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

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

Fetal Psychology

Psychology Today, October 1998
Source: Psychology Today, Sep/Oct98, Vol. 31 Issue 5, p44, 6p, 4c.
by Janet L. Hopson
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/tul/psychtoday9809.html#

Behaviorally speaking, there's little difference between a newborn baby and a 32-week-old fetus. A new wave of research suggests that the fetus can feel, dream, even enjoy The Cat in the Hat. The abortion debate may never be the same.

The scene never fails to give goose bumps: the baby, just seconds old and still dewy from the womb, is lifted into the arms of its exhausted but blissful parents. They gaze adoringly as their new child stretches and squirms, scrunches its mouth and opens its eyes. To anyone watching this tender vignette, the message is unmistakable. Birth is the beginning of it all, ground zero, the moment from which the clock starts ticking.

Not so, declares Janet DiPietro. Birth may be a grand occasion, says the Johns Hopkins University psychologist, but "it is a trivial event in development. Nothing neurologically interesting happens." Armed with highly sensitive and sophisticated monitoring gear, DiPietro and other researchers today are discovering that the real action starts weeks earlier. At 32 weeks of gestation - two months before a baby is considered fully prepared for the world, or "at term" - a fetus is behaving almost exactly as a newborn. And it continues to do so for the next 12 weeks.

Dr. DiPietro's work is cutting-edge and contributes signficantly to the field of fetal programming and prenatal psychology. She highlightsthe sentience of the gestating baby and provides evidence for the prenatal period being the most critical period of development in the history of the human being. I am, however, surprised that she would then say, "Birth may be a grand occasion, but it is a trivial event in development. Nothing interesting happens." Say, what? Just when ya think someone is brilliant -- but that is the nature of most of scientists who bring us great findings. They are single-minded, focused on their passion and piece of the puzzle -- often unable to see or fit the other pieces together to make a whole picture. Some of us, non-doctors and natural birth advocates and homebirthers, are able to see from a wider perspective and quite capable of putting pieces together. In fact, it is often the inexperienced, young researcher who has the broader scope and asks the most crucial questions that lead to deeper understandings. Listen to Candace Pert's story. "Molecules of Emotion" as a young, female researcher and her discovery of receptor sites that has lead to many advancements.

Back to my point, birth is the journey OF THE BABY'S that transforms one from total dependence upon the mother to being a separate and individual being - physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually - and, yet it is medically and scientifically trivial? And, that folks, is a problem in our society today. As we observe the manifestation of ACOG's seventy-seven years of promotion of birth as dangerous and deathly we see a society of women who are bought into believing that their bodies are dysfunctional and incapable of birthing without interventions. They now buy into the belief that birth is about the woman, about their needs and rights to pain relief - above the logical, physiological knowledge and need of the baby's to be not be born "under the influence" of drugs. Womens' perspective is that the birth is her birth and about her and her needs -- mostly about being "painfree." This is seen in home and hospital births -- the insistence on a homebirth when mother is high-risk or indications are it is not right AND the insistence on having a planned cesarean. Neither necessarily fully consider what is best for the baby. Considering the focus on the mother's experience and her need for easy, painfree birth only gifted by obstetrics and the prenatal 32 week baby being behaviorally similar to the newborn, how is it that birth for the baby, as reported by ascientist, is "trivial?"

Birth is a wondrous experience of both the completion and the beginning of the Baby. In that brief, but perhaps most defining experience of life one does the monumental task of separating from the Mother’s womb and into her arms and to her breasts, in relationship with the Father. Within seconds of this monumental, not at all trival, passage from the womb to the world, the baby's body is transitioning from being a water breathing being to being an air breathing being. Heart valves are transitioning. Every body and organ function done by the mother's body for the baby is now the baby's -- within seconds and minutes these baby previously symbiotic with the mother is now a totally, physiologically independent human. That process has no bearing on the emotions, psychology, physiology, or spiritually of the baby? And, it's not life long? HOW crazy is this thinking that birth is trival and that whatever happens it doesn't matter --- since the belief is that the brain is not functioning and recording during this experience?

