestational dialogues have gone differently. Whatever the story, it also belongs to the baby. Now our baby is here. She or he is a totally separate human, but it does not feel like that to us. This insures the baby’s survival.

The newborn baby’s life is still completely dependent. She or he is totally helpless and will survive only if there is a loving, nourishing caretaker who will protect him or her from dangers of the world. We humans are resilient and we do manage to survive in the harshest and most violent, uncaring environments, but we now know that a human’s ability to receive and give support, nurturing, and protection to others and self begins in the womb and during labor, birth, and infancy.

As mothers our emotional and psychological beliefs about our baby and our lives are important from conception forward. The baby has been grown in the womb of the person intended to be that caretaker and protector – in most cases. The relationship and the baby’s experience of the parents are well-established by birth. The birth experience will inform baby of how the world is – quiet, safe, supportive or scary, touch is harsh, and cold -- and how we will care for and protect him or her.

Mothers have their perspective of their experience of birthing their baby. Babies have their experience of being born. Did the baby begin his or her own birth process as is physiologically indicated? Or, was she induced? Was epidural narcotics used so that mother’s attention and focus was no longer on her body and her baby? What was that like for the baby?

How mother and baby come back together to reconnect will form a foundation for their way of relating. This is a profound relationship that will undergo major psychological and emotional changes in those first moments of life outside the womb. How mother and baby reconnect is defining. How that re-connecting and integration occurs will be the template for their relationship outside the womb.

Babies tell their story as mother tells her story – and new mother tell their story often. “Then the epidural came on and I was relieved. I watched television and slept. It was great.” But the baby is crying and thrashing. Mother says, “Shh, shh, shh,” to the baby and goes on with her story while simultaneously trying to force a breast or bottle in the baby’s mouth. This is like a mother telling her experience of birthing her baby, “It was horrible. I was in such pain and no one was there to support me.” Her friend says, “Shhhh..shhh…shhh… here is a piece of cake” and it is forced upon her. Soon the mother will not be trying to share her story that needs only to be acknowledged. It’s not that her perspective “will just go away” with time. She learns to hold the emotional pain inside. Babies learn this way too.

A baby’s response will accelerate, for example, when a mother is speaking of a medical caregiver whom she felt was invasive or violating. Or, sometimes, babies appear to zone out or fall asleep. They are “checking out”, they are not asleep. Babies also respond to parts of THEIR story that are joyful, exciting, and supportive. “And, when Bob (daddy) arrived I was able to relax and ….” baby relaxes, coos, laughs, or shrieks.

While I know this information may trigger many feelings about how our babies have been treated and what they experienced, I also always intend to provide the hope to heal it. It is important to understand that there are new techniques that support babies to heal what happened during birth. These techniques support mothers and babies to tell their story and to be heard by one another. Acknowledgement is the foundation for mother-child healing and for family and couple healing. Fathers/partners have their perspective of their experience that varies greatly from either mother or baby. Their experience is vastly different, but just as important. Fathers also need to have support to share their story and to be heard and supported. Men have no place to share, “I felt horrible when I wasn’t able to protect my baby or when I couldn’t get the nursing staff to listen to our decisions” or “when this man I never saw before lifted up my wife’s gown and ….”.

Mothers and fathers – nurses, doctors, anyone – can learn to watch babies and listen to their cries. Adults are too fast. They tend to be invasive of baby’s space and unresponsive to baby’s timing needs. Anyone can learn how to slow down and to respond to a baby in a more gentle, slower, and aware manner. All of us can learn how to pause when we are too activated, and to slow down to hear and see BABY’S story and their current needs expressed through their body language and cries.

This information can be quite alarming for parents who have not considered that their baby has their own perspective of the birth experiencing. This can trigger shame, guilt, anger, and denial. That is the “bad news” as I call it. The GOOD NEWS is that there is much new scientific information and new techniques to support a person – at any age – to heal their very early experiences. The focus of the new techniques works on the central nervous system level. We intend for baby (whether 4 days or forty years old) to have an experience of being wanted, heard, protected, seen, not separated from mother, or touched gently, etc. When the baby has that experience, the nervous system is able to create new neural connections around that experience. It allows one to integrate the undesirable experience with the desirable.

Healing, integration, processing … it is about healing the experiences during conception, gestation, labor and birth, and early parenting in order to overcome the experiences that interfere with attachment and bonding in the primal period. We believe that these early experiences are the foundation for the rest of life. We believe that the GOOD NEWS is that we can create the relationships we wish for with our loved ones when we acknowledge our woundings and the joys of our earliest experiences.

Therapists who work this way – to support baby, mother, and father to process their individual experiences and to integrate them into their new family system -- have been trained in biodynamic craniosacral therapy as the foundation for the work, and will have trained with one of the pioneers of this work, William Emerson, Ray Castellino, Wendy McCarty or one of their many students. Therapists and their teachers are usually members of the International Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH) (www.birthpsychology.com). APPPAH was co-founded by Nevada City resident, Dr. David Chamberlain. He and his wife Donna started a local group, Birth and Early Parenting Educators (BEPE) to support Very Early Parenting locally and beyond.

L. Janel Martin Miranda

CranioSacral focused Attachment Therapist

Birth Videographer

Midwest BEPE - Columbia, MO

Circumcision

2008-02-15T23:19:00.004-06:00

Speaking of pain, have you seen this video by Penn and Teller about newborn circumcision?

This entertaining documentary interviews parents, doctors, former babies, and activists both for and against routine infant circumcision.

Penn and Teller -- BULLSHIT

Be aware, it's very graphic.

Pain and Pleasure

2008-02-10T13:37:00.001-06:00

The fetus is not a “little adult,” Anand says, and we shouldn’t expect it to look or act like one. Rather, it’s a singular being with a life of the senses that is different, but no less real, than our own.

From article, The First Ache, in New York Times today,

http://www.nytimes. com/2008/ 02/10/magazine/ 10Fetal-t. html?_r=1& th&emc=th& oref=slogin

I began reading this and just had to highlight some points and give my perspective. It focuses on pain. Our society is obsessed with pain; well, with the elimination of pain. Have you noticed? Drug companies spend a lot of money to advertise for every imaginable pain and rake in billions of dollars for their efforts. And, we still have a lot of people unable to feel their pain ... and they are unable to feel their pleasure, their joy, and humans struggle to truly embrace love, touch, regard, and healthy, sexual connection. Consider with me as you read the article, what's up with this focus on understanding and getting rid of pain? Pain is a primary, human emotion, as is pleasure. Can we have one without the other?

He finds “outrageous” the suggestion that the fetus feels anything like the pain that an older child or an adult experiences. “A fetus is biologically human, of course,” he says. “It isn’t a cow. But it’s not yet psychologically human.” That is a status not bestowed at conception but earned with each connection made and word spoken. Following this logic to its conclusion, Derbyshire has declared that babies cannot feel pain until they are 1 year old.

If this is true, why do we nurture and love our babies? Why are we aghast at the story of an adult abusing a newborn or infant? Should we evaluate the experience of our infants with the same standard then that obstetrics uses in the evaluation of the newborn and the consequence of their work? Baby is alive, Baby looks ok.

As you read about the debate over when does pain start in the human and do prenates feel pain, wonder with me, "Do prenates, laboring and birthing babies, and infants FEEL ... so is all of the love we give them even important if they don't FEEL." Is there no "psychology" as this one researcher says? Or can you embrace the growing scientific evidence shared in this article that tells that we are CONSCIOUS beings during gestation? What does not yet psychologically human mean anyway? I have, sometimes regrettably, two degrees in the psychology field. I belong to the emerging field of pre and perinatal psychology (www.birthpsychology.com) even though I don't care for the title because of the word psychology. Psychology has a bad rap these days and what it means to some prevents them from pursuing the field of pre and perinatal life.

However, my colleagues -- from a myriad of field -- have been synthesizing the scientific research for over two decades. Today's article supports not only their work in the study of fetal pain (experience and consciousness) but also that there is a consciousness before conception, an existence, a being, a soul that comes in at conception. One can begin, as pioneering scientists have always done with emerging information to look even broader and deeper. We can wonder about the conception experience of the consciousness (soul) and the experience of the laboring and birthing baby in terms of pleasure and pain, or as biology looks at experience, growth or protection. Yeah, that brings up the abortion issue; I address it at the end.

I am only half way through the article and had to post my responses so far. What a great dialog we could have in this country if so many folks weren't afraid to change their behavior (obstetrics) and so many folks were afraid to acknowledge the consequences of our unknowing so far (the effects of random conception, unaware gestation, invasive drugged labor and birth, and disconnected infancy .)

Does the fetus feel pain?

"When the surgeon lowered his scalpel to the 25-week-old fetus, Paschall saw the tiny figure recoil in what looked to him like pain."

"I don’t care how primitive the reaction is, it’s still a human reaction,” Paschall says. “And I don’t believe it’s right. I don’t want them to feel pain.”

“Pain perception probably does not function before the third trimester,” concluded Rosen, the review’s senior author. The capacity to feel pain, he proposed, emerges around 29 to 30 weeks gestational age, or about two and a half months before a full-term baby is born. Before that time, he asserted, the fetus’s higher pain pathways are not yet fully developed and functional."

Before nerve fibers extending from the thalamus have penetrated the cortex — connections that are not made until the beginning of the third trimester — there can be no consciousness and therefore no experience of pain. Sunny Anand reacted strongly, even angrily, to the article’s conclusions.

Anand acknowledges that the cerebral cortex is not fully developed in the fetus until late in gestation. What is up and running, he points out, is a structure called the subplate zone, which some scientists believe may be capable of processing pain signals. A kind of holding station for developing nerve cells, which eventually melds into the mature brain, the subplate zone becomes operational at about 17 weeks.

I've said it a hundred times maybe here ... from the moment of conception there is no time in human development that is not critical. Every moment of life, from conception forward, through gestation, during LABOR AND BIRTH, the hours and days in the hospital, infancy, childhood ... everything we experience is registered.

after birth.

How important this wording is to our unconscious --- the separation of PREnatal and POSTnatal. Our language reflects a huge discrepancy in our thinking about human babies that is perpetuated by science and obstetrics. Notice this as you are reading anything from the science of prenatal life to ACOG literature. We look at the human being's experiences in two categories, Before birth and AFTER birth. Please begin to wonder about that ... how is it that we do not consider the same profound understandings to exist for the laboring and birthing baby? Why do we not understand that the newborn baby that we see so interactive and responsive at home three days later was also the same in the hospital. WHY do we, as a society, and around the world, believe that when the baby is in the hospital, in the care of professional medical people that whatever is done to the baby won't be remembered, and so, it doesn't matter?

Before nerve fibers extending from the thalamus have penetrated the cortex — connections that are not made until the beginning of the third trimester — there can be no consciousness and therefore no experience of pain.

Maybe not ...

"....five children who were captured on video by a Swedish neuroscientist named Bjorn Merker on a trip to Disney World a few years ago. The youngsters, ages 1 to 5, are shown smiling, laughing, fussing, crying; they appear alert and aware of what is going on around them. Yet each of these children was born essentially without a cerebral cortex. The condition is called hydranencephaly, in which the brain stem is preserved but the upper hemispheres are largely missing and replaced by fluid."

Mercer concludes:

“The tacit consensus concerning the cerebral cortex as the ‘organ of consciousness,’ ” Merker wrote, may “have been reached prematurely, and may in fact be seriously in error.”

Maybe the "consensus" that has pervaded conventional thought and lead us for generations to believe that the human baby doesn't remember the pain ... maybe that consensus is also in error.

Many noted that if Merker is correct, it could alter our understanding of how normal brains work and could change our treatment of those who are now believed to be insensible to pain because of an absent or damaged cortex.

While the scientists go on and on debating the if and when, and while obstetrics continues to promote that our laboring and birthing baby doesn't feel the experience, birth trauma doesn't exist so it doesn't matter they do to a baby to get them here, while they promote that the newborn doesn't remember, as in doesn't remember the happiness of the experience either, while they promote the baby remembers being dropped by the mother, but won't remember pain inflicted by a medical caregivers, while they promote that the baby IS affected by maternal ELICIT drug use but not by use IN the HOSPITAL, while all this goes on around us, LOOK at babies. LOOK at NEWBORN BABIES. SLOW down, LOOK at them ... at how they interact with their loved ones. Look at how gently and softly parents touch their newborns as the medical caregiver is so rough. Wonder at how the baby settles down in the arms of this PROTECTIVE parent and thrashes and flinches when that rough caregiver comes near or they hear that person's voice.

The possibility of consciousness without a cortex may also influence our opinion of what a fetus can feel. Like the subplate zone, the brain stem is active in the fetus far earlier than the cerebral cortex is, and if it can support consciousness, it can support the experience of pain. While Mark Rosen is skeptical, Anand praises Merker’s work as a “missing link” that could complete the case for fetal pain.

If the prenatal brain can support consciousness we can begin to extrapolate about the laboring and birthing baby and the infant AND about the consciousness that exists at conception and before. As the article goes on, of course it gets into abortion, as does the field of pre and perinatal psychology as we embrace that the human being has a soul, an existence before conception (and after physical life here). Embracing the concepts of pre and perinatal psychology that lead us to believe that the birth experience is a critical developmental time. It scares many who do not want to fully consider abortion beyond the typical, mainstream bi-polar perspective of the "right" versus the "left" that pervades ever issue in our modern life. I consider that while physical life here can be ended with abortion, consciousness, the essence, soul, energy that exists before conception a soul can not be killed, and that the experience of abortion is between these three souls (mother, father, and baby).

IN FACT, “THERE may not be a single moment when consciousness, or the potential to experience pain, is turned on,” Nicholas Fisk wrote with Vivette Glover, a colleague at Imperial College, in a volume on early pain edited by Anand. “It may come on gradually, like a dimmer switch.” It appears that this slow dawning begins in the womb and continues even after birth. So where do we draw the line? When does a release of stress hormones turn into a grimace of genuine pain?

Do we really need decades and decades of conclusive research to tell us to be soft, gentle, kind, quiet, respectful in the presence of a newborn? Do we not know that when we deaden our ability to feel pain, we also deaden our ability to feel all emotions?

Don't we want to be able to feel our pain, so we can feel our pleasure?

Don't we want to be able to feel our pleasure, so we can feel our pain?

Don't we want to know we are alive? And, don't we want to experience our lives here on this wonderful planet?

So, that's as far as I got. More later for sure....

Fentanyl -- More about Fentanyl

2008-02-08T23:44:00.001-06:00

Last year I posted about epidural and how babies are non-consenting research subjects. Today I received a comment on that post and wanted to share it here. Otherwise, you might miss it. It gives me the opportunity to revisit that information.

Link to the post:
http://hospitalbirthdebate.blogspot.com/2007/01/babies-are-non-consenting-research.html

And today's comment:

Anonymous said...: I am a terminal ovarian cancer patient and my doctor prescribed a fentanyl patch for the extreme pain I suffer. It has provided excellent relief and I don't believe that it has damaged my mental or physical health in any way. However, I have read that it is not short-term, acute pain, so I would agree that it doesn't belong in obstetrics. However, I think you're going overboard to classify it as a street drug. There are people who misuse just about anything in an attempt to get high. Should we ban house paint and spray cans so teens can't "huff" them? Same with fentanyl. There's more to life than giving birth. This drug has brought much comfort for people who suffer chronic pain.; 11:26 AM

Thank you for your post, Anonymous. There are not words to express how sorry I am to know that you are terminally ill. I wish you the best. I am sure the fentanyl patch is most helpful to you. This is the appropriate use of fentanyl. Labor and birth is not.

I shared an article about a young man who died from a fentanyl and heroine overdose in my post last year. The article says that over a hundred people have died from that combination of drugs. Clearly, I am not the one to classify it as a street drug. Whether it is or not isn't the point. What is happening to babies who are born under the influence of narcotics and synthetic opiods is the point. In addition to it being known as a dangerous drug on the street, the US Defense Department classified fentanyl as a potential chemical warfare drug. They were considering it as a chemical to use to subdue crowds but decided against it after the tragic loss of many lives in the Chech Republic, I think it was., where fentanyl was responsible for many deaths when used to subdue crowds.

