Lots and lots of babies who once would have died, today go home with their parents from NICUs. Obviously technology has played a significant role, as has the devotion and education of NICU staff. Yet, the issues
around NICU are very complex. I think many things that may seem
contradictory are true at the same time. For example, I think most NICU
personnel very much want the best for babies. I also think many
believe only they know what is best and are better equipped than
parents to make good choices. Thus, they push parents to make the choices
they want them to make. To this end, I have seen the most vile strong-arming of parents in NICU,
including threats and intimidation. I have seen this behavior
first-hand, and had it reported many more times by parents.


The fact is that parents tend
to feel helpless when their children are sick. It is my opinion that
the culture of NICUs and PICUs rely on this helplessness to keep
control of parents. I do not think that nurses or doctors intend to or believe they
do this to parents. It is like being a fish in water--you cannot see or
know that you are experiencing the water. It is just how it is and
there is a silent kind of agreement between parents and practitioners
that suggest their children will get the best care if they "don't cause
trouble".?

Can it really be true that NICU nurses and doctors are not aware that many, if not most, parents feel completely impotent and intimidated in NICUs. They feel that they have no rights, no authority, really no voice. They do not feel their babies are theirs and feel they must comply, with "orders" or else. They fear for retaliation against themselves or their babies if they resist the status-quo. Having worked in hospital, I
have observed first-hand nurses belittling parents for challenging
them. I have witnessed racist comments made by staff behind the backs
of NICU parents. I have seen terribly callous behavior toward babies and toward mothers who want to breastfeed. It has been years since I worked in this environment but the parents I work with report such things all of the time.

I recently worked with a mom whose 5 wk old baby was in NICU due to a FTT diagnosis (not a preemie). Mom asked if HMF made from human milk was yet available in their facility. She was told that it was--from Prolacta. The next day, she saw the package being used and asked the nurse why a cow-milk based product was being used (her baby is seriously allergic to cow milk) and she was told that this was the only product available and that her baby had been getting it all along. She felt angry and completely disrespected. She had been blatantly lied to and felt so helpless as she never wanted her baby to have AIM in any form and it had been given with no consent--yet the harm was now done. Mom was also threatened with a protective services referral if she refused the AIM. (Just to clarify--once we got the baby out of the hands of the specialists, she began to grow and has needed no HMF--she had an undiagnosed TT and significant food allergies).

Certainly there are doctors and nurses and many other people in NICU settings who are utterly devoted to the best possible outcome for these babies who, as Nancy so rightly says, were often not physiologically prepared to survive, and whose needs are a mystery to everyone.? But, there is also a prevalent culture that negates the pyscho-spiritual component of the lives of these babies and their families, a culture that diminishes the infant to qualitative measures and often obliterates any parental intuition and knowing.

As Nancy said, the tools used to save these babies often harm them. Perhaps if this could be more honestly addressed, treatment of trauma could become a part of the NICU environment and babies could have much healthier lives. These babies are no less human because they are fragile and their humanity is so often displaced in NICU settings by routine and protocol. There is abundant work in the field of pre and perinatal psychology that could be applied to these babies, yet in the name of "science", such healing is left out of the equation.

I think it is true in all fields that there are competent and incompetent practitioners (the IBCLC in the NICU where my client's baby was told her the baby did not have a TT). Parents have come to expect their very fragile babies to go home and expect doctors to make that happen. This places immense pressure on NICUs to perform miracles on a daily basis. Even so, I think that the litmus test for success in NICU has a false premise. Only lip service is paid in most NICUs to breastfeeding, to attachment, to KangarooMotherCare, to the emotional life of the infants. Babies remember and integrate every single invasion, every single trauma, every experience of abandonment--and no one is helping them with it, b/c just as we once believed babies didn't feel pain, we still cling to the idea that they forget trauma. Not only do they not forget it--unhealed, it will define them forever. That is the research that the experts in pre and perinatal psychology have given us.

So, I guess I think this is not is much an issue of good and bad practitioners, but an issue of a blind system that in general wants to remain blind. I think that so long as this unconsciousness is pervasive in NICUs,? fairly or no, parents and especially their better-educated, less emotionally involved advocates will continue to view NICUs as something less than they should be in the care of infants.





Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA
Intuitive Parenting Network LLC

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