The New Parenting Club

A BATTLE CRY

Among the Laguna Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest, parents bathe just-emerged newborns in a potion of yucca weed while prayers are chanted and songs of jubilation are sung. Just before the sun goes down, tribal elders paint the child’s body with white clay. Believing that human beings are never more attuned to understanding the critical lessons of life than during the moments immediately following birth, the elders recite tribal wisdom into the little one’s ear, simultaneously sprinkling ashes on the child’s body as a reminder that we must all someday return to dust.

Compare this birth experience to that in a society we know quite well: Mothers who are about to give birth are drugged then wired to a bank of beeping, high-tech monitoring and hydrating equipment. Supine and with her legs spread before a group of strangers (most of them male professionals), the expectant mother finds herself in a bare, noisy delivery room beneath a heaven starred with blinding halogen lights. Technicians garbed in green scrubs mill around in obstetric masks, checking settings, tightening straps, watching as a male physician often pulls the newborn child out of the womb with an adjustable metal forceps or suction device. The child is then spanked smartly on the rear end to induce breathing, and the umbilical cord is cut and discarded without ceremony. After being scrubbed down with antiseptic detergent and after fluids are vacuumed out of his or her nose and mouth with a suctioning tube, the child has a brief visit with the mother before being whisked away from the mother’s arms and breasts in order to be banded, vaccinated, fed artificially , and deposited in an isolated crib inside a room full of hundreds of other similarly birthed children.

Sound familiar? More than likely you and I were born in some version of this modern, industrial birthing ritual—not in a warm, dark, comfortable bedchamber surrounded by loving family and friends, but in a steel-framed hospital unit that smelled of antiseptic. This is the birth rite our particular society chooses for introducing newborns to the world. “Every society,” anthropologist Gregory Bateson once remarked, “practices the birthing ceremonies that best mirror its values, norms, and philosophy.”
But some people might ask: Isn’t this as it should be? Don’t we believe, from centuries of trial and experience, that modern hospital delivery is the safest, fastest, and most hygienic form of childbirth?
Many people think so, certainly. Yet many others—a rapidly growing number, in fact—are beginning to realize that despite its sophisticated chemical and surgical procedures, modern obstetrics, with its uncompromising emphasis on technology over nature, comes up gravely lacking in the human arts. As many people are coming to understand, all children born under hospital lights and raised in a daycare-like environment end up being denied essential physical and emotional tools they need so profoundly to reach their full potential as human beings.

Regarding this lack of human arts in birth, neuropsychologist James Prescott, reminds us of a fact that so many doctors and patients have forgotten, but that serves as a kind of battle cry for those who clearly see what is being done to both parents and children today. “No mammal on the planet separates the newborn from its mother at birth except the human animal,” Prescott warns us. “No mammal on this planet denies the breast of the mother to the newborn except the human

Of course, in some instances where the health and well-being of the mother and/or child are greatly compromised because of physiological disease, diabetes, genetic difficulties, or other genuinely high risks, technological intervention can often save the life of both mother and child.
There’s genuine trouble and the kind that is “manufactured.”

But for you moms who have genuine medical problems and need medical supervision by all means get it. There still many ways that you can naturally bond with your newborn and consciously parent him. We will be dealing with bonding in depth and in detail in a series called Blogs-on-Bonding.

Blog Posted 5/31/09 by Jeffrey Fine, Ph.D. Co-author with Dalit Fine, MS of the book
“The Art of Conscious Parenting” Release Date: – November 2009
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