Why would anyone even consider administering this to a laboring woman and baby? For any reason? The reason it is used at all was to counter the effects of bupivicaine which was known to be dangerous.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opiod. The drugs -- a cocktail of drugs at the discretion of the individual anestheseologist -- are administered directly into the spine of a woman. It doesn't just numb her from the waist down -- it gets into her system. She is impaired. Her baby gets the drug and is impaired. This doesn't begin to compare with the valid use of the drug for pain for an adult, with a patch. The blood brain barrier of the newborn doesn't develop for weeks according to some research out of the University of Arizona. Unfortunately, I can't find it right now. Basically, the astrocytes that will eventually make the blood brain barrier don't develop for awhile.

Prior to the great marketing campaign in obstetrics that convinced women that epidural is safe, we knew that babies were affected by the drug that is still used in epidural -- bupivicaine. I can tell you, as can many women, we were not "numb from the waist down." We were drug impaired. Babies were limp, unresponsive, and hard to waken. My daughter could not be wakened. So, now, a decade later, thanks to fentanyl... thanks to fentanyl!?!??! ... those effects are minimized. All babies from the beginning of obstetrics have uninformed, non-consenting research subjects. Now epidural is promoted as so "safe" and so "normal" that women who want to NOT have epidural are now seen as the weirdos by women who are happy to go in, lay down, spread before strangers, and turn their bodies over to the medical conveyor belt. They are happy to be numb, unable to feel their bodies, their babies, or to even move to allow their baby more room to birth from their bodies. Pitiful. Talk about "peer pressure".

Bupvicaine and fentanyl, neither one, were ever shown to be safe before using in labor and birth. Never shown to be safe for the baby. Experimentation on women and babies in recent years in obstetrics has been to find the dosage of bupivicaine that does provides the best "maternal satisfaction." The harm to the baby during birth and for his life time is not anyone's consideration.

The research by the early 90's was clear about the detrimental effects for both. Rather than discontinue it's use, experimentation on women and babies continued. The main point of my posts is that fentanyl is used by obstetricians without ANY research to show that it was safe for the baby or mother before doing so. There is a huge difference between a fentanyl patch for a adult in pain, and a catheter in your spine allowing the drug directly into your nervous system. HUGE DIFFERENCE. An adult can choose to use it. A baby can not choose. They are dependent upon to ensure their safety and wellbeing during labor and birth. A woman who would never consider during sanctioned (prescription) or street drugs, and is admonished if she does, is given full permission to use harmful drug during this most important event. It is done without his consent and against his will. Does the human baby not have the right to labor and be born without drug? With a mother is not impaired.

bupivicaine and fentanyl to find the best amount of fentanyl to COUNTER the dangerous effects of bupivicaine. These effects have been known since late 80's and early 90's. Rather than ending the use of the bupivicaine researchers continue to study the effects on HUMANS ... human newborns.

I am sorry, I don't think we can compare the adult experience/need for pain relief with fentanyl with what is right and just for the human newborn. The "off-label" use of fentanyl in obstetrics, on laboring and birthing women and babies can not be justified. I am speaking out on behalf of the babies who cannot speak for themselves. I am outraged at the medical profession for such criminal violation of woman and babies and for violating the position they hold. They are to protect and "do no harm." I am sad that women are so incapable of trusting their own body to birth their baby and instead trust the propaganda that epidural is perfectly safe. I am outraged that they believe that the use of narcotics is dangerous and the potential for addiction applies to everyone else but them.

What kind of society is this that promotes that a woman laboring and giving birth "under the influence" is ok? Natural? Normal?

I was born by saddle block and have done intensive trauma therapy to heal it. I have given birth "under the influence" of drugs several times -- one against my will and permission, and one by choice as my ex-medical student, later to be obstetrician husband convinced me it was perfectly safe. I was thirty-seven, supposedly in the high risk category and "didn't need to go through all of that." Wasn't he sweet? That was in 1994. Ten years later I found the extensive research showing how dangerous it was for me and for my daughter. He didn't read the research. He had trusted his teachers who pass on their medical rituals.

I know how hard it is to process the violation of a birth where things were done to me, against my will. I know what is it like to feel violated and feel raped .... to not remember twenty hours and who did what to me. All because of drugs I never said yes to. I know how hard it is to have chosen to induce and use epidural and then to learn how lied to I was. In both cases I know how painful and how freeing it is to recognize and deal with the impact on myself and baby. I know the power to heal that comes from seeing that my baby experienced their birth, whether I was violated or made the decision that resulted in their wounding.

We can acknowledge that women and babies are affected by birth ... drugs, interventions, rough handling, strangers, invasions ... because now we have techniques to help us heal and integrate the early, traumatic experiences. We don't have to remain ignorant, in denial, continuing to harm babies.

Back in the ring ... to help my colleague

2008-02-06T13:50:00.001-06:00

My colleague, Jill Chase, PhD, has entered into the web of another blog. The discussion is on waterbirth and Jill posted info from our field of pre and perinatal birth psychology. Jill and I are both members of the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Birth and BEPE.info (Birth and Early Parenting Educators). I posted this, but I am sure that it will disappear. I enter this ring ... like All-Star wrestling very rarely, only when I see a colleague getting attacked from behind, like with a metal chair and a multi-tag team approach. So, here's my post.

Hi, Jill --

I just happened to see you were in this nasty web. Having your credentials trashed is par for the course here. Don't take it personally. All you can do is post and run at best. Any one with credentials and information to challenge the status quo, to question the big debate home vs hospital, doctor vs midwife, from the perspective of the baby gets blocked anyway.

As a developmental psychologist, maybe you can address this -- before you get blocked. It does seem logical to me that the human development never ends once the conception occurs. so, that means that whatever is happening in the womb and during the first hours and months of life -- responding, learning in response to the environment -- is also going on during labor and birth. Isn't it rather unscientific and ignorant to think that the experience of the birthing baby isn't processed like every other moment? Whatever we call it -- imprinting or memory -- the experience is recorded in the human baby's brain and body.

This blog won't ever talk about the real needs of the baby. Because obstetrics and midwifery both deny that the baby is an aware, live being, the brain is working, is "online" and recording everything, and that the neocortex and language will develop based on what has happened before, you won't find an audience here. Most people have experienced harsh, rough treatment and interventions. Some take the perspective that it's the way it is and doesn't matter because we don't remember. Ironically, they are the medically trained and entrenched people, or their zombie followers. It is like that hazing mentality. They got through it just fine, so there is no reason to stop doing it. To realize that babies remember birth opens up a whole new level of FEELING ... denial is easier. "Because we have always done it" is easier answer than saying, "OH MY GOD... what have we done and what can do it about." Most of the people here can not go there --- they can not also see the field we belong to as having resources for healing when one has been traumatized.

Suzanne:
"Hey, I bet my babies didn't particularly love being intubated or placed on respirators! I should have told the NICU staff not to bother, as I wouldn't want to cause psychological problems later on!"

This is a perfect example of how the denial belief system that says we should just ignore that babies remember when some babies need interventions. Somehow, the need to do interventions with the knowing that the baby is going to impacted for life doesn't enter into the denial locked mind. WHEN babies need touch and intervention, a simple answer/solution is to do the touch with awareness. Our field believes we should tell the baby what is happening, ask permission, and to support the mother to be supporter of the baby.

Speaking to the baby, holding and comforting the baby before interventions when possible ... in a medical emergency, someone explaining to the baby, acknowledging the pain, the fast past, the separation from the mother and creating a safe environment. But the biggie is in a fast, harsh intervention, and/or on ongoing such as in NICU, the caregiver knowing that the baby is experiencing it and the brain and body will remember, will acknowledge this, maybe not verbally in the moment, but with their touch and regard for the baby. There is a whole field of research and practices for how to help the baby afterwards. This is what the human being needs in every other stage of life...

I was banned here repeatedly for posting what you have about our field and then started Hospitalbirthdebate.blogspot.com. I have done several posts on this over the past year. Feel free to be a guest poster.

As the blogger on hospitalbirthdebate, I was featured on Tales from the Womb. The NICU doctor blasted Dr. Wirth and denied that it is scientific that baby's remember; but who can deny that they experience it? He said on his April 22 post, "So no, I will not be softly and calmly uttering phrases like 'You're dying. Stay calm. I'm going to do an emergent chest tube insertion. It'll probably hurt... a lot, because if I take time to use pain medication, that tension pneumothorax is going to kill you.' to babies in the delivery room. Sorry."

Why not? Why not give a newborn baby struggling for life the same respect we would like to see our child, friend, spouse, or parent receive in their life threatening crisis?

My main point/question to those who feel that since their baby experienced or they are a doctor who does it ... And who can deny that human development is one, long continuum from conception forward? How can you scientifically promote that human being goes into "OFF" or "blob mode" in labor or birth or just because they are in the hospital, or being touched by medically trained people.

There is a middle ground. It IS ok to acknowledge the human newborn AND deliver conscious, gentle, acknowledging care and touch. AND, more importantly, we know HOW to help these babies to not live in the shadow of harsh entry into the world.

Our field is new, cutting edge, and compiling all of the science from multiple fields. She, like most medically trained people who are treating babies as they do, refuse to look at what they are doing -- even when based in science. But then, obstetrics is known, even within medical field, to be non-science based.

I am on my way to California right now to spend a month with David and Donna Chamberlain and our BEPE.info group. I'll have some good posts on this topic this month. And, I am posting this one now.

Janel
Baby Keeper

Just Say Yes .... to women and babies

2008-02-04T10:09:00.001-06:00

"We live in a culture where it's okay to "medicate" yourself to oblivion but if you are okay with coping with the natural pain of childbirth you're crazy."

Nik, a commenter on this blog

We have to "Just Say No to Drugs" when we do.

I read a great post today, Epidural is not your savior, at www.chris-0500-rn-rant.blogspot.com. She makes a point that I've been making for a long time ... about how woman expect to be pain free in birth and for the birthing of their baby from their body to somehow be done to them. Medicine has both obliged and created a monster. Medicine purports to be serving maternal requests and needs, but truly it is a relationship. When did it start ... that's in the history. Today, is a review of some literature that always makes me livid ....

Twenty years ago the research was clear -- epidural is dangerous for mother and baby. The need for management of fluids and oxygen were known, as were maternal and baby cardiac and spinal issues.

Not many people consider that these drugs were NEVER shown to be safe BEFORE using on women and babies, just as no drug - ether, scopalamine, demerol, bipuvicaine, fentanyl, cytotec -- was ever shown safe before doctors used them experimentally on women and babies.

Women have been trained by medical field and culture to believe that childbirth pain is horrible (thanks to pit it is) to be managed by someone or something outside themselves. In doing so women give up their power and ability to experience any pain -- the result of this mentality to use substances to get rid of every pain and for the medical person to do so is far reaching. As an ex of an OB, I am aware of the many reasons for the pushing of drugs in the medical field ... natural birthers allude to them and medical people deny it.

Here's a perfect example of the "Peer literature" that shows it has nothing to do with the real risks to the baby, to their relationship, and to their long-term addiction potential.

Bupivacaine versus bupivacaine plus fentanyl for epidural analgesia: effect on maternal satisfaction.
J D Murphy, K Henderson, M I Bowden, M Lewis, and G M Cooper, Department of Anaesthetics, Birmingham Maternity Hospital, Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre. BMJ. 1991 March 9; 302(6776): 564–567.

OBJECTIVE--To compare a combination of epidural fentanyl and bupivacaine with bupivacaine alone for epidural analgesia in labour and to evaluate factors in addition to analgesia that may influence maternal satisfaction.

"Maternal satisfaction" is the objective!?! with a drug like fentanyl?? while the field promoted controversy about home and water birth and maternal satisfaction and empowerment are ridiculed?!? Perhaps this “scientific” approach to studying the drugs used in epidural anesthesia – focused on maternal satisfaction – give us some clues as to how this cultural approval for these dangerous drugs, promoted as safe, but purportedly for physician needs and timing, has evolved into a socially accepted, safe drug. It is under the guise of “maternal request” and “informed consent” lingo and no one addresses a corresponding, rising epidemic of narcotic addiction problem in the US.

The medical field and their research are responsible for creating this growing belief in labor and birth being about maternal satisfaction, not the human baby's need -- and doing so with dangerous drugs.

Here is an example of peer literature that shows us just how little the baby is considered in the labor and birth experience.

The drug, bipuvicaine, that was known/shown dangerous in the early nineties is counteracted by another drug, fentanyl, a synthetic opiod, also NEVER shown to be safe for the mother and baby, but known to be extremely dangerous for everyone else in the world to use. WOMEN AND BABIES are being experimented on without their consent. From what we know of the epidural effects, from the 90's, we, physicians, nurses, mothers, grandmothers, fathers and anyone with half a brain cell ought to know that we must use these drugs and interventions only when absolutely necessary. The medical field promotes the use of cesarean, not because it is safer and easier for the human baby or mother.

Synergistic effect of intrathecal fentanyl and bupivacaine in spinal anesthesia for cesarean section.
Jaishri Bogra, Namita Arora, and Pratima Srivastava,BMC Anesthesiol. 2005; 5: 5.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1159169

In this study by addition of fentanyl we tried to minimize the dose of bupivacaine, thereby reducing the side effects caused by higher doses of intrathecal bupivacaine in cesarean section.

The researchers -- IN their research -- actually acknowledge the detrimental effects of epidural and are researching for dosage on live babies and women. Of course, throughout the 90's doctors experimented with drugs and doses and the researchers looked at the results. What kind of research is this? We are to believe any of the research that the obstetric field dishes us? I gave birth twice in a teaching hospital - one a planned induction with epidural. Were we research subjects? Must not be, no one ever followed up to see how we did in the long term. HA! It's appalling.

Methods: Study was performed on 120 cesarean section parturients divided into six groups, identified as B8, B10 and B 12.5 8.10 and 12.5 mg of bupivacaine mg and FB8, FB10 and FB 12.5 received a combination of 12.5 μg intrathecal fentanyl respectively. The parameters taken into consideration were visceral pain, hemodynamic stability, intraoperative sedation, intraoperative and postoperative shivering, and postoperative pain.

The year is 2005. HOW IS THIS “SCIENTIFIC STUDY” APPROVED AND ACCEPTABLE TREATMENT OF THE HUMAN NEWBORN??? One hundred twenty babies randomly placed in groups to receive different drugs. Drugs that were never, ever shown to be safe for a baby. It's OK to give birth under the influence of narcotics when we know how potentially addictive and dangerous narcotics are every day for everyone. Lord o' mercy -- do the people in charge of the "War on Drugs", drug prevention, drug treatment, and child psychology know this?!?! Being in all of those fields, I can tell you, NO, they don't. Do nurses and doctors thinks about this?

The researchers continue ...

Researchers concluded, Spinal anesthesia among the neuraxial blocks in obstetric patients needs strict dose calculations because minimal dose changes, complications and side effects arise, providing impetus for this study. Here the synergistic, potentiating effect of fentanyl (an opiod) on bupivacaine (a local anesthetic) in spinal anesthesia for cesarian section is presented, fentanyl is able to reduce the dose of bupivacaine and therefore its harmful effects.

So, now we have a new generation of children raised on television, drug commercials, and the DARE program who are now giving birth. We have women so unwilling to even feel a pain and willing to do so because they believe is it so safe ... because they are alive and "baby looks fine." The research above said babies were fine WITHOUT that even being a part of their research study. Is peer research really the ultimate in informing us? Or does it serve to perpetuate the obstetric field's vice on women's bodies and souls?

And, meanwhile, even a good number of good doctors and good nurses know that women can do labor pain. They realize that their profession is barely a hundred years old and that women gave birth for eons without medical professionals present. How quickly these drugs ... morphine, cocaine, and narcotics have numbed humanity.

