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Subject:
From:
"Jennifer Tow, IBCLC" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Lactation Information and Discussion <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 14 Feb 2006 01:21:51 -0500
Content-Type:
text/plain
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Esther writes:
"I have to start giving prenatal courses in infant behavior when
separated from mother. "

Exactly.

Every hospital has its own protocol, but I have yet to hear of one that 
is friendly to the biological norm. Everyone is trying to minimize risk 
(at least evryone on Lactnet), but the frame of reference is the most 
agregious interventionist birth possible. Everyone wants to do better 
than that and that is certainly a good thing. But, it is like comparing 
AIM's to one another. We only see their true nature when we compare 
them to breastfeeding (not to breastmilk). In the healthy newborn, any 
intervention in the early hours after birth poses a risk, whether it is 
weighing, suctioning, premature clamping of the cord, measuring, 
adminstering drops or shots or bathing (I know I loved the smell of my 
babies after birth and had no desire to have it washed off--once it is 
gone, it is gone forever, except in our memories--why the rush?) 
Whether they are done in one hour or two is irrelevent if they 
interfere with bonding, breastfeeding or the mother's confidence.

Also, I think discussion about how some things just cannot be avoided 
at birth and birth doesn't always go the way we like is being applied 
wrongly here. I don't think we can talk about the things that we 
believe cannot be avoided at birth until we consider our frame of 
reference.  If unhealthy, stressed pregnanies, medicated births and 
poor attachment are our frame of reference, then we will continue to 
miss the whole point. For, example, posterior babies can indeed be 
avoided when mothers know how. Many of the odd, stuck positions that 
babies get into have been associated by trauma experts as response to 
stress. Healthy pregnancies are certainly possible. Almost all medical 
interventions are completely unecessary and reaching out to the few 
very rare necessary cases as a way to justify the others is a poor way 
to make an argument.

If most interventions are unecessary and most interventions cause risk, 
why are most babies still subjected to them without so much as a second 
thought? I would argue that it is b/c even those of us who advocate 
truly for breastfeeding have forgotten what the biological norm looks 
like, if we have even ever seen it. What we all see every day are 
babies coping with stress, not babies simply being babies. Unless we 
have seen uninterrupted birth and bonding, we do not know how babies 
are meant to behave and unless we know how babies are meant to behave 
(and mothers of those babies), aren't we just going in circles? We 
continue to apply a discussion of what is normal to a situation that 
cannot allow for normal. How in the world we minimize risk in such an 
environment is beyond me.

We are so clealry able to agree that you cannot compare the behaviour 
of a breastfed baby to that of an artificially-fed baby, because we 
have all invested in that argument. It is just as obvious to me that we 
cannot compare a baby born in a hospital to a baby born at home and 
that only the baby born at home has any hope of truly reflecting the 
biological norm (although the hospital-born baby certainly does reflect 
biologically normal stress and coping behaviors). Most of us are not 
able to personally invest in that argument, though, so we ignore its 
implications. Until we do, I suggest that the other arguments are all 
just an effort in futility.

Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA

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