This is the standard of care according to Baby-Friendly criteria, and it is
meant to make it easier for babies to adapt to extrauterine life by keeping
them warm, unstressed, and on track for food at the same time as it reduces
mother's discomfort during any suturing and facilitates the beginning of
normal uterine involution due to the higher oxytocin levels from the baby's
stimulation of mother's skin, esp around her breasts.

What the nurses in hospitals where routine separation of mothers and babies
may not like, is that it shouldn't take long for management to realize they
have been paying twice as much staff as they needed to and it's time to
downsize.  When mothers and babies are kept together, babies don't get
hypothermic or hypoglycemic, nor do they cry for more than a very few
minutes.  Mothers don't hemorrhage as often and they don't complain during
suturing, because they are busy discovering, and being discovered by, the
baby.  They still appreciate having local anesthetic for stitches but they
don't lie there waiting for every poke of the needle.  If the placenta
hasn't already been expelled before suturing starts, it usually comes
spontaneously with little bleeding if baby is doing its job.

For the doctors who are worried about how to do the newborn exam with baby
on mother's abdomen, I would ask why the exam is being done then at all.
Unless a baby is having obvious difficulty we wait until they are at least
twenty-four hours old to show them to a pediatrician, because that increases
the chances that fetal circulation will have stopped and newborn circulation
been established, thus eliminating the need for a lot of fancy diagnostic
work to rule out pathologic heart murmurs.  It is also much much easier to
check for hip joint dysfunction when the baby has had time to stretch out
and relax for a day or two.  Of coures I work in a primitive country where
we don't even administer irritating agents to prevent gonococcal ot
chlamydial conjunctivitis in the newborn, we just observe them for signs and
culture the ones who get gunk in their eyes.  I have yet to see a case of
chlamydia or gonorrhea in a baby but I have only been working for about
twenty years.

I have never heard of an institution that changed its policy to having skin
to skin as standard, that regretted it.  It is so obviously the right thing
that I doubt it will even take long before the most dubious souls are
leading the charge to get every hospital in the state to do it.

The Swedish researcher Kyllike Christensson has done landmark work on this,
as have Lennart Righard and Margaret Alade.  Do a PubMed search for any of
their names if you need ammunition.  

As to the effects of a short interruption in the skin to skin time, you will
see that babies protest loudly and intensely against being removed, so for
auscultation of the heart the conditions will be more conducive if baby is
left in place on mother.  If they must be separated then policy should
specify that they are to be reunited as quickly as possible and mothers
should be reassured that they may simply let the baby take up where s/he
left off, because otherwise the mothers start to stuff their nipples into
the baby's mouth rather than waiting for baby to get around to latching in
its own good time.  This stuffing behavior is rarely observed when the
mother and baby are undisturbed from birth.  The best remedy for
interruption of skin to skin contact, is rapid resumption of skin to skin.
Any skin contact is better than none, and the more the better.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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