The natural birth field mostly promotes the ability and right of a women to move her body to birth her baby ... upright, no recreational use of narcotics during birth because of the danger to her and her baby. She is up and off her sacrum where the nerves all gather and pain is heightened. Her pelvis can up open up to 30-50% eliminating the need for interventions and the coached pushing. On her back, numb from the waist down with the interventions so aptly described in the post, Epidural is not your savior, it is an absolute miracle, a tribute to just how much the human woman's body and her baby can endure and overcome, and still manage to birth ... alive. Another blog and visitors shred the natural birth movement and women's self-empowering that comes with claiming her body and birthing at home. It is they, the medical caregivers and their peer reviewed research that has created the language of "maternal satisfaction" and now they are angry and outright undermining that when women say no thank you to drugs. Anyone who has read about and considered the natural birth movement knows the main reason women want to birth out of the hospital is to avoid the drug enforcement crew.

When a woman "knows her body works" and maybe even sees her body as her savior, she doesn't need any drugs ... and science and logic tell us that is better for baby and mother, and their relationship. The mechanics of medical birth ensure that women will need pain relief. It is criminal, I tell you ... and then there's what they do to the baby while maintaining that babies don't remember.

Oh, my ... where are the logical and scientific folks who claim that the birth experience is irrelevant at best for the babies when we know logically and scientifically that there is no time in human development from the conception experience throughout life that the human brain is not taking in and processing information. Birth is not a black out where the baby's brain is not functioning ... INTERACTING WITH THE ENVIRONMENT AND PROCESSING IT. Americans, 90% of whom were born "under the influence" of drugs are IN a BLACK OUT when it comes to the needs of the laboring and birthing newborn.

"Just say yes ... to women and babies"

I have an ongoing challenge out to anyone who can show me ONE piece of literature that shows that any drug ever used in obstetric care was shown to be safe before using on laboring and birthing baby.

Induction with Castor Oil

2008-01-14T22:59:00.004-06:00

I saw a post somewhere discussing the scientific validity of using Castor oil to begin labor. I tire of this stupid war between midwives and doctors, unrecognized as just another a battle between women and men and women's rights and needs to be independent, autonomous, and respected. A debate over which is more scientific -- drugs or an ancient old remedy, Castor Oil? One of the things that is tragic about obstetrics AND midwifery is the lack of regard for the physiology of labor from the baby's perspective. How about a discussion about INDUCTION? Period.

No one seems to want to have that discussion. WHAT is the BABY's EXPERIENCE of what OTHERS decide and DO during his or her birth? How does induction by any means impact the baby, and his or relationship with the mother who clearly had her own needs and agenda and pushed the baby before she or he was ready? When the baby is induced by Castor Oil or drugs ... for any reason ... a caring, logical human being should not need scientific studies to tell us it interrupts the baby and should be as a last resort and with AWARENESS and COMMUNICATION. Logic and science also guide to do whatever we do in a way that recognizes that this human baby is a FEELING, SENSING human ... more so than we'll ever be ... and that the development from conception beyond never stops. The human being NEVER stops being in RESPONSE to the environment from the moment of conception.

We must consider that the use of Castor oil and any other natural remedies are still induction. Induction is a disruption for the baby. This is imprinted on the brain that is experiencing labor and birth, a developing. The baby hormonally begins the process of labor and signals to mother’s body, so, of course, induction by any means is a physiological disruption.

Induction, by any means, also creates psychological, emotional, and spiritually dynamics … in the human's relationship to the world and to/with the parents, EVEN when done for medically necessary reasons. When done for medical, life saving reasons or NON medical reasons, it doesn't matter. It still disrupts the baby. Done for just for convenience sake of mother or caretakers, or mother is tired of pregnancy, whatever the reason, the experience of baby's own biologically program need to begin labor is disrupted ... the consequence, the trauma, the damage is done for no good reason. Humans are masters at justifying and denial .... so women continue to induce whether it be medical or natural. Perhaps, natural would be less damaging than drugs. That's for another day. Today, my rant is about the BIRTHING BABY.

Birth IS the BABY'S experience of birthing into this world. The baby's birth is not the mother's or the doctor's. It is the mother's experience of birthing her baby and she, of course, will have to live with the consequences of the circumstances; however, it is the baby who will literally have to live with the consequences of other's choices. The baby's need to begin labor is physiological; it's part of the greater plan of physiology and biology that the Being/Fetus/Person initiate his or her own labor ... when physiology says it's time. This is true of all mammals. I saw Baby Story today where two zoologists had twins ... by cesarean. That's how far we've come. People who know how nature works also disrupt birth.

We humans are not now excluded after eons of doing so, just because a group of people who claim dominion over "science" say it is ok to do so. We can not do so without very really consequences to humanity.

The conglomerate, collective impact of the myriad of disruptions and violations of a baby during labor and birth can be seen in the behaviors, illnesses, and dysfunctions and "issues" in education, law enforcement, addiction, and violence. Every family and community will experience the long-term consequences of disrupting birth.

WHATEVER the baby experiences during labor and birth and in the hospital, it is imprinted in the brain; the part of the brain that is non-verbal and from whence all other development will occur. The experience results in physiological, psychological, emotional, and spiritual reactions; a complicated and real collective response that is IMPRINTED in the brain. Experience and interaction with the environment is how the human being develops from the moment of conception, whether IN the womb, leaving the womb, or living physiologically independent of the womb.

Once we begin to see the human baby as an amazing, reacting, responding organism that just happens to also be a soul in a new body (take that any way you wish ... new for the first and only time or new for another time), we can see that induction or not and how we treat the mother and baby as we do so, is just the beginning of our journey towards creating aware, compassionate, gentle, safe environment and experience for the baby. What is the safest, calmest way to support them to birth, regardless of the medical need, while maintaining their connection and relationship in the process ought to be the guiding rule.

Holidays, New Fathers, and Candidates

2008-01-05T13:59:00.001-06:00

It's been weeks since I posted. I was moving in the weeks before Christmas and I have been traveling for the holidays. So busy ... as I prepare to head west to California and Hawaii.

I got a great Christmas present from my son and daughter-in-law ... the news that they are expecting a baby. Yesterday I got an email from my son ... with pictures ... he has traded her Mazda for a "baby mobile" (a BMW wagon.) I emailed back that he is "par for the course." It is so fun to watch a newly pregnant couple. HE fast forwards through all of the possible financial concerns and prepares by getting that safe, family vehicle in the first trimester. SHE is aglow with the energy, hormones, and sweet knowing that she is doing something extraordinary ... building a human baby. What a blessing for a woman when she is in an environment where she is loved, protected, nourished, and nurtured by her partner ... for that is all she needs during this time. The more worry-free she is and the more her body, mind, and soul can focus on the baby, the more happy, healthy, and harmonious her life and she will be ... and baby will be. More about that later ....

On the way home, I stopped in Iowa to visit my aunt and my brothers. I had the opportunity to go to hear John Edwards and Obama speak - two blocks from my brother's house. I sat in the front row of the Edwards event and was close enough to see the wrinkles in his pants. He shook hands with us in the front row. I also got to ask him a question about his plan for creating support for the men and women serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Later, as he left, he signed my Edwards sign. I got all of it on video, but actually we were so close that it was hard to get the best shots. My daughter made good use of her Christmas gift, a new camera though. Here Edwards is in front of us speaking ... and then signing my sign. That's MY head and glasses. Really! In the photo here of Senator Edwards and my head, he is telling me thank you for my son's service and wishing him a safe return. Not in this shot, but during the exchange he made good, solid eye contact. That was important to me as he voted for the war.

You can tell by the pictures here who I support. Edwards is the only candidate in the running who is talking about not only ending THIS war, but getting rid of nuclear weapons ... I mean power. And, he is for taking back America from the corporations. Ah-hem, that would include OBSTETRIC MEDICINE some day. My niece and I waited until we got home to jump up and down together like girly-girls at a New Kid's concert. Oops, I just aged us, didn't I?

The next day we went to Obama's speech ... on the stage at my old high school and where I did my tap dance recital at age six and played the xylophone in "Sound of Music" in high school, and lots in between. What fun.

Obama had increased security because of threats so no one got to be up close with him. I was really glad to hear him speak and hear his story. I was, like he was, a communityy organizer and in mediation and conflict resolution at the community and state level. I was inspired to hear the community organizing concepts being entwined into national politics. I was inspired by the number of young people at his meeting as I have long been concerned about the lack of young folks at the voting booth. This world always belongs to the young adult generation and I am happy to see them rise up to take on this mess that has been left to them. If they elect Obama I can live with that, especially if he has Edwards as a running mate and keeps Richardson at Secretary of State.

I was glad to hear and see them. It makes such a difference. It's too bad that every citizen in every state doesn't have this opportunity. If you do, take advantage of it. Seeing someone in person is important. Our senses can take in what our mind doesn't have time for or allow us to.

I wish we could have a Presidential Team of about seven with a mix of Dems and Republicans. I like Ron Paul. I wish they had to work together and that each of them is able to focus on their gifts that they bring to the committee. Obama would build a good bi-partisan team. More about that later .... it's not exactly related, really, but I can't help myself.

Natural, Ideal Cesarean Surgical Birth

2007-12-24T09:39:00.002-06:00

Doctors at Queen Charlotte's hospital in London are pioneering "natural caesarean" births with the aim of making the surgery less traumatic for mother and baby.

Full story at:
BBC News Pictures of "Natural Caesarean"

Also check out:
The Ideal Cesarean by Robert Oliver, MD

The key focus of this natural cesarean is clearly to preserve the relationship between mother and child and to create attachment. On another blog that denies the safety of homebirth, the issue of mother-child attachment and the fact that this attachment is harmed in hospital birth is also denigrated.

The information here from the BBC showing a new approach to surgical birth in the UK is the sort of information that you won't see on other sites trashing natural vaginal birth and the growing movement of homebirth, and especially homebirth among women who previously gave birth surgically. What is it about American doctors that has them so entrenched in their denial and in their positions -- that they are the only ones who refuse to recognize the critical human need to re-connect with the mother on the outside of the womb in order to create the attachment that supports health, harmony, and wellness?

The impact of surgical birth on baby and mother is ignored there in order to perpetuate a war against natural birth. One site in particular refuses to allow a discussion of even the possibility of a detrimental impact of surgical birth on the mother and baby. What never enters the discussion is the baby's experience of the surgery -- EVEN IF it is done for life-saving reasons. To do so , that is, to entertain the possibility that any surgical birth is traumatizing to the baby, so that UNnecessary surgical birth is a very, very huge issue, well, this would lead to a very serious discussion in far corners about the MISUSE of cesarean surgery.

What women know, and what doctors especially know is that when a woman enters the hospital it increases the chances of a perfectly healthy woman and baby experiencing unnecessary, physiologically and emotionally traumatizing surgical birth. The discussion of the cost of this on many levels -- physiological, emotional, psychological, and spiritual, for their lifetimes -- never happens on another site that is so adamantly, rabidly opposed to homebirth with qualified caregivers.

Since homebirth's popularity is stemming from the conditions of birth in the hospital and the increased chances of a life-threatening surgery for no good reasons, it is an important discussion. They -- doctors and labor/delivery nurses (the "experts") -- further refuse to discuss how any surgical birth could have life long consequences for baby and mother. It is all said and done in the name of science. Yet, here we have those from the same party-- obstetric science-- confirming that surgical birth is dangerous and we do need to make attempts to do surgical birth more kindly, and with awareness of the impact on the baby and mother.

Why would we not!?! Do we really need empirical studies done over twenty years to finally tell us, "be kind to the baby", "make sure mother and baby make eye contact and touch", "make sure minimal interventions and touch by strangers in the first hours of life." No, the research on that is clear and has been for many decades. It is time to EXPECT and DEMAND that obstetricians everywhere follow the evidence-based science and to treat our babies gently and kindly.

Who should the public listen to? Who should pregnant women go to? Those who promote a balance between science and what we know logically and from our ancient history of birthing from the vagina? We need to create SAFE hospital birth by acknowledging that the human being is profoundly impacted by their birth experience ... wherever it happens. We need aware, kind caregivers willing to do what is morally and medically right for the human being coming in to the world, not what "has always been done" or is best "for my license" or to "prevent malpractice litigation."

Scroll down for my Christmas greeting to you.

Baby Story

2007-12-19T09:23:00.001-06:00

I just watched TLC's "Baby Story."

Oh, my, why do I do this to myself? I don't have television but I am visiting someone who has cable.

The mother went to the doctor and learned she was dilated to four and so they sent her to the hospital. The next doctor's immediate plan of action was to induce because her labor wasn't productive. Four cm? She was still just 5cm after some time on Vitamin P. The doctor added that women can do this for weeks; that is have sporadic pains. The medical profession is so apt at creating the illusions that allow them to manipulate and control women in labor.

Half of U.S. doctors mum about incompetence: survey

2007-12-03T21:15:00.002-06:00

There is a measurable disconnect between what physicians say they think is the right thing to do and what they actually do," said Eric Campbell of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, who led the survey.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/246934/Study_Half_of_U_S_Doctors_Fail_to_Report_Medical_Mistakes

When considering where a woman and baby are safest -- hospital or home, one needs to consider what the current researchers and hospitals are saying about hospitals and doctors in general. There are many posts here on this blog that raise the question of particular interventions and protocols of obstetric medicine.

Virtually every study done shows that homebirth is AS safe as giving birth in the hospital for babies and it is safer for the mother to birth at home. Every other industrialized country where mother and baby are safer (lower mortality rates) than in the US have midwives caring for low to moderate risk and doctors caring for high risk. In those countries midwives work in partnership with doctors.

Have you seen Michael Moore's movie, "Sicko" yet? He compares hospital care in the US with several countries with universal health care. Ricki Lake's move, "The Business of Being Born" is also being shown in select cities and addresses the "business" of obstetric medicine. She follows a midwife on several homebirths. Viewers can watch the experience of birth at home as one with out chaos and trauma, which is critical for the human baby as she or he IS experiencing birth. Reviews on both sides point out that the midwife does not wear gloves (so I will too). Midwifery supporters lament that this will be a detractor for many women and that doctors will make a big deal of it when it is very rare in practice.

I would like to add that it seems the medical perspective for wearing gloves is much more about self-protection. I have seen myself, a nurse in a hospital take a glove out of her pocket and use it for a vaginal exam. She was protecting herself, with no regard for the mother and baby. Detractors will always find some relevant, but not critical thing to look at to verify their point that homebirth is dangerous. So, if you watch the movie, know that the midwife won't be wearing gloves. Feel your feelings about that part and then focus on the experience of the baby.

The baby ... that's what birth is about .... or should be.

Prenatal and Birth Memories

2007-12-01T23:55:00.002-06:00

Prenatal and birth memories are a little more complicated than what we think of as memory. Prenates and newborns are very sensory. Their brain is recording every event from conception forward. Language develops over time as the human infant and toddler put words to feelings and make connections. A good example came up today at my house. My 14 year old was talking about "remembering" seeing her father and I in bed and how she didn't know what it was about. Now she does. That is how children learn everything --- just because they don't have words for the experience as an infant or toddler doesn't mean they don't remember it. By the time she KNOWs the language to understand and speak about sex, she has known about it for a very long time.

It is well- known and accepted that the brain wires in response to experience. Research and technology of the 90's confirmed and deepened our understanding of the brain. This development of the human brain begins in the womb, begins at conception and during the first weeks of life the neural tube is one of the earliest structures. The experience of the newborn and infant is as real as yours or mine is now. The baby is experiencing something -- and the brain responds and wires connections ... safe or scary, happy or angry, fearful or relaxed ... their sensory oriented body takes it in and it is recorded in the brain. This is why we talk to and touch the baby, and it is why we give them visual stimulus. It is known if this interaction with the environment is minimal or violent or distracted the baby won't develop intellectually or appropriately.

According to Gerald Vind, a neurobiologist and expert in prenatal brain imprinting and reimprinting"

Norepinephrine acts in the developing nervous system of a prenate to suppress the growth of irrelevant and undesirable neural connections, while at the same time facilitating the formation of relevant synaptic connections. Norepinephrine also provides protection in the brain, especially a part of the emotional center (limbic system) that is called the amygdala. It prevents damage to the amygdala and suppresses abnormal kindling activity (seizure activity) when operating under conditions of peak activity. Under conditions of acute or repetitive maternal stress, norepinephrine levels are depleted. This is typically accompanied by the secretion of natural opiates that also exert an inhibitory effect on the release of norepinephrine. During pregnancy these natural opiates are passed through the placenta and influence the development of the prenate. At any stage of a developing brain, the depletion of norepinephrine, along with excessive amygdala activation, and opiate release, can lead to permanent structural and functional alterations affecting brain interconnections, synaptic size and densities, as well as their responsiveness. With repeated instances of heightened stress activities, an abnormal form of neuronal interconnections can develop along with a reduced response threshold. In other words, severe maternal stress while you are carried inside your mother’s womb can really mess up the way your brain is "wired." This is how the foundational capacity for empathy and socialization is handicapped.

And people get so "jiggy" about babies remembering birth and early infancy --- babies who are fully formed human beings from second trimester on, awake and looking around at birth, and their brains don't remember? Basic brain development is that the human baby experiences and interacts with the environment and the brain responds and "wires" up in response. Was it happy or sad, joyful or painful, stressful or gentle?

Once one understands that consciousness is present in the cellular matter of the egg and the sperm one begins to see how everything happening outside the womb of the baby is contributing to his or her development. Some say it's inappropriate to speak to children about their birth?? On some level that is so laughable, because of the utter ridiculousness that the baby doesn't remember -- as if the baby wasn't there and didn't experience the birth. HIS or HER birth.

There is a field of scientific research looking at the primal period of life and specifically the last trimester when the human fetus has been shown to be interacting, tasting, feeling, sensing, and hearing and responding to the environment. There is also a field called Infant Psychology and most major universities have a research lab looking at the ability of the human newborn's effort to interact with his or her new environment. Yet, we are expected to believe that this development from primal period to infancy is somehow in the "off" position during labor and birth? So, that a baby is not impacted by the experience?

We have evidence about prenatal period so it is inappropriate to dismiss the birth experience. THEN, one can begin to look at conception and the first imprint of perception, based on the mother's hormones in response to HER experience -- love, ambivalence, guilt, rape. Emotions result in hormones. How the cells join together to create the one cell of the new human in a particular hormonal environment is the first experience of the human being. It's so logical that in every cell that develops from that cell, the being knows what happened at conception. This continues through gestation, labor and birth. How can we logically and morally and scientifically say that process and experience of birth is insignificant to the baby?

Anti-homebirth folks rail against women for thinking only of their own experience. They are chastised for putting their baby in great harm and putting their need for a good experience ahead of the baby's. Most birth caregivers refuse to consider the baby's experience.

What would it hurt to consider how the birth might be experienced by the baby and that same science about development applies to the period of labor and birth as it does to the prenatal and post-birth period?

Re-Programming Prenatal Experience

2007-11-30T19:39:00.000-06:00

Re-Programming Life from Our Zero-Point
by Gerald Vind, PhD

Visit the website at: Transforming Dragons

Prenatal Re-Imprinting (PNRI) is a technique for accessing and re-imprinting the first-forming embryonic patterns that imprint at a cellular level. Thus, PNRI accesses the biological origins of maladaptive patterns, that is, their biological zero-point* of their existence. These zero-point maladaptive patterns, once located, can be easily re-imprinted and a permanent re-programming can be made to replace negative patterns with positive patterns.

How does that work?

Our personality begins to develop at the same time as our embryonic nervous system. And from our conception (our zero point) and throughout our development in our mother’s womb, we are imprinted with various foundational neurochemical response patterns. Our embryonic and fetal imprinting follows our mother’s response to her life experiences. Our mother’s emotional experiences (good and bad) produce many different emotional neurochemicals that pass through the placenta and imprint cellular-level response patterns. We become imprinted, and we adapt to our mother’s neurochemical “soup.”

This imprinting occurs in the emotional center of our brain (limbic system). And, it is our emotional center that will later guide our attention, awareness, attitude, mood, emotions, and motivation. Our embryonic imprinting establishes our foundational thresholds and set points that we become programmed to reactivate throughout out life.

After we are born, our life becomes organized around creating events that produce the same “flavors” of neurochemical “soup” in our emotional core that we experienced in our mother’s womb.

This is so important, and yet, it is astonishing that no one has addressed this problem in any meaningful way. That is, no one except PNRI practitioners.

PNRI is a science and methodology that takes us back to our zero-point to re-experience our prenatal imprinting. Through a novel and highly effective PNRI system, practitioners work with clients to transform their maladaptive personality patterns into positive and self-actualizing patterns. The results are achieved in a few sessions, and they are zero-point life readjustments.

The zero-point of our being is where we started to form the personality “grooves” that we continue to follow after birth, digging our early prenatal “grooves” deeper throughout our life. PNRI focuses on the early imprinting of maladaptive “grooves” or patterns because this is the place where profoundly beneficial changes take place with PNRI.

Locating the zero point of a maladaptive pattern and transforming it with PNRI releases negative foundations for our present problems (tracing all of the way back to the zero point). Without the negative foundation, our associated contemporary problems are able to resolve themselves and clear up quickly. Thus, PNRI is zero-point life readjustment that is effective and efficient. The power and potential of re-imprinting prenatal patterns is truly remarkable.
______________________________________
* The term “zero point” is borrowed from its use in quantum physics. There, it is used to describe the threshold of existence where, for example, a photon “pops out” of the vacuum of space into our observed local space-time. In quantum field theory, zero-point energy is synomous with “vacuum energy” that can be drawn from the vacuum of empty space; that is, the natural process of creating “something” out of “nothing.”

Mother Song

2007-11-29T12:05:00.001-06:00

Hollywood Images of Birth

2007-11-29T09:02:00.000-06:00

From a very interesting blog, Feminist Mormon Housewives at http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/?p=1462#comment-291738

The poster wondered about how common the Hollywood birth images are actually are in real life. That is one topic that neither Heather nor I have written on. One hundred forty some people responded. Here's mine:

The images we see of childbirth on television, Hollywood style, are like everything else on television …. designed to numb us, entertain us, and sell us. Rarely, does a woman go from not much happening to full transition, at the worst possible time … or most timely for entertainment. Like other forms of violence that humans watch mindlessly for hours every day, modern birth in the hospital is crammed into brains as the “normal” way, the safe way … they are selling epidural and the control of women’s bodies, minds, and souls just like they are selling the newest car, line of clothes, improved mop, and sexy shampoo. Like violence, like the sexual images our children are exposed to, the message of the horrible pain, the need for a crew of medical people pushing, probing, and coaching … all keeps us hyper aroused, over-stimulated and numbed — all at the same time. Our children hear shampoo commercials of orgasmic sounds, see women sprawled and wiggling in bras .. selling everything from cars to microwavable rice. And, they are expected to abstain — with images of sexual relationships everywhere … and, since society doesn’t question or confront this, it’s zero surprising that the images of birth — meant to draw women to the hospital where it is very lucrative — are indoctrinating our society. The walking wounded and numb make good, compliant women, consumers.

Thanks for this topic … it is one I haven’t written about on my blog … but will.

www.hospitalbirthdebate.blogspot.com

Comment by janel — November 29, 2007 @ 12:43 am

I couldn’t read all of the messages, but I did pick up on one vein of thought and posted a summary of what I wrote so extensively on last year ….

With all due respect to Janet’s husband, an anesthesiologist, apparently, I would like to ask him if he might be someone who could answer my challenge —

Throughout the history of modern birth, starting with morphine, twightlight sleep, ether and including Scopalamine, Demerol, Cytotec, and now epidural, these drugs have all been used on laboring babies and women with ZERO research to show their safety. ALL of them have been shown to be damaging and dangerous and were stopped because of the consequences … after use on millions of babies and women. Twenty years ago the choice drug was Demerol … and it is rarely used because of the impact on the baby. Since then epidural has increased in spite of the research in the late 80’s and early 90’s that shows it is dangerous. The drug, bupuvicaine that made it dangerous was counteracted by using fentanyl, an opiod … ALSO NEVER shown safe for laboring babies, but known to be extremely dangerous for adults. Mothers are encouraged and supported to give birth UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF NARCOTICS?? What a horrible contradiction. Yes, I have given birth under the influence of epidural. We are not just numb from our waist down — we are altered, drug-impaired while birthing our baby. And, this is considered normal. In the early 2000’s one study took 120 pregnant women and divided them into ten groups and each was given a different dose of fentanyl to see which dosage works best to counter the effects of narcotics. !?!?!? These babies and women are UNinformed and NON consenting subjects in a research study …. animals get better consideration. Women and babies (some who grow up to be men born “under the influence” of drugs) are one long research study. Psychology, medicine, human development, addiction studies. prevention, and treatment, and the myriad of other social and health issues, etc totally ignore the impact of birth on the lifetime of the human and certainly doesn’t consider that drug use and the resulting disruptions so well known, and the trauma form a foundation for life.

For a long time I have been looking for someone in the obstetric or anesthesiology field to give me ONE study that proves that ANY drug used EVER in modern medical birth was shown to be SAFE prior to USING on BABIES and WOMEN.

Doctors, nurses, and women will all … out of their own guilt, not imposed by others … resist the truth that drugs affect the baby ….because when we have chosen that or had it imposed upon us, or learned it was “fine” and “safe”, we face a huge journey.

There is a whole new field of understanding fetal and newborn learning, consciousness, and healing of whatever happens — whether it was truly lifesaving technology or doctor-induced for doctor convenience and malpractice avoidance (my ex is an OB), or by maternal choice. Ultimately, humanity has to begin to see that birth IS THE BABY’S experience of coming from somewhere into this physical life — and that the baby does not go to “OFF” during labor and birth. We know that the fetus is learning, responding in relationship with the mother and the environment … hearing, tasting, sensing, developing. And, we know that the newborn IMMEDIATELY is negotiating with a new environment during major physiological transition, and is interacting … LEARNING … It is clear that something very serious is amiss in medicine about the importance of labor and birth and how babies are also experiencing, responding, learning. All bundled together, that is results in memory. Prenatally, postnatally, and during labor and birth. The baby is experiencing everything. It is his or her birth. We can’t deny it away. Birth can’t just be about the mother’s need for pain relief or convenience, or the doctor’s needs.

Again, with all due respect and sincere wish for a real dialogue about what is really happening to babies in birth, I share my passion here.

Thanks.
Janel

I hope sometime soon, someone who is trained in anesthesiology will respond to my request for ONE research study that shows ANY of the drugs EVER used were studied BEFORE using on babies and women. The question is basically ignored by those promoting banning homebirth, and the wrong promotion of it as safe so that more women than not, now in 2007, will see it as perfectly safe. Drugs at birth is a collective consciousness that allows the cycle of dependency and drug addiction we see to be perpetuated. THAT could be a hypothesis for someone to study -- as it has never been studied. EVEN in addiction studies, with 80% of the present population born under the influence of drugs, IMPAIRED, with impaired mothers, the use of UNRESEARCHED drugs at birth has NEVER been studied as a causal or related factor.

The use of narcotics in labor and birth (while discouraged and even warred against in every other aspect of life) is disguised at giving women freedom from pain in birth … with no regard for her baby’s lifelong consequences of being born while they both are impaired “under the influence” of narcotics. In ANY other situation in life, a woman would be chastised and judged for being impaired while doing something so important, and she’d be seen as harming her child if she is impaired.

In this bi-polar society in seems daunting for anyone, especially medically trained people to see that even when they are using a substance for the right reasons, to facilitate the birth so that either or both mother and baby will survive, it STILL has consequences. Refusal to see that and to engage in ways of supporting the baby afterwards create this growing belief -- a monster that everyone ignores and denies -- that babies are unaffected by what we do, what they experience, what they have circulating in their body, and that their systems must work and struggle to adjust because of drugs and disruptions.

The research in the late eighties and 90’s were very clear about what the physiological response to epidural was for the mother and baby. This does not change just because they added ANOTHER harmful, unresearched drug to counteract (fentanyl). It doesn’t change because we deny it with the belief that women’s rights to pain relief, doctor’s time schedules, and convenience are as important, if not more, than the rights of a human baby to be born free of harmful, addictive chemicals.

It seems to me that the lack of any research and the ongoing research ON babies and mothers to find the right dosages with least complications, and the obstetric shop-talk sharing how to’s is outrageous.

Using Cyotec in the first place was done on women and babies without study and it was done between doctors and residents, in online chats, and general “shopt-talk” fashion. Dosages, complications, and responses was figured out like how we teach our young people to prepare, stuff, and cook a turkey. AND, meanwhile, simultaneously, THEN they began to research it …. THOSE who have it in their interest to continue using it. Same with epidural anesthesia …

YEAH, I AM blue in the face ....

I met a local anesthesiologist recently ... our conversation started over the war. It was a week after my son went to Kabul and I was working at being numb. He started giving me all sorts of things to send my son to read ... including something about the Heroin War, or something. I started to share my perspective that our violence and addiction starts in the primal period ... as I shared my oft cited research where 120 babies received different doses of bipuvicaine and fentanyl to determine the best dose combination, this new acquaintance smiled .... I said, "What, you are a doctor?" He, who is as crazed about the war and heroin use as I am about making birth safe for the baby by creating science-based protocols and using drugs and interventions only when needed, was shocked when I suggested that he and his colleagues have created the drug addiction crisis and asked how is it that any of you would be able to consider what it is that you have done to so many humans? I said it would take a spiritual crisis and awakening ... and our society does not support that. Anyone in any sort of emotional, psychological, or spiritual crisis is "diagnosed" and pumped with drugs that cause a myriad of other issues. We see it on television, in the advertisements .... around and around we go.

Progress in the "war on drugs", the "war on crime", the "war on gangs", the "war on violence", the "war on poverty", the "war on cancer" will happen ONLY when we start bringing babies into this world in an aware, safe, gentle, connected, drug-FREE, violence-FREE way. (Medical birth is violent).

We can conceive, gestate, labor and birth, and care for our infants with awareness, protection, gentleness, our time and touch EVEN when or ESPECIALLY when medical intervention ARE necessary. What is wrong with this world of obstetrics that promotes all or nothing ... either their way or no way.... zero compromise so that woman blindly follow, or live their lives damaged in silent rage and illness, unable to connect with their children in the way that both their mind and souls strive for and miss over and over and over.

Oh, my ....

Homebirth Not as Risky as Perceived

2007-11-28T11:48:00.000-06:00

From Canada.com

At the bottom of the page I saw an ad for a blog that warns about the dangers of homebirth. Amazing, how much time and money one person will spend to spin. This article reports about a study done in Canada in 1999 that shows homebirth is safe.

Home births not as risky as perceived
Matt Ramsey , CanWest News Service

Some things -- like stripping naked, making breakfast and sipping coffee in the buff -- are better done at home.

Comfort and privacy are the primary reasons Euphemia and I are opting for a home birth assisted by midwives.

Unfortunately, domestic delivery for anything more than a pizza is often viewed with a skepticism bordering on reproach, which is why I find myself in a position potentially as hazardous as buck-naked bacon-making.

Studies shown giving birth at home does not carry increased risks, compared to delivering in the hospital.

Home birth is dirty, we are told, dangerous for mother and baby, you'll have to sterilize the house, boil the cats in bleach, etc., and even then you're taking a huge risk. It hurts too much to do it without drugs. Plus you'll annoy the neighbours. You're a crazy hippie, global warming is a myth and your mother dresses you funny.

