Nikki writes:
 "After spending a week working as an LC in a local hospital, I wonder if
anybody ever sees a normal newborn anymore."

I am fortunate enough to see normal newborn behaviour quite often because I am closely connected with the homebirth community and the vast majority of my close friends (and many more other women I know) have had homebirths. When I worked in hospital for 4 years, I very rarely saw a newborn with normal behaviour (even among babies we saw routinely, for no particular feeding concerns), but what was more astouding to me was that almost no HCP expected to see normal behaviour and had no frame of reference for doing so.

I am so terribly tired of hearing about the one or two babies who manage to escape the majority of interventions and about the tiny minority who really need them as excuses for stalling the serious overhaul that is desparately needed. Babies are human beings who deserve the respect of being treated in a way that is consistent with their physiology--it is brutality to treat them otherwise and appalling to view this treatment as normal, understandable, necessary, justifiable, harmless or otherwise acceptable. I think even the majority of us who believe that normal birth is all but gone from the Western landscape, who believe that medicalized birth is largely unecessary and  who witness many of its consequences with deep sadness and dismay still accept it. And I think this is b/c even we have not asked what is truly at risk, was is lost that cannot be reclaimed, what aspects of our humanity are not so resilient as we might like to believe and the most difficult--what have we and our own children suffered in our births? 

Once again, I urge anyone who really cares about this to take a look at the APPPAH website (http://www.birthpsychology.com/)--there is far more at risk than the first latch, or even whether the baby is ultimately breastfed. How does one even begin to address optimizing human potential when so much potential is recklessly erradicated at birth?
Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA