Keeping Your Baby Close After Birth

Written by Laura Schuerwegen

I could write about a million benefits of keeping your child close after birth, but I'll leave that up to the experts and stretch your imagination a little.

Imagine that you are an unborn child. You have been floating happily in lukewarm liquid for nine months now, you experienced taste through it. You felt vibrations and heard your mother speak, and you heard other, more muffled noises too. You sensed your mother's touch through the womb that hugs you. You have been really comfortable.

But right now, that womb, which is all you have know for all eternity, is getting a little tighter, you have little space left and it is getting harder to move. You may have engaged, you may not., anyway, you are ready for some change.

And so it happens, you start to feel hugged ever more tightly by that uterus, your home. Irregular at first, and short, but after a while, these sensations get more intense. Something is about to happen! You feel slightly pressed downward with every contraction. You are excited. You feel how your mother feels and you hear her voice, maybe she's a little frightened, should you be? Maybe she's excited too, and happy, so you feel happy too.

Let's just assume you are all well and she is indeed happy and excited to meet you - after all, she did wait nine months for this moment. Let's assume that this engaging thing and the contractions work well.

So you feel it's time to put in some effort of your own, after all, your mommy - who you have felt and heard and tasted all this time, but have yet to meet - is putting in so much effort.
So you twist and wriggle and turn. You feel really squeezed. Your head is a little sore, you feel like you can't take much of this for too long.

And then it happens...

[[[ I am sorry to take you out of the imaginative trip for a moment, but I just want to show you two possible scenarios and you pick the one you would like to have as the second half of this story ]]]

SCENARIO 1
The pressure on your head is relieved and you feel a rush of - what is this, it's fresh, cold even, and it smells so different - air on your face. A big human pulls you out rather rudely and holds you upside down. There are all these things around, and so many people and noises and smells and everything happens so quickly and you don't see well, but the light stings your eyes.

"Hey, why are they cutting off my lifeline? I like that, I played with it all this time! Don't take it away!"

You are being pulled away from the one smell and feel you knew to again another entirely different setting. They prick you and it hurts and they rub you down and put stuff in your eyes, it stings even more than the light! You are starting to feel very desperate, very helpless. Maybe this wasn't as exciting as you though it would be. Frankly, you wish you were back in that warm - albeit tight - uterus. You start to cry - "Hey what's this noise, it's loud and it hurts my ears, wait... it's me!" - you are kind of freaking out.

Someone else puts you on a cold metal thingy and starts measuring you. By this time you are tired and desperate.

But then they bring you over to the one creature you know. She looks kind of desperate too. And she's cold and tired, just as you are.

You want to look, you want to taste and smell. But you're still a little freaked out, scared, and very very tired. Will they come and take you away again?

SCENARIO 2
The pressure on your head is finally gone and you are in a lukewarm environment, just as you were in utero, but vast and less tasty, though it does taste and smells the same, just less pronounced. You open your eyes and see a beautiful face radiating love. You feel two strong but tired hands on your back.
 They pull you up - "Hey what is this? This smells great! I want to have a taste of this!!!" - and put you at the breast.

While you enjoy this liquid gold, you dare another glance. "Wow, mommy is really beautiful and look at how happy she is!"

You hear an emotion filled mutter, and look to the side. You've heard that voice before, but a lot more muffled. Hey, look at that, that's a totally different face than mommy's! A hand that belongs with the second face caresses your back and the face speaks gentle words to you, ever so softly. Mommy hums, and cries tears of joy.

"It was all worth it!" you think, as you doze off into a wonderful little slumber.

[[[ Take your time to wake up out of that soft dreamless sleep ]]]

Which one would you pick?

Laura Schuerwegen aka Mamapoekie is a Belgian mother, wife and writer who lives in Sub-Saharan Africa. Find her thought on birthing, parenting and living on Authentic Parenting. 

Medical Diagnosis in Pregnancy

Written by Laura Schuerwegen, previously published on Authentic Parenting

Image: Daquella Manera on Flickr

In obstetric care - which is still the main from of care pregnant women in the Western world are getting, and which more and more women in the world are being pushed into - it seems as if a pregnant woman is a disease waiting to happen. Obstetric care for pregnant women is indeed focused on seeking out deviant results in an otherwise symptom-free patient. That's why 'regular' care in pregnancy includes this huge battery of tests (well, that and the fact that these tests mean big business for hospitals).
This is quite different from any other medical speciality. Generally doctors don't seek out illnesses, unless they manifest. Most forms of medicine are diagnostic or curative... seldom is medicine explorative or preventative.

Preventative care can even be refused by your doctor (like taking out a completely healthy appendix, because it might someday get inflamed), and preventative drugs - profylaxia - are mostly given only when the treat of disease is real and the cure is hard or non-existent (at least this is how it should be in an ideal medical situation, but we see that with things like vaccines - big business again - this bird doesn't fly either).