A year-long study in 1999 (reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal) comparing outcomes between home and hospital births among B.C. women able to choose between the two found: nothing.

Fewer interventions during labour for home birthers, fewer maternal infections, fewer episiotomies and no significant differences in perinatal mortality. Oh, and because women who are able to birth at home typically stay there, homestyling is cheaper, too.

The study concludes: "There was no increased maternal or neonatal risk associated with planned home birth under the care of a regulated midwife."

Studies in New Zealand, the U.K., U.S., Switzerland and the Netherlands have made similar conclusions -- home birth with qualified caregivers is as safe as birthing in a hospital. Last week, a study indicated women who choose caesarean section without medical necessity face a five-fold risk of postpartum cardiac arrest over natural birth; wound infection rates were five times higher.

Pregnancy is not an illness and we are not going to treat it as such. If we need to go to hospital to safeguard mother or baby's health then we will go and do whatever is needed.

In the meantime, the coffee is on and the curtains are drawn at home -- where women gave birth long before there were hospitals.

© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2007

Betrayal of Women in Obstetrics

2007-11-26T19:29:00.002-06:00

Lest we forget .... how we got here today ....

Doctors Choose Midwives to be Caregivers

2007-11-24T11:58:00.000-06:00

Despite what some folks claim, more and more doctors and nurses, even and especially labor and delivery nurses are choosing midwives and homebirth.

This is a link to a story by a physician about her birth, a double footling breech at home ... attended by a midwife. (Husband/father is also a physician.)

Two Florida Docs

From her blog, Permission to Mother

Denise Punger MD FAAFP IBCLC & her husband John Coquelet DO are in private practice in St. Lucie County, Florida. They have three unschooled, drum-banging, karate-kicking sons. (Their hair is long, again.) Her perspective as a board certified family physician with expertise in breastfeeding is truly unique. Permission to Mother is her first book. Much of it has been worked on at home with the three boys active in the background.
The book is due out "at the end of the year." That would be any time now. Watch for it -- I think it will be a good one to bring much needed perspective from medical doctors who seek the balance between our wisdom and physiology and advancement in medical abilities.

Midwifery in Afghanistan

2007-11-22T13:07:00.001-06:00

When I learned my son was going straight from Kuwait into Afghanistan a month ago, I had a huge mix of feelings.

One was ENVY ....

Four years ago I was considering going back to get my RN degree and I retook a lot of pre-requisites. My GI Joe was in college and asked, "Why in the he** do you want to do nursing school at your age!?" (Jeesh, I was only 47! Youth.) I told him if I just had that nursing degree that I had started to do twenty years before and if I was without parenting responsibilities (ie, his younger sister), "I would SO be in Afghanistan helping to bring midwifery back there."

He replied, "Yeah, you and your *#^% hippy friends, and when you'd get in trouble WE'D have to come save YOUR A**ES!!"

I exclaimed, "YEAH ... of course!! EXACTLY. THAT is what the military should be doing!! Providing protection for us to go do good there ... bring the things that they need to survive and to create self-sustainability."

(And, I zero mean Walmart, McDonald's, and StarBucks.)

So, yeah, it was envy ... one of the seven sins .. not simple jealousy. I was envious ... how could he do that? Go to Afghanistan while I am still here?

So, as usual, GI Joe's soul, in the body of a human brought through my body, is my muse, and his path (our "soul contract") is dragging me along (mostly kicking and wailing) this year, only this time, not quite happily, but with interest beyond wailing about my son being in a war. I so want to contribute to the rebuilding of the lives of the women there.

I pray his soul and his consciousness remember our conversation ... about how the peace nik, hippy, rabble-rousers AND those who are courageous and strong and willing to risk their lives in battle can come together and work together towards a common good. Harmony within the self and in the world.

(Raise them in the ways, and they'll return, right?)

WOW, what if the US would raise it's collective consciousness level and marry the MILITARY and the PEACE CORPS? What if we did that and spent our lifetime together seeking to bring health and wellness to all peoples of the planet, rather than seeking to maintain our consumer-driven lifestyle in the name of Jesus. (Watch for new documentary this week, What Would Jesus Buy?) I wrote about this marriage of polarity (like most human marriages) then, when I learned my son's second year deployed in Afghanistan, but I''ll mention it again ...

What if the 500 Billion spent on decimating Iraq had gone towards wedding this union ... the compassionate, skilled people of the US, either via military or the Peace Corp working together? There are so many Americans who would gladly do a rotation in a third world country ... sharing their personal and professional skills ... IF they didn't have to KILL and BOMB, and IF they deploy on mission of good and could do so without living in poverty (as most Peace Corp and Vista workers do.)

The expected trillions of dollars in Iraq and all of the consequences from it, could have been spent on going in to build roads, electrical plants, public communication, sewage plants, schools, and hospitals. My son says that Kabul is like every other city -- but without sewer systems and people blow themselves up. I have followed the plight of the Afghan women for a decade -- and, recently a high number of them are setting themselves on fire - because their lives are still so tragic. http://www.rawa.org/index.php.

There are some good things going on there, but do we hear about them, or the continuing needs? What if we were to fund creating healthy water, nutrition, and necessary BASIC medical supplies such as antibiotics. Women are not allowed to see male professionals, so the women desperately need female doctors, nurses, and midwives.

Last fall I researched and wrote a lot about the role of midwifery in making birth safer in every other industrialized nation in the world that has LOWER MATERNAL AND INFANT MORTALITY rates than in the United States. (Dec, Jan, Feb posts). While the United States allows physicians, drug companies, and lawyers to control women's bodies in birth and maintains that induction and surgical birth are as safe, or safer, than natural birth -- when their own research shows us this is false -- other countries have better outcomes for both mother and father. Spreading this way of birthing is part of the war on humanity.

Meanwhile, in Canada, of course, there is a group who is contributing to the plight of women in Afghanistan and making birth safer by training women in midwifery. Yeah!! Canada. Thank you!

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/
story.html?id=a81a5644-7d48-4970-aa85-114db0bce762&k=15021.

I waaaanaaaahhaa go, too .... and take the CanioSacral healing work there ... and, my cameras, of course, so I can share it with you all.

(I did not get the RN degree .... THAT is another story .... ONE day a colleague sneaked me into the newborn nursery in central IL. I was a "job shadow". Me, the birth trauma therapist and Baby Keeper. Oh, mama. I knew if I couldn't make it one day watching what they do to babies -- while calling it normal and scientific -- I couldn't make it through two years of BS.)

Birth with Dolphins

2007-11-21T23:22:00.000-06:00

Star Newland, dolphin researcher in Hawaii on on YouTube.

Below, and at www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuYeP7ApwN4

Star discusses the Sirius Institute, dolphins and dolphin birthing and communities, the pod (community,) and the Domestic Harmony Initiative in Hawaii.

I, Baby Keeper, co-wrote the Safe Baby Resolution with Star in late 2006 and it was introduced into the Hawaii legislature in 2007. Baby Keeper is moving to Hawaii to complete work on the Domestic Harmony Initiative and Safe Baby Resolution.

Safe Baby Resolution asked legislators in Hawaii 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. The resolution looks 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 seek to make gestation and birth gentle, drug-free, and safe for mothers and babies as well as for medical caregivers and society. The resolution supports all parties working together in partnership to create this foundation to support harmony for our babies -- and for the world.

It is up to each of us to seek the harmony within ... to seek harmonic resonance within and with others in order to live harmoniously in the world. Many on the planet are seeking "PEACE" in these times --- as am I, as I my son deployed directly from the Iraq war into Afghanistan for another year. I, like many families of deployed loved ones, have come to learn much about finding peace within. Rather than seek Peace --- somewhere out there, dependent upon what others do or don't do, and while failing to make sacrifices on behalf of others --- we propose seeking to BE and LIVE harmoniously, even when, or especially when our personal lives and/or the world around is so fearful.

Happy Birthday, Blog - Happy Thanksgiving, Friend

2007-11-21T22:48:00.001-06:00

This blog is ONE YEAR OLD this week -- and thanks to it, I am a bit wiser, as well as older (my birthday is this week too).

This blog was conceived and born out of my angst of my son's departure to war and another blogger's disregard for women and natural birth. I found my voice this year, in thanks to standing up to her and starting this blog. Like most women, I was terribly violated in birthing my babies -- three grown and one teen. Since I was violated, so were my babies. It took me twenty-five years to acknowledge within me that my body remembers and my baby's body remembered, and to begin this almost decade long journey of healing to claim my body, soul, and mind. Claim myself from the insidious socially ingrained denial of the impact of medicalized birth on women, on me, and on all of us when we are born.

I had already participated in years of healing at a level that medicine and psychology deny, (because to do so would require they themselves to go within to heal, and it would require they change what they do that is so financially lucrative.) I have studied pre and perinatal psychology since 1999 -- and, I sought to share it here on this blog -- my personal journey and the new science and the application of the logic and science we've know for eons. Women are so disempowered and silenced in their experience of birthing. Their souls and bodies are violated, the baby is traumatized and brutalized, and the father of their baby, if there, is profoundly disempowered. This blog let me get it all out. Oh, mama, did I get it out.

I wrote 600 pages on this blog from November to May ... THREE books worth.

As my son deployed the experience shook me to my core. I had to look at ALL of the fifty previous years of denying my personhood and self. I had to look at my gifts and shadows, failings and successes, and prepare for the next decades --- making life safe; making birth safe. It opened up the floodgates. I found a bottom reservoir of grief ... I cried more tears last year than in my entire fifty before. And, then, like Forrest Gump's marathon back and forth across the country, I just stopped writing one day. I had to get out of "the cave" and walk this path it opened up.

The day after Earth Day, April 2006, I joined the local community radio station and was on the air within two days reading announcements. On Memorial Day I interviewed people and created a montage that is the opening for my segment, Until They All Come Home, a tribute to the men and women who are serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on KOPN 89.5 (www.kopn.org) on the News at 5, sometimes Tues and/or Thursday. (May 28th post). I did the fast track training to be able to "run the boards", do programming, and music shows. If you have a community radio in your community, check it out. In June I joined the Community Access Television (CAT) and I have been working on my documentary about birth ... a film for fathers about their babies experience of birth.

Please watch for a trailer coming very soon .... and an introduction version, hopefully in January, for midwives, doulas, women, and men. The introduction will be fund raiser to complete the documentary.

I am very thankful for all of the blessings of this year ... especially you. Have a blessed holiday.

P. S.

Below is a segment of my first posting on November 23, 2006. My challenge to the physician who stills taunts and verbally assaults women, to the neonatal doc blogger who devoted a post to me to dis' my work (Debunking the Pseudoscience of Infant Memories) www.talesfromthewomb.blogspot.com, Sunday, April 22, 2007 and my April 25th post here), and to the anesthesiologist I just met at the health food store the week after my son didn't come home and who screamed at me, "You've got to pray your guts out" when I said numbly, "I won't ever seen my son again. He'll die there" ("Dude, it's just a stage of grief), and to anyone else in MEDICINE who controls women's bodies ... is SHOW ME THE RESEARCH THAT INDUCTION, EPIDURAL, and SURGICAL BIRTH ARE SAFE ..... AND, that BABIES DON'T REMEMBER BIRTH (it IS the baby's birth and s/he DOES experience it! The unborn baby's brain is "ON" even during labor and birth. DUH!):

It is abhorrent that peer-reviewed, doctor/medical business and drug industry controlled research are medically and socially sanctioned to do decade after decade of medical and drug research on the bodies and souls uninformed, non-consenting women -- and their babies. The generational impact of this to the human baby, male and female is an outrage. It is morally, ethically, legally, and spiritually wrong.

It is obscene to promote the use of narcotics at birth as safe for the birthing human, WHILE "America's War on Drugs" rages on, and while school children (with poor impulse, motivation, and boundaries) are being drugged with prescriptions of narcotics but taught in billion-dollar programs to "Just say no!" It is immoral and negligent to promote cesarean birth as safe when there is no research to prove this WHILE the incidence of every devastating childhood illness goes up.

In pre and perinatal psychology we know that poor impulse control, motivation, follow through, integration, and boundaries are all established in the brain of the laboring and birthing baby. Medical establishment is fighting like hell to prevent this research that PROVES that disrupting by induction, drugs, interventions, surgery, and brutality of the first hour of life. THAT is the problem. A win would mean that women and babies are treated with aware, gentle, safe, and respectful care knowing that every single word, thought, and action is experienced and remembered by the birthing baby's brain.

THE BURDEN OF PROOF IS ON THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT AND THE PHYSICIANS TO PROVE THAT THIS IS INCORRECT, AND THAT WHAT THEY DO HAS NO DETRIMENTAL EFFECTS --- BEFORE THEY DO IT YOU. Otherwise, we are all just human guinea pigs.

SHOW ME THE RESEARCH THAT SHOWS THAT INDUCTION AND EPIDURAL RESEARCHED AND SHOW TO BE SAFE -- and worthy of being now considered routine and normal.

Dennis Quad's Newborn Twins Fight for their Lives after Hospital Mistake

2007-11-20T13:01:00.000-06:00

Dennis Quaid's Twins in Medical Nightmare, TMZ.com

"TMZ has learned that Dennis Quaid's newborn twins are fighting for their lives after being inadvertently overdosed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Sources tell us the twins -- Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace -- were accidentally given a massive does of Heparin, an anti-coagulant. Babies typically get 10 units. Our sources says they were each mistakenly given 10,000 units. The drug is used to flush out IV lines and prevent blood clots. We're told one dose was given on Sunday morning, another on Sunday evening.

We're told late Sunday night, both babies started to "bleed out." Both babies are now at Cedars in the neo-natal intensive care unit where we're told they are stable.

We're told a technician stored the Heparin in the wrong place, and when a nurse grabbed the medicine for the babies without looking -- it was the wrong dosage.

A source says the babies are now being given Protamine, which reverses the effects of Heparin.

We're told as many as thirteen patients were mistakenly given the overdose of Heparin, but the effects are more critical because of the age and weight of the twins."

My heart goes out to Dennis Quaid and those poor babies. I hope they come through it okay. I also hope steps are taken to prevent this from happening again. With the father being so famous and well-endowed, I'm sure something will be done. Stories like this make me even more certain that my choice of unassisted homebirth was the safest one.

New documentary clip

2007-11-16T11:12:00.000-06:00

Trauma, Brain and Relationship:
Helping Children Heal

Section One: The Very First Relationship

http://www.traumaresources.org/video_1.htm

Hospital birth can end in tragedy, too.

2007-11-15T11:19:00.000-06:00

Despite our supposedly excellent healthcare system, our infant mortality rate is far higher than it should be; indeed, many countries boast of a much lower IMR than we have. Our stillbirth rate is still 1%, meaning that 1 in 100 babies will be born dead. Considering homebirth only accounts for 1% of all births, and an estimated 90-95% of homebirths have great outcomes, most bad birth outcomes are taking place in hospitals.

Nevertheless, to discredit homebirth, some focus on only the bad outcomes of homebirths, completely ignoring the hospital births that go wrong. When a homebirth fails, it is the mother's fault, the midwife's fault, and it's a tribute to the dangers of homebirth. When a hospital birth fails, it was no one's fault. Or, if it was the doctor's fault or the result of a staff mistake, well, you can't use that to make a general statement about the safety of hospital birth.

Are you rolling your eyes yet?

Those who birth at home or in the hospital usually photograph the event. Most of the time, the pictures show a beautiful and happy experience. Another writer recently stated that what she would like to see, however, are pictures of a homebirth that ended in tragedy. Why on Earth would anyone like to see that? Only a bitter and cruel person would take joy in the misery of others. It makes me cringe.

Hospital birth ends in tragedy as well. I don't like to see photos of tragedy; I don't take pleasure in anyone's pain. Nevertheless, if pictures of a homebirth tragedy would discredit homebirth in general, would not pictures of a hospital birth tragedy discredit hospital birth in general? I don't think pictures of either says much at all about the safety of either birth option in generally. If I did, though, and was attempting to discredit hospital birth, here's the photo essay I would create:

A photograph of the mother trying hard to deal with the intense contractions caused by Cytotec induction.

