This is not off-topic if one considers the significant risk of the untimely
forcing of pre-term babies from their mothers' wombs.
Induced labor is associated with greater amounts of
analgesia/anesthesia/intervention, all of which increase the risk of further
complications, than is spontaneous labor, if only for the simple reason that
some women in spontaneous labor will not be in places where they can receive
drugs or be subject to intervention.
So already we can see several threats to the initiation and establishment of
normal infant feeding.  Who is better qualified to sound the alarm than the
advocates of normal infant feeding?
I will also venture a claim that institutions which condone and even promote
such a bizarre view of the physiology of human birth are unlikely to
encourage practices which support breastfeeding.  So these babies whose
chances of experiencing normal nutrition are already compromised, will be
doubly compromised in the first hours and days after birth.  It must be
difficult to imagine how simple normal infant feeding is, if all the staff
ever sees are babies born this way.
I agree with Jay.  This is malpractice.  It is also a very insidious form of
violence against women and children.  AND it is unconscionably expensive.
How about taking a look at how countries with better maternal and infant
mortality statistics treat birth?  It doesn't resemble the mainstream US
approach much at all.
Rachel Myr
writing now as a midwife who cultivates normalcy along the whole continuum
of childbearing, from before menarche to beyond the climacteric
Kristiansand, Norway

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