October 26, 2009 - Janel and Rich

October 26
Stuart Fischbein, MD
Obstetric physician from California who is a strong advocate for patient's rights to informed consent and refusal. He is a long-time supporter of midwifery care and creating partnerships with midwives. He is currently one of the few obstetricians to speak publicly and to stand up against his own professional organization on behalf of women's rights to true informed consent and choice. Recently, for allowing patients the dignity of true informed consent in his community he and his midwives are being threatened with disciplinary action. www.supportdrfischbein.blogspot.com.

Dr. Fischbein, obstetrician from northern Los Angeles area, had to cancel and Rich and I winged it. I shared some recent research that showed that mother's breast milk has stem cells in it, meaning that the mother's body CONTINUES TO BUILD the BABY'S BODY for months or years. I shared my personal experience of having a profound connection to my son who is in Afghanistan where 16 American soldiers had died that day. Our conversation zig zagged around the topic of the impact of obstetric interventions on the human being and on society. Rich's paper, Munchausen Obstetrics, link at top of page here, has many, many resources on this topic.

At t the end of the hour, with only minutes left, we had a caller who doubted what we were saying. She said she is a scholar and doesn't believe the anecdotal stories. I gave her a resource, Dr. William Emerson's site, www.EmersonBirthRx.com, but she said that's just one person. Both he and David Chamberlain, PhD are coming out with new books very soon. Dr. Chamberlain is the co-founder of the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health, www.birthpsychology.com, founded in the mid eighties. Members are international and include physicians, nurses, psychologists, music and craniosacral therapists, and many, many others all who have done research in the area of the primal period of life. The research is there and it has been for years. Here's one from the seventies, http://www.birthpsychology.com/violence/verny.html.

Aside from the research there is just plain logic ... birth has to matter. Once one embraces how fully present we are in the womb (and before) and at birth one has to stop what they are doing to human babies. Meanwhile, DENIAL permeates every aspect of birth and consideration for the full sentience of the human baby. Why? Because to acknowledge that we are fully present at birth, one has to deal with their own birth, their primal brain imprinting, and how it has created who they are today. And, one has to deal with their own decisions or their own victimization as a woman birthing her children. THIS IS the biggest obstacle. I would bet that our caller had a cesarean, chosen or not, or something profound that happened to her giving birth. Our society doesn't acknowledge it so it doesn't provide or research options to support healing, so people deny it. Babies can't be fully aware. It can't matter what we do to them in the first moments, hours, and days of their life because then we have to deal with what we did to so many babies.

I found my old site cached on google and I am posting links to a couple of pages here. One is a newspaper article about my work in the Peoria Journal Star in October 2003.

The Baby Whisperer

The other is the testimony of the same mother featured in the article about her experience of doing therapy with her baby and me. He was born at home but had to have multiple heart surgeries in his first two weeks. A psychology professor at the local community college wrote a seething "letter to the editor" about my work. This and my response are also on this page and it includes many, many references.

A Mother's Story

With all due respect to our caller, I realized how tired of I am of having to be the one "to prove" with science my premise that we can be kinder, we can honor the mother and baby (soul) being born. The truth is that obstetric medicine isn't and hasn't been scientific based. NEVER were the drugs ever used shown to be safe prior to using on NEWBORNS. Humans, baby humans, are NON-informed, NON-consenting subjects in one long, horrid research project. Obstetric medicine is the place of manufacturing of human deficits and dysfunctions, namely the ones that create broken human connections as well as drug addiction and propensity for violence, for being a culture of people with little respect for the boundaries of others.

So, let me say, "NO, YOU prove that what is being in done in modern medicalized birth for sixty decades is NOT damaging." My guts, my heart, my logic and science tells me is it profoundly damaging.

In November of 2006 a month after my son first deployed to Iraq I began writing on a blog and I wrote 600 pages between November and May. It was my therapy as I wrote about birth, war, obstetrics and mother-child attachment. That blog is www.Hospitalbirthdebate.blogspot.com. It is full, full, full of articles with research to back our discussion.