What about the Baby?
September 10, 2008 – 3:38 pmEvery mother wants the best for her baby, and they buy all sorts of toys to stimulate their interest and development, have attractive mobiles over the cot, and spend a fortune on a beautiful nursery, but what is really important to the baby?
Birth must be the most important experience of our lives, and labour starts at the baby’s say-so. When it’s lungs, kidneys, liver, etc. are completely mature, the baby releases a protein into the mother’s system which stimulates the mother’s production of oxytocin, the hormone which stimulates the uterine muscles to work, and this signals the beginning of the intricate and magical dance between the mother and the baby’s reactions throughout the birthing process.
As hypnobirthing offers the mother a calm and gentle birth, so it does to the baby as well. A drug free labour is good for the mother, there is less to recover from, but it is even more good for the baby. For example, pethidine is processed through the mother’s system in about twelve hours, but it is at least sixty hours before the baby’s sytem, with its slower metabolism, is free from the drug.
Most babies lose weight after birth and then, a few days later, begin to put it on again and move forward. Hypnobirthing babies frequently move forward and put on weight straight away. After all, they have nothing to recover from and their systems are not made sluggish by toxic drugs. One baby I know was weighed three times the day after birth, because the midwife thought she had made a mistake when the scales registered that the baby’s weight had gone up instead of down.
Of course, a vaginal birth is much healthier for the baby than a Caesarean. The passage down the birth path may be tough, but it provides a powerful massage to stimulate the baby’s circulation, help expel mucous from the lungs, and flex the muscles and ligaments. By contrast, a baby born by Caesarean is subjected to rapid decompression and is, by comparison, flacid on arrival. It’s also worth remembering that the baby’s gut is not used in utero as its nutrients come from its mother through the umbilical cord. Withint a short time after birth, the gut will be colonised with millions of micro-organisms. If the baby is born vaginally, it will pick up its mother’s micro-organisms on its journey into the world, against which it will already have its mother’s immunity. If it is born by C-section, it will pick up whatevermicro-organisms happen to be hanging around on its arrival, to which neither it nor its mother will have immunity.
The decision about when to be born must be the biggest decision of our lives. To take this decision away from a baby, except in very extreme circumstances, is presumptuous in the extreme.
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