I went to a wonderful seminar with Michel Odent a year or so ago, and he spoke quite a bit about oxytocin, how it affects the mother-infant bond, and how various interventions interfere with it. Induction of labour, because it uses artificial oxytocin, decreases the amount of natural oxytocin the body produces in labour. The artificial oxytocin does not pass into the brain, though, so it cannot produce the "caretaking" effects that natural oxytocin does. He had some interesting animal research. When sheep are given epidurals during labour, for example, they will not care for their lambs after they are born - they reject them. He also pointed out that skin-to-skin contact increases oxytocin production, and thinks it is essential for babies where there has been a lot of intervention in labour. Kangaroo care and sleeping naked together are his suggestions. Odent feels that for most of recorded history, cultural birth practices have deliberately (though probably subconsciously) intervened in the natural process to prevent the strong bonds between mother and child from developing. For example, many cultures have prohibited the mother from giving her baby colostrum. In others (such as ours) the baby has been routinely separated from the mother (triggering a grieving reaction). Societies did this, he believes, because they wanted the bond weakened - either because they saw children as the property of the father, and wanted to disconnect the child from the mother, or because they needed the mother to separate from the baby to work or to fulfill her role in the marriage, or because they wanted children to grow up to be warriors/soldiers who would kill for their society. His ideas are very interesting, and make a lot of sense to me. Teresa Pitman Guelph, Ontario *********************************************** 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