I am not going to stand on my head to try to relate this to BF.  (I would
but the piles in my work room make it difficult.)

A Dutch midwife giving a talk at an international midwifery congress in
Vancouver BC in 1993 mentioned their very low rates of pharmacologic pain
relief.  The N. American midwives were clamoring to know how they managed to
achieve it.  Didn't Dutch women feel pain?
The Dutch midwife seemed puzzled.  She said simply, 'Dutch women expect
childbirth to hurt.  And they know it won't kill them.'  End of talk.  I sat
in the back, giggling, for at least 15 minutes.

Later I have heard other Dutch midwives talk about the same thing and they
distinguish between the normal pain of normal labor, and the abnormal pain
which to them signals that something is wrong.  The first requires only time
to resolve it.  The second may require a change of tack, possibly drugs.  I
have also heard that the anesthesiologists are feeling underemployed in the
Netherlands and the normal way of birth may be threatened as women are
encouraged to request elective epidurals.  Can anyone set me straight, off
the list?

Forgive me for stating the obvious when I point out that when nearly all
laboring women are anesthetized, the birth attendants lose a very useful
diagnostic tool to assess normalcy.  Wow!  Don't need to stand on my head
after all!  False positive diagnoses of complications in labor lead to
unnecessary interventions and ultimately BF suffers.  There!

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway
marveling at the diversity of human experience

             ***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html