I agree that high risk mothers need the option of hospital care, but we should still do what we can to make hospital care more responsive to the needs of the newborn for contact with his or her mother, and promote as much autonomy as possible for birthing moms. As well as educating staff to help with breastfeeding. I have the utmost respect for those of you that are working so hard to see that these things happen at your institution. Remember though that neonatal encephalopathy (babes without any gag, blink or suck reflexes, with altered level of consciousness, etc) is not necessarily a result of birth asphyxia. We used to think it was, but the terminology has been changed to reflect the new understanding that the brain injury could have happened any time. I have one little one in my practice who clearly had a prenatal event (mom noticed she stopped moving as much, her doc took her seriously and checked it out, the baby's reactivity was poor, they delivered by rapid Cesarean and the baby has bilateral brain injury. She's progressing, but definitely has motor issues, and perhaps cognitive ones as well). Another babe that I'm seeing with a colleague had a beautiful home birth, no distress, but a few hours after birth the midwife did not like how he looked and transported him to the hospital with his mom. He started seizing and had the whole scary gamut of encephalopathy symptoms. He is recovering well, and has just begun breastfeeding at about 5-6 mos. Yet another child had a prenatal stroke and has mild CP and had seizures until he had half his hippocampus removed on the injured side. Catherine Watson Genna, IBCLC NYC *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(R) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html