A picture of the doctor's face when the mother is bleeding profusely from her vagina, her blood pressure and pulse falling, and the baby's heartrate rapidly decreasing.

The mother's expression of shock and horror when she's told her uterus has ruptured, though she's not high risk as she's never had a C-section before.

A shot of the mother once she has become unconscious, bleeding to death, being wheeled to the OR.

The collection of doctors and nurses gathered around the woman, now under general anesthesia, with the doctor making the incision.

A picture of the father's face as he paces the waiting room, hoping, praying.

The doctor's hands inside the mother's uterus, then emerging holding a floppy baby with very poor color.

Desperate attempts to resuscitate the baby.

The look on the parents' face when she's told that the baby had already sustained too much neurological damage by the time he was born and resuscitated.

Shots of the infant in the NICU and a groggy mother holding her baby, covered in wires, 3 days after the birth, with tears in her eyes.

An infant-sized casket being lowered into the ground as black-clad, crying family members hold each other.

Yes, in the hospital, most of the time intervention comes in the nick of time. The baby lives and is healthy is the usual outcome. Sometimes, the baby has brain damage--as happened at a hospital near me recently--and/or is diagnosed later with cerebral palsy as a result. Unfortunately, babies do sustain damage severe enough to result in death even in the hospital.

As we've already established, 1% of babies are born dead, and homebirth only accounts for 1% of all births total with 90-95% of them being safe, most of these stillbirths do occur in the hospital. As many studies indicate a lower IMR for homebirth than the average hospital IMR, it seems this outcome is more likely to occur after a hospital birth.

Is homebirth always safe? Is it always the safest choice for every mother? No. It is the same with hospital birth. Hospital birth doesn't guarantee a great birth outcome, nor is it always the safest location for a baby to be born.

Pregnant Patient's Bill of Rights

2007-11-14T10:46:00.000-06:00

Full credit to: http://www.aimsusa.org/ppbr.htm

THE PREGNANT PATIENT'S BILL OF RIGHTS

Many pregnant women are not fully aware of their right of informed consent or of the obstetricians' legal obligation to obtain their patient's informed consent prior to treatment. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) first publicly acknowledged the physician's legal obligation to obtain his or her pregnant patient's informed consent in its 1974 publication, Standards for Obstetric-Gynecologic Services, (pg 66-67) which reads:

"It is important to note the distinction between 'consent' and 'informed consent'. Many physicians, because they do not realize there is a difference, believe they are free from liability if the patient consents to treatment. This is not true. The physician may still be liable if the patient's consent was not informed. In addition, the usual consent obtained by a hospital does not in any way release the physician from his legal duty of obtaining an informed consent from his patient.

"Most courts consider that the patient is 'informed' if the following information is given:

The processes contemplated by the physician as treatment, including whether the treatment is new or unusual.

The risks and hazards of the treatment,

The chances for recovery after treatment.

The necessity of the treatment.

The feasibility of alternative methods of treatment.

"One point on which courts do agree is that explanations must be given in such a way that the patient understands them. A physician cannot claim as a defense that he explained the procedure to the patient when he knew the patient did not understand. The physician has a duty to act with due care under the circumstances; this means he must be sure the patient understands what she is told.

"It should be emphasized that the following reasons are not sufficient to justify failure to inform:

That the patient may prefer not to be told the unpleasant possibilities regarding the treatment.

That full disclosure might suggest infinite dangers to a patient with an active imagination, thereby causing her to refuse treatment.

That the patient, on learning the risks involved, might rationally decline treatment. The right to decline is the specific fundamental right protected by the informed consent doctrine."

American parents are becoming increasingly aware that well-intentioned health professionals do not always have scientific data to support common American obstetrical practices, and that many of these practices are carried out primarily because they are part of medical and hospital tradition.

The distingquished obstetrician Dr. Roberto Caldeyro-Barcia, while President of FIGO, the world congress of obstetricians-gynecologists, cautioned two decades ago:

"In the last forty years many artificial practices have been introduced which have changed childbirth from a physiological event to a very complicated medical procedure in which all kinds of drugs are used and procedures carried out, sometimes unnecessarily, and many of them potentially damaging for the baby and even for the mother".

A growing body of research makes it alarmingly clear that every aspect of traditional American hospital care during labor and delivery must now be questioned as to its possible effect on the future well-being of both the obstetric patient and her unborn child.

There has been a three hundred percent increase in the rate of autistic children in the United States in just one decade. One in every 35 children born in the United States today will eventually be diagnosed as retarded; in 75% of these cases there is no familial or genetic predisposing factor. One in every 10 to 17 children has been found to have some form of brain dysfunction or learning disability requiring special treatment. Such statistics are not confined to the lower socioeconomic group but cut across all segments of American society.

New concerns are being raised by childbearing women because no one knows how drug induced changes in brain chemistry, oxygen depletion, head compression, traction and skull fracture by both forceps and vacuum extractor the fetus and newborn infant can tolerate before that child sustains permanent brain damage or dysfunction. The findings regarding the cancer-related drug diethylstilbestrol have alerted the public to the fact that neither the approval of a drug by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration nor the fact that a drug is prescribed by a physician serves as a guarantee that a drug or medication is safe for the mother or her unborn child. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics' Committee on Drugs has stated that there is no drug, whether prescription or over-the-counter remedy, which has been proven safe for the unborn child.

The Pregnant Patient has the right to participate in decisions involving her well-being and that of her unborn child, unless there is a clearcut medical emergency that prevents her participation. In addition to the rights set forth in the American Hospital Association's "Patient's Bill of Rights," the Pregnant Patient, because she represents TWO patients rather than one, should be recognized as having the additional rights listed below.

The Pregnant Patient has the right, prior to the administration of any drug or procedure, to be informed by the health professional caring for her of any potential direct or indirect effects, risks or hazards to herself or her unborn or newborn infant which may result from the use of a drug or procedure prescribed for or administered to her during pregnancy, labor, birth or lactation.

The Pregnant Patient has the right, prior to the proposed therapy, to be informed, not only of the benefits, risks and hazards of the proposed therapy but also of known alternative therapy, such as available childbirth education classes which could help to prepare the Pregnant Patient physically and mentally to cope with the discomfort or stress of pregnancy and birth. Such classes have been shown to reduce or eliminate the Pregnant Patient's need for drugs and obstetric intervention and should be offered to her early in her pregnancy in order that she may make a reasoned decisions.

The Pregnant Patient has the right, prior to the administration of any drug, to be informed by the health professional who is prescribing or administering the drug to her that any drug which she receives during pregnancy, labor and birth, no matter how or when the drug is taken or administered, may adversely affect her unborn baby, directly or indirectly, and that there is no drug or chemical which has been proven safe for the unborn child.

The Pregnant Patient has the right if Cesarean birth is anticipated, to be informed prior to the administration of any drug, and preferably prior to her hospitalization, that minimizing her intake of nonessential pre-operative medicine will benefit her baby.

The Pregnant Patient has the right, prior to the administration of a drug or procedure, to be informed of the areas of uncertainty if there is NO properly controlled follow-up research which has established the safety of the drug or procedure with regard to its on the fetus and the later physiological, mental and neurological development of the child. This caution applies to virtually all drugs and the vast majority of obstetric procedures.

The Pregnant Patient has the right, prior to the administration of any drug, to be informed of the brand name and generic name of the drug in order that she may advise the health professional of any past adverse reaction to the drug.

The Pregnant Patient has the right to determine for herself, without pressure from her attendant, whether she will or will not accept the risks inherent in the proposed treatment.

The Pregnant Patient has the right to know the name and qualifications of the individual administering a drug or procedure to her during labor or birth.

The Pregnant Patient has the right to be informed, prior to the administration of any procedure, whether that procedure is being administered to her because a) it is medically indicated, b) it is an elective procedure (for convenience, c) or for teaching purposes or research).

The Pregnant Patient has the right to be accompanied during the stress of labor and birth by someone she cares for, and to whom she looks for emotional comfort and encouragement.

The Pregnant Patient has the right after appropriate medical consultation to choose a position for labor and birth which is least stressful for her and her baby.

The Obstetric Patient has the right to have her baby cared for at her bedside if her baby is normal, and to feed her baby according to her baby's needs rather than according to the hospital regimen.

The Obstetric Patient has the right to be informed in writing of the name of the person who actually delivered her baby and the professional qualifications of that person. This information should also be on the birth certificate.

The Obstetric Patient has the right to be informed if there is any known or indicated aspect of her or her baby's care or condition which may cause her or her baby later difficulty or problems.

The Obstetric Patient has the right to have her and her baby's hospital- medical records complete, accurate and legible and to have their records, including nursing notes, retained by the hospital until the child reaches at least the age of majority, or, alternatively, to have the records offered to her before they are destroyed.

The Obstetric Patient, both during and after her hospital stay, has the right to have access to her complete hospital-medical records, including nursing notes, and to receive a copy upon payment of a reasonable fee and without incurring the expense of retaining an attorney.

It is the obstetric patient and her baby, not the health professional, who must sustain any trauma or injury resulting from the use of a drug or obstetric procedure. The observation of the rights listed above will not only permit the obstetric patient to participate in the decisions involving her and her baby's health care, but will help to protect the health professional and the hospital against litigation arising from resentment or misunderstanding on the part of the mother.

Prepared by Doris Haire ©2000
American Foundation for Maternal and Child Health

I am mama! Hear me ROAR!

2007-11-13T13:14:00.000-06:00

Recently, it has been discussed on another blog that referring to a mother or pregnant woman as "mommy" or "mama" is degrading and condescending. Homebirth advocates, a writer claims, are the ones guilty of this, because after all they are convinced of their own superiority. These allegations are just another attempt to discredit homebirth advocates and thus poke fun at homebirth.

Yes, homebirth advocates do often refer to pregnant women and mothers as "mommies" and "mamas." So do many in the natural living and attachment parenting communities. It is not done to make one feel inferior, however, but for other reasons. It is a term of both endearment and of respect, as most of us feel that motherhood is a woman's highest calling. Mothers are usually grown-ups, so why would calling someone a mama or mommy make them feel like a little child?

I am a mother, a mommy, a mama. I am also a woman, a wife, a person. I'm proud of all that I am but most importantly of being a mother. When someone calls me mommy or mama, they are acknowledging that I have answered that calling to motherhood. I do not feel degraded when called either; I feel uplifted, acknowledged, respected, even comforted. Why would it make me feel infantilized or like a baby? That's what my baby calls me, and it warms my heart whenever he does. It's just as heart-warming when someone else says it, a pleasant reminder of who I am: a mommy. I'm proud to be a mama.

When I go to the clinic for my son's well-baby check-ups, they refer to us as "mom/mama" and "baby". "So this is baby? My, how beautiful... And how are you doing, mama? Good, good. Now mom, I'm going to have you take baby's clothes off so we can weigh him. Oh, don't cry little one, you'll be back in mommy's arms soon enough..." Do they do this out of respect, affection, or a feeling of superiority? No. They do it because they have too many patients to be bothered to learn our names. I find that far more degrading.

Why is it okay from doctor to patient but not from mother to mother, midwife to mother, etc.? Why it is degrading for a fellow mother or a midwife to refer to a woman as mama or mommy out of respect and affection, but not for a doctor or nurse to do it because of laziness and lack of time/involvement?

Apparently it is equally degrading for a woman to tell a pregnant mother or woman that she is beautiful. Why is that? I find the form of a pregnant woman to be a symbol of beauty. I think breastfeeding is beautiful. Why would telling someone that make them feel degraded? It's never made me feel child-like to be called beautiful, whether it's said by my husband, a nurse, or a passerby.

And why does being proud of someone indicate a feeling of superiority; why does having someone be proud of you mean you're inferior? I am proud of my son for who he is, my mother for homeschooling her son who was having trouble in public school, my husband for working so hard. I don't feel superior to them. My stepmother is proud of me for trusting my instinct, though she's not even a "supporter" of UC. My husband is proud of me for being a good mother. My parents are proud of me just for who I am. Should I feel inferior because of that?

An Unassisted Birth Story

2007-11-10T12:50:00.000-06:00

Hello everyone. I am pleased to announce at long last that I have given birth and am no longer pregnant. My second son, Cedric Orin, was born on September 24 at 1:49 PM in the family bed. He emerged into his fathers loving hands with his older brother looking on and his godmother filming. He weighed in at 7lbs 6oz and was 19" long, the same length as his brother and just one pound heavier.

The full story of his birth is located here:
Cedric Orin's Beautiful Unassisted Birth

No portion of it may be reprinted without my explicit consent or that of Associated Content, and I am sure my publisher would be more than happy to deal with any unauthorized usage.

Mothers and Babies in Afghanistan

2007-10-30T22:22:00.000-05:00

These articles are several years old. Recent reports are that life in Afghanistan, especially for women and children is worse this year. Billions and billions of dollars later ...
Birth shadowed by death
Afghanistan: A Johns Hopkins-linked program combats tragically high maternal and infant mortality by training midwives
By Douglas Birch Sun Foreign Staff
May 27, 2004
"We have a local midwife," Abdul said. "But she has no education."

23,000 Afghan mothers die in childbirth each year, making it the nation's leading cause of death for women.

Biggest cause of death

It's also the single biggest health threat that Afghan women face, claiming the lives of more expectant mothers each year than malnutrition and war. It is a public health catastrophe with few parallels elsewhere in the world.

In the United States, the lifetime risk of death in childbirth is one death out of every 2,500 women - the risks for any individual depending greatly on the number of times she gives birth. In Afghanistan, the figure is one in six.

Giving birth is perilous here partly because of the nation's poverty; the lack of roads, clinics and health workers; and partly because the country's culture has blocked health care advances.

In the US only 3% of birth are at home. One third of all births are surgical births and many of those are believed to be unnecessary and doctor-induced. In Afghanistan women do not have the option of hospital birth.

Only 8 percent of Afghan births occur outside the home but that figure might soon rise. In interviews, village elders across eastern Afghanistan said that they want their wives, sisters and cousins to go to clinics or hospitals to give birth.
another article:
Feature-Women dying to give birth in Afghanistan
By Angie Ramos
ISHKASHIM, Afghanistan, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Gulnama Shamsali sips tea and tries to calm her screaming six-month-old son as her husband and his four siblings quietly nibble their lunch -- a few pieces of stale wheat bread -- in their cold, dark mud house.
In two months, Gulnama, still only 22, will give birth to her second child.
And she could die from doing so.
The nearest hospital is 100 km (60 miles) away, four to five days by donkey, the most common transport in rural Afghanistan.
But Gulnama, whose youthful face is scarred by patches of frostbite from the bitter winter weather in her native Badakhshan province, says she is not worried. "I will give birth and their destiny belongs to God. He will save them," she said.
According to U.N. data, Afghanistan has among the world's highest rates of maternal mortality, and remote, impoverished, Badakhshan has the highest rates ever recorded anywhere in the world, with one mother dying in every 15 births.
It is not difficult to see why.
The province is spectacularly beautiful, with high mountains and deep valleys blanketed by green in spring and summer, red in autumn, and white in winter.
But this beauty masks extreme poverty, an absence of physical infrastructure, a lack of skilled health workers, high illiteracy and social pressure on women to bear many children.
CONTINUE AT:

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/
MHII-69U83W?OpenDocument

More Great Scientific Research

2007-10-30T11:37:00.000-05:00

Bipuvicaine and fentanyl and other narcotics are also considered safe and without harm by those who use them and those same people who do the research and have a lot to gain.

MMR: It's safe when you remove the damaged kids

Around 7,000 American families have joined a very long queue to try and win a cash settlement after their children suffered permanent, or longterm, damage from one of the 'safe' vaccines such as the MMR. To win their case with the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VCIP), the families must prove a direct causal link between the damage done to their child and the vaccine.

For this, they must locate good scientific evidence which would be recognised and accepted by the VCIP board.

Unfortunately, as we're always reminded, scientific studies have consistently proven that the vaccines are absolutely safe. Even Dr Andrew Wakefield's infamous claim of a possible link to autism has been discredited by medical research.

And, as luck would have it, in the very week when the VCIP started reviewing the merit of the parents' claims, the august New England Journal of Medicine published another study that suggested that the vaccines - and especially the thimerosal preservative used in the vaccines - didn't affect neuro-psychological functioning.

To discover the safety of the vaccines, the researchers looked at the health records of 1,047 children aged between 7 and 10 years who had been given their first thimerosal-loaded vaccine as a baby. They couldn't find anything out of the ordinary among the children.

However, in making their selection, the researchers took out any children who had existing neuro-psychological problems, such as encephalitis, meningitis or hydrocephalus, as this might have caused 'bias' to the results.

So let's get this straight. The children who were removed from the study had been vaccinated, and they were displaying neuro-psychological problems. Once removed, the researchers were left with a group of healthy children, whose very well-being 'proves' the vaccine is safe.

Don't expect any pay-outs any time soon from the VCIP.

Published 26 October 2007 14:36 by Bryan Hubbard Filed under: MMR, vaccine, vaccine damage

Birth Extremism

2007-10-30T09:15:00.000-05:00

Seems there is a discussion elsewhere about BIRTH EXTREMISM ..... isms are everywhere and a daily part of life ... birth extremism though? hmmm ... seems some folks, especially medical folk, who have much to gain financially from winning converts to the belief that birth is dangerous and that vaginal birth causes brain damage, while Cesarean surgery is safe .... well, these folks believe that women who choose natural birth and other lifestyle choices that protect their child from abuse and toxins are extremists ... braggarts even. Oh, those women who brag about birthing without drugs, at home ... who "think only of themselves" and not the safety of their baby.

By the way, how did the neophyte, "Medicine", become the One, real, and true way, and the natural way (through eons of time) become the "Alternative"?

"Birth Extremism" just might be necessary to bring the pendulum back to mid-line.

Here's an epistle I really enjoyed ---

See, I for one honestly don't get why anyone is actually bothered by "birth extremism". YES there are fanatics, as there are in every walk of life. I once knew an OB who honestly subscribed to the old fashioned "iron clad perineum causing brain damage in baby's tender heads". He cut an epis on every single woman, had like a 50% cesarean rate, and openly stated that he hated vaginal birth and thought that individuals born vaginally ALL had some degree of brain damage. I kid you not! Clearly he didn't represent the viewpoint of all OBs, or all physicians.

There's a very large percentage of docs practicing defensive medicine, despite knowing that it's application may often be against evidence and even against the well being of women. Do they represent all docs? Obviously not. AmySue herself has railed against defensive medicine often - just do a google search on her and it.

So yes - the lotus-birthing, placenta-print making, elimination- communicating, breatfeeding until age five and then only raw food eatin', handmade toy only playin' parents out there ARE extremists. Big flippin' deal!

There are thousands of "extraordinary groups" out there in American present and past (nuns, hippies, gypsies, amish, brethren, survivalists, trekkies... the list goes on and on....). It's part of what makes any culture interesting, for pete's sake. Celebrate diversity!

On the point that these women/parents may "make other's feel bad" for choosing an epidural or bottle-feeding -- again, BFD! Christians make me feel bad for living in sin, do I care? Health food nuts make me feel bad for liking sugar, whoopdee. Greenies make me feel bad for driving an SUV, oh well.

My point is - cultural extremism in many walks of life has always and will always wax and wane. There will always be dreamers. There will always be those who hate authority. Why do you guys have such a problem with it??!

Our Boys ... We have good news!

2007-10-08T18:52:00.001-05:00

Mine first! He's coming home!! My GI Joe who is partially responsible for my inspiration for this blog a year ago will be home within a week. He deployed to Kuwait and Iraq from Mississippi on October 16, 2006.

I am traveling to Mississippi to meet his plane and to count his fingers and toes, to touch and smell him, kiss him and look into his eyes to tell him how happy I am that he is here. Sound familiar? It FEELS familiar!!

A HUGE congratulations to my co-blogger Heather and her family on the arrival of her son as well. He was born at home as Heather planned -- unassisted, with only family present. What a wonderful, beautiful story awaits the readers. You are the BOMB, Heather.

We want pictures! We want pictures! We want pictures!!

Janel
Babykeeper

wow!

2007-09-26T22:51:00.000-05:00

Father delivers baby by calling 99925 Sep 2007

New father Leo Hickman was forced to help his wife Jane give birth to their third child while on the phone to 999 emergency services, according to reports.Jane Hickman had planned a homebirth for the delivery of their third baby, following advice from doctors, fearing that she wouldn't make it to the hospital on time based on the speed of her previous two labours. When Mrs Hickman began to go into labour at the family home in south London, Leo had to step in for the midwives, who were stuck in traffic, and attempt to deliver their first son with the help of 20-year-old 999 ambulance phone worker Katie Vallis. Baby Jacob weighed a healthy 8lb and is doing well.

Mr Hickman told the Daily Mail: "It was only once Jane and Jacob were asleep and the girls were in bed that Margaret [mother-in-law] and I had our first stiff drink of the night. "I never did discover the name of the operator - I still only know her as CAC1821 from the London Ambulance Service.

But none the less we toasted her too."

http://www.bounty.com/Father-delivers-baby-by-calling-999.news/18292569

How to Afford a Water Birth

2007-09-12T00:39:00.001-05:00

"So you've decided water birth is the right choice for you--or at the very least that it could be. But can you afford it? Renting or buying a pool made just for giving birth can be quite costly. Electric water pumps and heaters just add to the expenses. Not everyone has hundreds to spend on a water birth, especially after paying a midwife a few thousand bucks! You don't want to give birth in the bath tub, but what else can you do? Well, relax. You can have a wonderful water birth--without overspending!

Well, first thing is first: you need a birthing pool. You don't have to buy or rent an expensive one made specifically for birthing, though. Inflatable kiddie pools do just fine. You want to make sure that it has sturdy sides that will support your weight as you lean against them. It needs to be wide enough and deep enough for you to fit in comfortably, but it also needs to fit in your home. Remember that the interior of the pools will be smaller than the exterior measurements. An inflated floor will make it more comfortable."

Read the rest here: Your Guide to an Inexpensive but Wonderful Water Birth

Babies faces -- we wash them too much, and with chemicals

2007-09-09T11:33:00.000-05:00

I love this letter I get from this fellow and am posting it in full.

I was reminded of my teenage years when I decided to wash my face multiple times a day to improve my skin. My complection was clear and I got many compliments on it but decided I wanted it even better. My skin broke out! and so I went back to my routine of soap and water morning and night -- if I remembered. My grandmother had given me cod liver oil to take for my skin --- she knew. I have never used a lot of cremes and makeup and didn't blow dry my hair. My younger sister who did looks older than me. I always wondered about that.

I am also reminded of another natural way that we mamas have for washing our baby's faces, especially in a pinch when nothing is available -- our saliva. My older daughter absolutely hated that as she got older. She will be thirty in November and so this was waaaaaaaay before the days of "wet ones".

By the way, I know a brilliant, mother Earth mama who used old receiving blankets and made her own "wet ones" with natural indredients. I scratch my head and say, "Wow, and a wet washcloth used to do the job just fine, and it was Earth friendly too." We just keep evolving into such "civilized" beings -- and, but, what is the cost to the planet?

I suppose that for eons now, since women have been giving birth, that they knew all of the ways that they could use their body to care for their babes. I wonder what women did when water was not immediately available? Don't we all still do that sometimes? Babies were rescusitated by mouth. Women today can't even imagine it -- we're so evolved. It seems so gross to me now, but did women clean up burps by mouth and what about the other end? Sorry ... but, I do think about such things. How did women do it? Is there a reason that breast milk poop is not offensive?

So ... here's the letter.
LJMM
Babykeeper

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The Good Life Letter
9th September 2007

Dear janel,
Did you know that WE may be increasing the cases of eczema in British society…

…because we wash our babies too often?

Bless poor Mums and Dads these days. Terrified by scary ‘EVIL GERMS’ adverts into scrubbing their tots to oblivion in boiling water every night.

But it could be true….

The number of kids suffering from skin conditions like eczema has doubled in a generation. A scary 35% of babies suffer from sore, flaking and itchy skin.

Around 25 ago this figure was 17%.

This is not as widely reported as it should be. But it’s a growing theory. Even the bloke off This Morning – Dr Chris Steele – claims that these sorts of stats could owe much to the over-washing of babies.The reason?

Well, a child’s skin is delicate, and the skin needs time to strengthen of its own volition. So it’s no surprise that over-cleaning is going to cause damage.

Especially with modern soaps and lotions.And it’s not only children….Over 5% of adults in the UK now have eczema, which involves red, dry, itchy skin… lumps, blisters and weeping sores.

Many experts believe a lot of it is down to our crazed dependence on the artificial cleaning agents, solvents, detergents, oils and other gunk.

Again, this wouldn’t surprise me at all.

But before you run screaming for cover at another Collins outburst…. I don’t want to get into a rant about the perils and pitfalls of modern living… not today at least.

I want to offer your a few specific, NATURAL ways to help avoid – and ease – skin problems like eczema.
Because as sufferers will already know, the side-effects of conventional drugs can be worse than eczema itself.Steroids can cause muscle wasting, weight gain, osteoporosis, poor immune system, ulcers, high blood pressure and glaucoma.

And while antihistamine drugs can reduce inflammation, they can also make you drowsy.They key for a long term solution is to find natural ways to correct your body’s metabolism so that it tackles the root of the problem.

In short, let’s see if you can help give your body the tools it needs to clear up the problem for itself.
3 supplements to help fight the symptoms of eczema

First up. Try out supplements of essential fatty acids. They are said to bring you relief of eczema symptoms.
For instance, a study in Denmark showed a 58% success rate in treating patients with fish oil supplements over a 4 month period.

Even better, eat oily fish like mackerel as part of your diet. They’re packed with Omega-3 and also vitamin D, which is good for the skin.

Upping your weekly fish quota is not such a struggle to do either… (unless the slightest whiff of mackerel causes you to erupt into the nearest wheelie bin.)

I recommend smoked mackerel and scrambled eggs for breakfast 3 times a week. Absolutely delicious.

Fish oils can also reduce levels of leukotriene B4, an inflammatory substance that has been linked to eczema.
In one trial I’ve seen reported, the results were amazing. In the test group, 73% of eczema sufferers who were given fish oil saw improvement after just 12 weeks.

There’s also Zinc….

It helps make the enzymes involved in your fatty acid metabolism. And it helps your stomach produce hydrochloric acid.

Oysters contain more zinc per serving than any other food, but red meat and poultry are good sources too.
Or, if you’re vegetarian, pumpkin seeds are the most concentrated source of zinc outside meat products.
Also try dairy products, beans and lentils, yeast, nuts, seeds and wholegrain cereals.

A useful FREE resource for you

If you have a serious skin problem here’s a non-profit organisation for you to turn to.

They’re called the Skin Care Campaign, an umbrella organisation for British people with skin diseases. It’s a subsidiary of the National Eczema Society, a registered charity.

Write to this address:
Hill HouseHighgate HillLondon N19 5NA

Or check out their FREE website:
http://www.skincarecampaign.org/

In my opinion, the only problem with sites like these is that they tend to offer only conventional medicinal treatments. I’d much prefer to see a whole range of treatments offered..

For people who’ve been failed by the treatments they’ve tried already, where’s the lifeline?

That said they do give you support, champion your cause and a network to rely on, which is a good thing in my opinion.

And offering you information on alternatives, so you can be empowered to make you own choices is what services like The Good Life Letter are here for.

Or, you can try great handbooks like this… which I love.

No, this isn’t for eczema, but another skin condition I’ve had a tonne of email about recently…

Hope for psoraisis sufferers

If you or your loved ones have psoriasis, here’s a great handbook. It shows you all the conventional treatments… AND the alternative options, too. What causes psoriasis and a range of tips to help treat the symptoms Revealed!

The factors that increase your risk, including stress and worry
Lifestyle changes that can help including food and drink you should avoid.
Possible serious complications that could put your at risk
The low-down on new medicines your doctor may prescribe
Natural homeopathic remedies that really work
The key ingredient in the Eskimo diet that keeps them psoriasis-free
An effective, little known treatment that has helped thousands
Helpful addresses for psoriasis sufferers

You’ll also learn from actual case histories of psoriasis sufferers and how they treated their agonisingsymptoms and now successfully keep psoriasis at bay.

Go and take a look at it here:
www.psoriasisbook.co.uk/index.php?pac=GLL97

I hope some of this helps you. I’ll keep looking out for more resources, research and natural remedies

Yours as ever,
Ray Collins

The Good Life Letter

More US women dying in childbirth

2007-08-30T13:06:00.000-05:00

Death rate highest in decades; obesity and C-sections may be the cause

Read the story here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20427256/

Childbirth is Safe for Today's American Women, but Why?

2007-08-25T21:22:00.001-05:00

"Those who are against homebirth and freebirth often have the same arguments. They say that parents who chose these births are thrill-seekers who don't care about the well-being of their babies. A favorite statistic to quote is the fact that some 500,000 women die yearly around the world from childbirth complications. These arguments are severely lacking in foundation and evidence. There is much that the naysayers purposely leave out and exaggerate. To really understand the dangers of childbirth and the safety of birthing location, we need to examine the most common causes of maternal death across the world and why they are not so rare here in America today.

We need to know more for the number 500,000 to tell us anything about the safety of birth. How many women each year give birth? Where do most of those maternal deaths occur, and what is different about that country from America? What are the most common causes of death? How many of those deaths were truly preventable? The presence of this data would enable us to calculate percentages. Those percentages can give us a far better idea how safe or dangerous childbirth is than a lone number. The truth is, the numbers aren't quite so dismal for Americans.

..."

Read the rest here

Why My Son is Invited to His Sibling's Birth

2007-08-17T12:52:00.000-05:00

"Many people believe that childbirth is too traumatic for children, especially those young in age, to witness. They say that mothers who wish to have their older children present for the birth of siblings are being selfish. They think that inviting the child to the birth is solely for the mother's benefit and that no one is thinking of the child's well-being. There may be certain situations in which it would be inappropriate for a child to witness birth, but this is certainly not true all or most of the time. Many believe that the entire family benefits when children are included in birth, and I happen to agree.

Hospital birth has the potential to be more traumatic than homebirth. Risk of complication for mother and child is much higher in the hospital. This is in part true because of how intervention-happy hospital staff tend to be, but also because of the environment itself. Hospitals are scary places that we associate with sickness, and just being in them makes some uncomfortable. This is true for children. Women in the hospital are more likely to have violent contractions caused by labor induction or augmentation with pitocin. The child may also hear screams coming from down the hall, even if his mother is relaxed. His mother is hooked up to machines, and people are fussing over her as if something can go wrong at any minute. That can be frightening.

Homebirth, however, is much more calm and gentle. Home is where the heart is and is where most people are comfortable, especially children. At home, a woman is less likely to be screaming her head off. Homebirthers usually have a very different attitude about birth, which affects how they cope with labor. They also can enjoy all the comforts of home and use them to soothe their pain. They are at home where they are best able to relax. They also aren't subjected to the tense environment of the hospital or interventions that can make labor harder, like pitocin drip. Children can come and go as they please, watching the birth, joining mom in the birth pool (tons of fun!), or going down the hall to play with toys. Homebirth usually doesn't involve people frantically scurrying about, and there are no scary machines or strangers."

