The effects of separating babies from mothers is enormous. 

My 75 year old mother still remembers with great pain my brothers birth, youngest of four. After spending a pregnancy worrying about whether or not she had Down's syndrome (she was 40 at this stage) she got hypertension after the birth when they whipped the baby away for what turned out later to be some routine weighing and stuff. Despite her pleas, they kept reassuring her that he was just fine but did not let her see him. 

So her blood pressure went through the roof she was so upset and angry, the drips started, her BP shot through the roof, they kept the baby away because of her blood pressure... and she then recalls my father finally breaking through the delivery room doors and immediately insisting she see the baby. Of course her blood pressure went down straight away. To this day when she gets mad about something her blood pressure goes up. 

This story made me quite militant when doing obstetrics myself for a while, and when having my own babies, not to let mothers and babies be separated. But If I had not had two switched on parents who were prepared to fight the system, who knows what might have happened ... my mother getting a hypertensive fit and brain damage? A horror story around birth ? 

I think all of this stuff is like dropping a stone in water - the consequences of an event are like ripples and go on forever, even through generations. 

We must keep sharing these different stories , because the actual practices vary much more than the text books, and the roots of explanations are often in dissecting the details and asking why and how did that happen.

Mary E Black
Australia

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