Diane--I so appreciate what you are saying--I was privileged to listen in on one of those Conscious Woman sessions and so wish I could get others to hear that same message--I am CNM/IBCLC as these are my two passions, and I find so much frustration in getting others to see the relationship between what happens during pregnancy and birth and what happens afterwards to breastfeeding and then to parenting.
HEAR HEAR! Please join the revolution and help us get some real change in the realm of women's health care, preconceptual planning, pregnancy care and birth so that we can have some changes in the realm of how our nation's children are parented.
I wear a tee shirt that says "Peace on Earth Begins with Birth" and another that says "a Peaceful Birth for Peace on Earth" and it all comes from my heart.
Melinda Hoskins, MS, RN, CNM, IBCLC
mother to three wonderful young women who each have become ambassadors for that which they experienced through my experience.
Diane Wiessinger <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I've known for most or all of my professional life that good breastfeeding is linked to good birth, and I've probably always given the connection lip service. But it really hit home for me - hard - when I put together a talk on birthing and parenting in other mammals and realized that in *every other mammal* a ruined birth leads almost inevitably to damaged parenting. We humans get around it reasonably well by overriding impulse with intellect, as this mother is doing following a surprise c-section:
"I feel as though I adopted Jason but he is not biologically mine... I don't know what happened to the bump on my belly and I have no idea where this child came from... But *he* seems to think I'm his mother, so I will go with that. I don't know if/how normal birth might have changed things, but the more we nurse, the more I believe he's my kid."
I'm not interested in becoming a midwife or doula or expert on birth. But I feel as if I finally "get" that if we can't reclaim normal birth we will always have a formula-feeding culture of detached parenting.
Are we perhaps in the position of the US revolutionary-era Continental Congressmen - people of varying passions and purposes who needed to pull together for a while? Ben Franklin said, "We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately." Once we've truly begun to win both the birth and breastfeeding cultural wars, we can afford birth forums that ignore breastfeeding and breastfeeding forums that ignore birth. But maybe in the meantime, Lactnet needs to include some modest ongoing level of birth discussion, whether or not breastfeeding is mentioned in it, just so we all remember where breastfeeding and parenting start? I think we have that now, and I'd like to see it continue. Not as an equal focus, of course, but as the quiet, constant matrix on which we all hang together.
Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC Ithaca, NY USA
www.wiessinger.baka.com
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