Dear Friends:
 
There is pain as pathology and warning (as with a broken leg or tooth) and  
there is the pain of hard work as in a marathon or turning the soil to make a  
garden. The trouble is that the medications women are given to  deal with 
their labors also have an impact on the baby, unlike the analgesics  one takes for 
a root canal or a broken leg.
 
Of course there is a need for labor pain relief. My protest is the routine  
use of it.
 
Women need something to get through labor. That could be a loving  and 
supportive environment, encouragement, the freedom to do what they want as  in 
eating, drinking and moving about. Or that something could be drugs; as  hospitals 
are set up to give only drugs, (and even insist that women use them)  that is 
most women will use. When was the last time a woman was given a nice  sandwich 
or a cup of hot tea in labor? What adult  wants ice chips when  they are 
working hard?  If our birth environments changed, our  breastfeeding would change 
also. Breastfeeding rates diminished in part when  birth moved from home to 
hospital.
 
The pendulum has shifted now so much that women who want an unmedicated  
spontaneous labor in a hospital in my area are scorned and treated in a less  than 
embracing manner.
 
The best we can do now is to keep mothers and babies together. Nissen and  
Sepkoski are but 2 researchers that showed that the impact of medications can be 
 dampened if baby is left with the mother until the first  
breastfeeds.....Baby-Friendly hospitals in the US show this too.
 
Personally speaking, in my labors I asked for a cesearan section (twice)  and 
my head to be cut off (once) at 8 centimeters dilatation. But because I'd  
set up my environment to support an unmedicated labor, and was also fortunate  
enough to have a nice physiologic labor that was over within a day........those 
 things did not happen. Most women can have an experience like that. The 
trick is  to keep the fear at a minimum.
 
Hospital obstetrical practices induce fear in women, both subtly and  
overtly........medications are more often given to deal with fear than with  pain. 
Fear makes pain intolerable..........which Dr. Read wrote about 75 years  ago.
 
warmly,
Nikki Lee RN, MS, Mother of 2, IBCLC, CCE, CIMI
craniosacral  therapy practitioner
_www.myspace.com/adonicalee  


_ (http://www.myspace/adonicalee) 



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