From conception forward there is not moment that is not critical to the development of we are as a human. When two cells a sperm and an egg become the one and begin dividing into who one is to be, the baby never ceases to be in relationship to the Mother and the Father’s genetics, perceptions, and life experiences. Every Baby, therefore, is created and birthed in the likeness of the Mother and Father. Conception, gestation, and labor and birth, then, are the one ongoing biological and spiritual journey between three souls that continues throughout the lifetime. Some of us believe that we are unable to progress in our personal and spiritual journey until we deal with who we are at this earliest level -- until we embrace who we are as the union of the sperm and the egg. We can run away and be alienated from our parent, but we are, in essence, that sperm or egg. How they came together, how we were grown in their lives, and how we are birthed is ours. The baby can not get away from it.

A Baby’s birth belongs to this triad of Father-Baby-Mother. Their experience of birth should not be any more of a medical, legal, financial, or politically dictated event than is their conception and gestation of their little one. Birth IS the baby’s birth and she or he is the responsibility of the Mother and Father. Yes, I know fathers are absent, I acknowledge that. My perspective is one from a cellular, energetic perspective. One of the things I now know and believe strongly is that we are the union of our sperm and egg. We are connected to that genetic, ancestral history whether the parent is physically present or not.

With the birthing woman and man’s experience acknowledged, if society were to adopt the attitude that “Birth is about the Baby”, it would not only utterly and profoundly change the way our society treats babies. There would be a scientific, religious, educational, medical, and legal demand to do whatever we do with consciousness -- in vetro fertilization with sperm donor, focus of our resources on supporting mothers in harmonious and healthy gestation, we would not induce baby’s labor, nor use drugs, unless medically necessary and then we would do so with deepest regardless and awareness of how it is impacting the human baby. We would embrace birth as a defining human experience and critical time in brain development.

What about labor and birth?? Why the "black hole" or "black out?"
Every one of these fields, in their scientific literature and language refers to human birth as “pre-natal” and “post-natal. Not one, especially medicine and psychology, acknowledges the biological and scientific fact that the human baby is aware at birth and that the birth experience is a critical time in brain development. Even the most important researchers in my personal study, my academic and scientific heroes whose work provides the foundation for my work (Wirth and Nathanielsz), do not make reference to birth itself; it is pre and post. Even the Kings College of London’s Perinatal Psychiatry web page states, “The Section aims to improve knowledge and understanding about mental illness during pregnancy and postnatally.” Perinatal means the period of birth. Are they then looking at pregnancy and postpartum for answers regarding mental health? That's odd.

We need to look at our languaging -- it illuminates our beliefs and attitudes. We are looking at all sort of issues of the developing human being -- environment, toxins, nutrition, stresses during prenatal and postnatal, but not during labor and birth. First Dr. DiPeitri says the 32 week old fetus is as sentient as a newborn and then says the experience of birth isn't important. What is up with this logic? Drugs, herbs, and hormones to induce that interfere with the baby's hormonal development and initiation of labor and epidural anesthesia with fentanyl and narcotics, hurried labor, forced pushing, or surgical birth is trivial?? And the billions of neurons (most we'll have) at birth are like, what? Shut-off??

Looking at the impact of labor and birth on the baby – body, mind and soul - is a perspective whose time has come. Doctors leaving obstetrics and medicine because of malpractice issues and the United States ranking among the lowest in maternal and infant mortality. Our mental health, social, and educational systems wrangling for money for programs that apparently do not solve the problems; in fact, more children than ever are suicidal, abused, on drugs, with more physical and medical issues than ever in history. Is not time then to look at the totality of the conception through birth process?

We are culturally desensitized to the period of labor and birth. When not specified, our mind does not embrace the concept. This omission is not without a historical reason. Society is in a collective denial. Ninety percent of us of alive in the United States have been born “under the influence” of drugs -- so it is no wonder women who in any other situation would not use drugs for herself or her baby, and father’s who would in another situation be a roaring protective father stand by helpless and numb and watch others manipulate, force, and manhandle their baby.

One hundred years of birthing our babies “under the influence” of drugs, we now have a social collective “Black out” regarding what we are doing to our babies.