Read the rest: Why My Son is Invited to His Sibling's Birth

10 Things You & Your Prenatal Care Provider Should Know

2007-08-10T14:01:00.000-05:00

Pre"Birth is highly medicalized in today's society. The C-section rate is double what it should be, and our intervention rates are high. Most interventions are overused and abused, putting the mother and child at risk without necessity. Care providers may be motivated by ignorance, greed, or impatience--just like any other fallible human being. There are a few things that all women and care providers should know. Knowing these things decreases your risk of premature birth, an uncomfortable and painful delivery, unnecessary and dangerous interventions, and various other things.

A woman does not have to deliver within a time limit of going into labor. Too often care providers expect labor to progress within a specific time frame. Each phase is only supposed to last a set number of hours. If a labor is not proceeding fast enough for their liking, they will augment labor with pitocin. This can cause the contractions to become more intense and painful than natural ones that build gradually, and it increases risk of fetal distress and various other things. All women labor at their own pace. It is normal for some labors to be quick, some slow. It is also normal for labor to slow down, speed up, stop, start, and even regress. You do not need to deliver your baby within a certain time period of labor starting. This is true even if your waters have broken, as the placenta continues making amniotic fluid until the baby is born, and this steady trickle will prevent bacteria from entering the womb--unless it is aided by human fingers.

A broken bag of waters can repair itself, and the placenta continues making water throughout the pregnancy. If your membranes rupture prematurely, you do not need to be hospitalized--unless they are going to monitor you to try to prolong labor. You do not need to give birth within 24 hours. Many times when the amniotic sac breaks too early, it will repair itself. There is no danger of having a dry birth, as the placenta keeps making fluid for the baby. The baby will not be in there without amniotic fluid just because your water broke. Moreover, while you do need to take precautions such as not bathing or allowing anything put into your vagina, you don't need to worry about infection. Even if your bag of water does not fix itself, the slow trickle will push bacteria out of the vagina so that it does not penetrate the womb."

Read the rest here

Preparing for a Natural Birth

2007-07-28T11:54:00.001-05:00

"There is really no way to make childbirth painless. Many women throughout history have had painless births, but there is no way to guarantee a birth without pain. Even with today's technology, birth comes with pain most of the time. Epidurals can make the pain more comfortable, but they don't always work and do come with risks. The best thing to do is hope for the best and learn methods of controlling and coping with your pain. There are many natural ways to lessen pain. Being prepared can help you deal gracefully with whatever you experience during your birth.

When preparing for a natural birth, the first thing you need to do is begin reading. You should read anything you can about birth. In the beginning you'll want to educate yourself about the physiology of labor, complications that occur, and common hospital interventions and their risks. As you move closer to your due date, you should focus more on the positive aspects of birth. Read birth stories, and read books about natural birth to learn what to expect and how to cope with whatever comes your way. You should read a little everyday throughout your pregnancy.

Connect with a support group of friends who are educated about birth and who have experienced natural childbirth. They can teach you so much. Learn from them, and lean on them. They can tell you what to expect and give you pointers on dealing with labor. There are many forums on the internet dedicated to natural childbirth."

Read the rest at Preparing for a Natural Birth

Preparing for a Natural Birth

2007-07-28T11:54:00.000-05:00

Senator Loudon: Language inserted to protect babies

2007-07-18T12:22:00.000-05:00

Senator Loudon: Language inserted to protect babies

Springfield New Leader

I supported tort reform and sponsored medical malpractice insurance reform so obstetricians would not leave Missouri because of high insurance costs. This and my desire to see babies born safely to Missouri families prompted my insertion of the midwifery and Down syndrome language into House Bill 818, recently signed by the Governor.

My wife and I prefer hospital births but find it shocking that Missouri is the only state where midwifery is a felony. I had strong majorities in the House and Senate for my bill ensuring licensure restrictions on midwifery. When one senator up for re-election filibustered at the behest of one lobbyist, thwarting the voice of the Legislature, we employed the constitutional measure allowed exactly for this purpose.

Over 90 percent of babies with Down syndrome are aborted, yet in January, ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) mandated its members suggest a Down syndrome test to all pregnant women. Columnist George Will called this a "search and destroy mission," which "borders on eugenics." Lobbyists obstructed my efforts to change these provisions.

Savvy lobbyists know it is easy to kill a bill. You only need to buy one senator's filibuster. This is an abuse of the process. So, when trying to create a new freedom in the face of that filibuster, there are few choices. You can compromise. We did that. You can negotiate with fellow Senators. We did that. In the end, when there is no dialogue from the other side, constitutionally there is one option, which we exercised.

I inserted language in HB 818 to counter their "search and destroy" mission against babies with Down syndrome, and to de-felonize midwifery. It seems inconsistent that ACOG would attack the midwifery language but not the Down syndrome language, while attempting to strip both from the same bill.
All of the outrage is based on about 30 women delivering babies in a birthing clinic or home, to 1-3% of families at the most (based on other states' data). Why should we let ACOG hold the monopoly in Missouri? They have failed to prove their case with raw data, so they have resorted to fear mongering. Seeing through this, senators voted overwhelmingly (21-11) for midwifery, despite lobbyist rhetoric.

Now, Missouri women, not the state, decide where to deliver their babies. Mothers carrying babies with Down syndrome will have full information (high false-positive rates, resources available, adoption) before making critical choices.

My hope was that de-felonizing midwifery would bring ACOG lobbyists to the table to create a law that works for both sides. ACOG prefers to make midwifery a felony again.

Instead of civil debate, the medical groups have chosen the uncivil course of filing a lawsuit which the taxpayers will have to defend.

In a perfect world, one senator would not serve a narrow special interest and block the will of 21 and another Senator would not resort to maneuvering around him in pursuit of freedom. Until the.

This is also personal to me. Our baby, Robert, hospital birthed by an OB, would not be here but for the pre-natal suggestion of a midwifery advocate regarding an undiagnosed clotting disorder that caused three prior miscarriages. We also adopted a precious little boy with Down syndrome, Samuel, and we are passionate about his right to be alive. I think all Missourians should have the access I had. ACOG's lawsuit may block that.

Published Saturday, July 14, 2007

http://www.news-leader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articleAID=/20070714/OPINIONS02/707140325/1006/OPINIONS

A tearful day

2007-07-13T15:06:00.000-05:00

I responded to a dear friend who wrote kinds words of support today. She lost her beautiful daughter four years ago.

Thanks, Sista.

I know you get it. Over time I came to articulate that it is sort of like when a family has a baby in NICU or a child missing. We know where they are and fear the worst and then the element of how wrong it is and our child is doing it, participating in it. His soul has a mission and I totally support that. I am in awe of him sometimes and the shared journey of ours. I saw him come in at conception and he was so dear and cherished. So awesome. So much anguish is from the time of his early teens when Mario was so brutal to me and I was "hiding" it and our relationship, from the ga-ga begining to the abuse, harmed Joe. FORGIVENSESS ... knowing HE chose ME for whatever his purpose. He is a loved, cherished, and cared for being. I am curious about WHO he will be when he returns. How will he be and his thinking ... what will he be led to do? WHAT is HIS role in this? Looking back at his articulations as a child becoming a man, he was so about the world changes. The Warrior Soul.... the GENTLE warrior ... clearly, Mario (soul level) was part of Joe's plan.

The hard part is like when you were with Rachel in ICU ... the waiting for the prognosis ... that part is part of this. WHAT, when, how .. will he be ok? Survive .. keep limbs, vision, brain? We he live his life like so many VN vets? Last year this time I wrote him a "love letter" when I realized he was going AWOL on me --- I am, had to be, as I am sure you considered, inspite of your premonition, of the possibility of caring for a disabled child for the rest of life.

It's also a bit like parents who know their child is abducted or a runaway (as Joe chose this) -- the "just can't get to him or stop anything or protect him" part of it. If only all of these people in between me and him --- from the Guard Family Assistance people who have direct contact with the redeployment who can have direct contact with him or his commander to the Alaska television journalist who was embedded in Joe's unit and SAW him, to my senators, to congress, to the Pres --- would do something. It's like sitting in NICU day after day and NO ONE seems to see or notice that I am unable to function wholey. I can't (Couldn't) take care of my basic needs.

I think often of the mother of the young woman who disappeared in Aruba last year. She was a maniac to some in her vicious vigilance. I totally get it --- I FEEL it on the inside. A mother does not stop her innate, physiological response to her child in danger. I imagine my eighty year old grandmother still feeling this way about her sixty year old son. I think of the next forty years (I plan to be at least ninety when I finish up my own mission here). I think of Joe being in the military for the next tweny years. Will this SCREAM -- the physiological response stuck in my gut -- EVER stop? How does the mother of that young woman or the parents of the two US soldiers MIA ever breathe? Or, the families of the men and women who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq .. or anywhere for any reason?

I haven't cried for about three weeks. Yesterday and today I am teary. I sent a birthday package that had come back, and a new one with ten dozen cookies. Enroute to the PO I heard Diane Reams on the radio speaking with soldiers sharing their experiences. I sat listening in the parking lot to a very articulate man in the same rank as my son. He spoke of his experiences of going into Iraqi homes and terrorizing them, ah, I mean interrogating them. How do people hear believe that all of the terror is out there and directed at poor little ole us who have seventy percent of the world's resources? I wondered how is my son't experience of the the war affecting him? The boy conceived and raised by a rabblerousing, grassroots, anti-stupid rules naturalist hippie and a conscientious objector in VN gone to prison for five months instead of going to war -- who came to admire Colin Powell as his hero-- WHO will he be when he comes home?

I imagine he'll come home and like others in his generation to whom this world now belongs, fallen in on them, will have fix this mess. My imagination and hope that sustains me some days is that he will come home to the next phase of the unfolding of his soul's journey - MY HERO, who will know in his soul and his bones (because of genetics and upbrinign) how to go about creating peace and equality in the world. I am so proud of him.

Tears are falling now. I would give anything to hear my son's voice, see his face, and nuzzle in his neck taking his scent into every cell of me.

Homebirth Attended by Amish midwife

2007-07-08T22:45:00.000-05:00

I attended a birth on July 4th. You guessed it; of course, it was a homebirth. I s'posed that the baby might be one of the very few babies born on the holiday during 2007. Most of the babies due anywhere near were induced in order to have the holiday free. Imagine what havoc the Wednesday holiday created for obstetricians --- getting births in on Monday and Tuesday. I bet that was tricky. Do you suppose that they just induced the week before to make sure the weekend was free as well? You can go to your local hospital website and track births. I started doing that two years ago when my cousin's son had a baby in St Louis, MO. My mother couldn't pull up the picture and I was helping her. DAMN!!! I noticed immediately no babies on the 4th and a spike in the days before. I got to looking and DAMN! again! BIG drop in the numbers of birth on Saturday and Sunday and every holiday. *#($(& $(&#(* (*#&(*. Makes me angry to think about how obstetricians are given free license to do whatever they want even when the science shows the danger and consequences to women and babies (induction, then the needed epidural ANESTHESIA, and then surgical births they lead to.) I wonder how NICU census numbers range near holidays.

ANYWAY, back to sweeter things ..... the homebirth I attended. Baby number four. Second homebirth. The first two were cesarean births. (I could get into that, but will save it.) The midwife for the birth was an Amish midwife who was two hours away. I was seventy some miles. The baby was "over due" and not much happening. The mother woke in labor about 6:30 am and she called me by 7. I headed out about 8 ish to drive the 78 mile trip. I arrived about eight minutes before the baby was born at 9:30 am, and the midwife was about four minutes behind me.

No one answered the door and I crept in quietly, whispering, "Haaalllooo." Grandma stuck her head out of the bathroom and said, "We're in transition!" I was unwrapping video camera cords as I approached. I looked in and thought, "Ah, you are way past transition." Baby's head was crowning. Grandma said, in a panic now, "Have you been to a birth before?" I was there to video the birth for my documentary AND to support the baby and mom to have minimal disruptions and to do the self-attachment sequence. She said, "I don't know if this is normal -- I have never seen it from this end." (She did two homebirths too.) I noticed that it was only the dad sitting on the side of the tub supporting the mother, and the grandma. No midwife. A flushed and relieved and now-panick feeling Grandmother moved aside for me to "take over." I was still fumbling with the camera cord and my camera battery seemed uncharged. The father said the electricity had gone out. As I put the camera aside, I said to the grandmother, "It is, (normal). She's crowning." To the mother I said, "You're doing great. I see baby's head. " To Grandma I asked, "Do you have gloves?" My fleeting thought was a plan to support the mother to catch her own baby and to get ready to activate a transport. I was grateful I'd taken neonatal resuscitation certification with Karen Strange in January and had just reviewed it. Country birth. Amish midwife. Seemed like a good thing to do. I was more grateful it wasn't necessary.

In that couple of minutes, between the crowning head contraction and the next one that pushed baby out, while I was thinkin' 'bout what to do about no gloves (and blood and fecal matter), the midwife arrived. She walked into the bathroom, pulling on her gloves. I moved to the side by grandma who had moved aside for me. The midwife leaned down between us and the tub (like we were playing Twister -- bathrooms aren't made for five people and one birthing a baby) and she caught the baby. Easily. Peacefully. Gently. It could not have been orchestrated more perfectly and beautifully if we'd tried it. Minutes, literally. If I had stopped along the way to go to the bathroom, or if I'd gotten behind a slow vehicle, or if I'd hit the lights wrong going through town, or stopped to talk with my friend when I dropped off something to her, I would have missed it. Three hours of labor were basically transition. I left about six hours later and I went to my fourth of July party.

That night my father was transported two hours by ambulance from the rural area in other direction to Columbia. Rural Missourians have next to zero options for ANY kind of medical care, birth to elderly. Today I finally got to have a long talk with the happy, rested mama. I told her (I'd been awed by this thought) that her baby is the least traumatized human being I have ever seen. She was so well cared for in the first hours of her life, and in a quiet environment where no one hurt her. She did cry and cry for twenty minutes, and I believe it was about the pressure on her head. Going fast is very painful for the baby.

She had not one sonogram, or vaginal check, or monitoring between contractions. No shots, no scrubbing or bath. Weighing done at one hour just before the midwife left . Otherwise, baby in mama, daddy, or Grandma's arms, and mine briefly in the first minutes of her life. Only people the mother trusts and chose. I held her briefly during the first moments of her life while the mother repositioned herself on her knees, then to support self-attachment, and to carry her to the other room where mother wanted to sit after two hours. Baby's head was not constantly poked and prodded as in a birth I attended recently at home where baby was monitored in between every contraction. So disrupted. Why? Because the doctor has to document and protect herself. Not from the parents necessarily, but from the system that will go after her should anything happen. The mother held the baby while she was still on her knees, holding her, talking to her, touching her .... what she wanted that she'd missed in the first births. She held the baby below the level of the placenta -- just as Dr. Morley says is optimal (http://www.cordclamp.com/). When the cord was cut it was white -- indicating transfer of blood and cessation of pulsing. The midwife was holding the baby. The father softly said, "Give her to me" and the midwife did immediately. It was SO BEAUTIFUL --- SO the way it is supposed to be. Isabella is HIS daughter. It's his home, and mama is his wife. There was zero resistance from the midwife. She trusted the woman's body to care for the baby during labor and birth, and she trusts a father to care for his baby in the first minutes of life. There is nothing like seeing this.

Later when the electricity was back on I got video of him cleaning the bathroom and working in the kitchen. It was amazing to watch -- he was instinctual. While mama and baby cuddled, touched, and nursed he would go do caretaking chores --- getting the laundry started, making food. He was circle around and check on his baby and wife. It was like watching the male of an animal species caring for his baby and partner.

Welcome to the world, little one, little Isabella. She is so cute. She did self attach by the way. She did it her way and in her timing, of course. Self-attachment is so awesome to watch. The baby at the previous birth I videotapped also got to self-attach. I stopped the midwife from interfering -- the baby was crying and struggling, as they do and are supposed to. Baby and mother, just like in labor and birth, interacting together. It's ok for the baby to struggle with soft, gentle guidance and support from mother -- to attach at her breast. Welcome, Phoenix. Sweet, amazing baby.

So cool. SO COOL.