I've been following this discussion but not jumping in, until now.  It's my
son's 21st birthday today.  As I write I can recall all the details from
this exact time, over two decades past.  I remember him lying on my body,
and talking eagerly with the other five people in the room, most of whom
were there because I had invited them.  None of them disturbed my son.  I
know that he latched on without a problem after a while, no clue when, and
that it was simultaneously very special, because he was newborn and we'd
looked forward to being able to see and hold him for a while, and very very
ordinary, because he simply set about doing what a baby does, in that way
that they do when we don't impede them.  None of us cheered, or wrote down
the time, or even formally and systematically assessed his performance.  He
was weighed and measured very shortly after birth as was the custom then,
and returned to me.  After that, nobody manipulated us, though his sister
and father were talking to him and probably touching him too.  I'm sure I
positioned him, and I'm sure it happened without me giving a thought to
correctness or incorrectness, because it was second nature to me anyway.  I
know I did not consider it a particular achievement, and I know it didn't
hurt, and it worked fine.  At that point in my life I really had no clue
about how difficult breastfeeding can be, because I had never worked in a
hospital.  I started midwifery school eight months later and it was an eye
opener.  I realized I was the exception, not the rule.

The first time I watched the Breast Crawl Video, I was amused at the crowd
in the room and the bright lights.  It seemed to me that the film was made
almost on the spur of the moment.  I envisioned a course for health
personnel, or maybe just Grand Rounds, at which they were told about this
behavior, and then perhaps either the speaker, or an employee of the
hospital where the course was being held, got the idea to go to the
maternity unit and see if there was someone there who wouldn't mind being
observed, and filmed, and off they went.  It seemed clear from the video
that the attitude to both consent and privacy was very different to what I'm
used to, but I found it more amusing than anything else.  That the mothers'
faces are rendered unrecognizable is something I took to be a privacy
preserving measure.

I've never been to India.  I live in a country with a very low population
density, where people are discomfited if they have to share a double seat on
the bus with someone they don't know, and the ideal weekend getaway is going
for a hike in the mountains and not meeting a soul.  I've heard that the
biggest stress for a Norwegian in India and in any other densely populated
place, is that there are people, everywhere, all the time.  Paris and London
are overwhelming to me, after living here for so long.  So I imagined that
having a dozen or so people in the room with the woman and her baby is less
of a shock in Maharashtra than it would be here.  The custom of whispering a
holy message in the baby's ear is one I have seen in Muslim parents from
Pakistan and Bangladesh, and some Arabic-speaking parents as well, and I
have been told it is because that should be the first thing a person hears
in this world.  It's also not an exalted moment, just something that is done
with as much ceremony as touching a mezuza on passing through a doorway for
pious Jews, or crossing yourself on entering a church if you are Catholic,
or saying 'bless you' when someone sneezes, to keep their soul from escaping
through their mouth.  It looks to an outsider more like a conditioned
reflex.

About a week ago I read a piece in an international news magazine about the
rates of selective abortion of female fetuses in India, resulting in a very
skewed gender mix of children in some areas.  I find it significant, and
reason to rejoice, that the baby in this video is consistently referred to
as 'she'.  Being born female in some parts of the world is a risk factor for
being killed at birth, and in India, being conceived female puts a baby at
risk for not being born at all, if your parents avail themselves of the
illegal but still available services of people doing ultrasounds to
determine gender, for the purpose of ensuring a male child.  So when
thinking about introducing risk through interference, think about what risks
are at play in the society in which this film was made.  If this video,
while showing how capable a baby is, can also model the valuing of a female
life, I'm all for it. 

The most powerful thing about this video, to me, is precisely the fact that
the baby does all the things a baby does.  No drum roll, no heavenly trumpet
music or angel choir, no rays of sun breaking through the clouds, no
fireworks, just chatter and banter and a baby, doing what babies do,
unhurried, unperturbed, and amazingly undistracted by all the others in the
room.  If we believe that  breastfeeding will only work if everything in the
setting is in accordance with our own culturally determined notion of
perfect, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.  Breastfeeding is hard to
extinguish.  The desire to do it, and the reflexes and instincts that drive
us to persist, are strong and long-lasting, and can withstand a lot of
adversity.  Breastfeeding is tough enough for this very tough world.  It's
even the only way to feed a baby for which this is true. 
I may well be misinformed, but I've been told that gorillas, once the baby
is out, throw themselves backwards into a supine position with the baby on
their front, and just let the baby go to it.  At the most recent homebirth I
attended, the baby ended up on mother's chest, and mother and baby explored
each other in near darkness for about an hour, interacting intensely for the
entire time, and if there was any eye contact, it wasn't possible to observe
it in the ambient light.  I've seen the film, made with a camera with a
night setting, and the baby's hand and mouth movements, as well as the
crawl, are readily apparent.  Due to maternal bleeding this baby was
encouraged to latch before she had done so on her own, and the latch was far
from perfect, which I attribute to our pushing things.  It did elicit
uterine contractions, but the mother got sore too.  I've found a lot of
times that a baby-led latch looks way off, but it isn't.  It's been a lesson
for me in trusting babies and trusting the process.

Please misunderstand me correctly.  I'm not saying that women should have no
say in who they have with them when they give birth or how they do it;
anyone who knows me knows that I am a fierce defender of self-determination
for all people.  I'm not saying we should always turn on the lights and
invite all the passersby into the birth room to watch, chattering, while we
film, and then put it on YouTube.  But I'm particularly baffled that people
in a country where mothers and babies are routinely cared for by entirely
separate teams of nursing and medical staff in physically separate places,
and where most care is certainly not determined by what women or babies want
or need, are objecting so strenuously to this six minute film.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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