Reposted for Jennifer Tow:



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

Kathleen Fallon Pasakarnis, M.Ed. IBCLC
Nurturing Family Lactation and Parenting Services

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