So back to obstetrics. Obstetric care looks for diseases that don't present itself, and uses preventative treatment and procedures and sometimes even surgery, without necessity. And most often without informed consent. When necessity does arise, it is most often created by the very profession that cures it - again all very lucrative. All under the motto that "we should think about the baby too". I'm sure if they would ask those babies, most of them would prefer to just be able to gestate at their own pace, and be perfectly well with that.

Image: Euthman on Flickr

So I wonder where this attitude comes from - especially since it has been proven time and again that this approach to pregnancy causes more harm than anything else.

There are two reasons I can see for this approach. One is financial, as you could have guessed from the text above: labour wards are often indeed one of the only wings of a hospital who make a profit (that and radiology or laboratory facilities). The other one is that OB/GYN in fact practice defensive medicine and a diagnosis in pregnancy gives them a sort of 'get out of jail free card' to get out all the possible tests and procedures in the book, and afterwards - if all would fail - leaves them to say "we tried everything we could".

Either one of these reasons seem very unethical to me... Is all this even legal? And who regulates this?

Laura Schuerwegen aka Mamapoekie is a Belgian mother, wife and writer who lives in Sub-Saharan Africa. Find more of her thoughts on birthing, parenting and living at Authentic Parenting.

Supermodel mum told to "put 'em away" - unless she's showing them to straight grownup males, natch.

On Wednesday Miranda Kerr, Australian model, fashion worker, and partner to actor Orlando Bloom, announced a painkiller-free birth to their new son Flynn and included an at-home photo of her breastfeeding the delightfully-snuggly newborn.

I don't know this family, but this brief piece was a ray of sunshine in my day. I believe such unselfconscious and straightforward announcements by celebrities in support of birth advocacy and breastfeeding - as well as lovely candid photographs like this - do a great deal to help the many "regular mums" (and dads) at home watching. Anyone who's made a study of breastfeeding rates knows that family and cultural support - or the lack thereof - is a critical factor in how our babies end up being fed. In the US, a country with dismal breastfeeding rates (and a concomitant endemic lack of support for the practice), pioneering celebrity families can empower otherwise uncertain newbies. This theory is supported by impassioned activists representing populations with even lower rates than the sum population, such as teen mothers and African American mothers.

I also know breastfeeding, with its oft-innate demonstrable power and its female- and child-positive associations, is extremely threatening to many men and women. Images of breastfeeding and discussion of breastfeeding rights are roundly mocked by all quarters including, sadly, many prominent feminists (such as Erica Jong's recent piece lumping breastfeeding as being part and parcel with modern motherhood's "prison", hinting that required breastfeeding may be imminent and other foolishness. Memo to Jong: don't get it twisted. It's kyriarchal standards and cultural institutions that "imprison" women, carers, and small children).

Thus, of course, there were many critics responding to Kerr's photo (which of course, transcending irony to the nth degree, shows so very much less flesh than the Victoria's Secret work she's done). Australian health advocate Dr. Samantha Thomas' post on the responses to Kerr's photo reveal some of the less uncivil (but still profoundly wrongheaded) commentary. Included are body shaming (yeah, I know - directed at a supermodel), accusations of vulgarity and inappropriateness, and slut-shaming (you can see more examples of misogynistic commentary here). Bizarrely, some commenters criticized Kerr for wearing makeup in the photo.

I was very fortunate to raise my newborns in a breastfeeding-friendly culture (in fact, sadly, many of the women I knew at the time did not seem to realize how counterproductive and cruel anti-formula-feeding language can be). But when I see negative responses to Kerr I have that oppressive tingle: a near miss. Had my circumstances been different, stories like Kerr's and responses to them could have had a tremendous effect. As it stood, I was one of those "fortunate" women when it came to breastfeeding. My body cooperated with me, the babies did well, my practitioners supported us, my family could feed ourselves on my one income which in turn meant I had a partner who was able to do what it took to make things happen (I was a chemical engineer at a paper mill - my husband Ralph brought me our newborn twice a day), and the children and I enjoyed the process. Other families aren't so fortunate, and many women need more help and more cultural sustenence - including the emphatic support of the public that yes, they have a right to feed their child the way they choose. At least in the US, we are failing miserably in that regard.

So today I'd like to extend, for what it's worth, my deep appreciation to Kerr and her partner for being brave enough to go public with something they have every reason to celebrate. As one mother to another, I hope she finds friends and supporters to help her and her partner in their new journey.

It looks like things are getting off to a beautiful start.

***

Kelly Hogaboom is a 33-year old woman raised by hippies in a bus that had planets painted on the side. She now lives in a much-beloved semi-urban ex-logging town nestled in a windswept harbor in the Pacific Northwest, the United States, with her partner and their two children Phoenix (8), and Nels (6), four kitties, and five laying hens. She loves to sew, to cook, to write, and to stay up too late watching B-movies with her wiggly kiddos. You can read her blog at kelly.hogaboom.org and social commentary at underbellie.com.

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