Cloth Diapering Tips & Baby Talks

Posts Tagged ‘human birth’

Often with great difficulty, as many women can testify. But why should human birth be such an effort, when so many other animals appear to produce their offspring with so little trouble? There is no ambulance to rush a mother giraffe to hospital when she is about to produce her six-foot tall calf. Despite its ungainly shape, the newborn giraffe simply slides out of its mother’s body, crashes to the ground and then quickly staggers to its feet. There are no doctors or midwives to assist an orang-utan mother as her baby edges its way into the outside world. Again the whole procedure seems remarkably relaxed and simple. When the family cat hides away to deliver her litter of mewing kittens she does not appear to be racked with pain. She goes through birth after birth with quiet efficiency and little fuss. So why has the human baby’s entry into the world become a time of such high drama and concerned medical supervision? Has our species become somehow inefficient at giving birth and if so, why?
It is often argued that the frequent agonies of giving birth are the result of the fact that human beings, uniquely, spend their lives walking around on their hind legs. This bipedal position certainly puts some conflicting demands on the female pelvic girdle, which must be both a vertical locomotion support and a birth passage. The baby has to emerge through a ring of bone that must, of necessity, be a compromise between its two main functions. But although this factor may playa part in making human birth more difficult than birth in other species, it cannot be the whole answer for one very simple reason: primitive women did not have ante-natal clinics, hospitals, drugs, anaesthetics and obstetricians for expectant mothers. The primeval human female had to produce her babies under simple, tribal conditions without any modem technology to help her and she had to continue to do this for thousands upon thousands of years for our species to succeed. And succeed it did, on a global scale.
If primitive mothers could manage without any specialized help, why can we not do the same? A favourite answer is that
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the tribal mothers were working ‘in the fields’ all day, and this made their bodies more muscular and stronger, so that they could give birth more easily. Bearing in mind how well fed we are today and how fit young women keep themselves, this explanation no longer seems very persuasive. It may have applied in epochs and cultures where women were made soft by being forbidden to do physical work, but even there it is hard to accept it as an important factor.
Looking at the evidence from ancient societies and from modem tribal societies in remote parts of the world, it seems that there are two major differences between their simple births and our more painful ones. These differences concern the place where the mother gives birth and the position in which she does it. We have altered these two aspects of delivery and, in doing so, have created unnatural obstacles to easy childbirth.
This may sound strange, but consider the facts. The tribal mother-to-be gives birth in a familiar place, soothed and helped by familiar female friends. She is not rushed off to a strange and rather daunting location, to be attended by strangers. The modem mother-to-be is not ill, but she is taken to a hospital – a place that we all automatically associate with sickness, injury and pain. This removal to an unfamiliar place with alarming associations makes her anxious. Consciously, she knows that everything is being done to help her, but at a deeper, subconscious level, she feels the unease we all sense as we approach a hospital building.
This anxiety has a quite specific effect on her, and to understand it it helps to look at the behaviour of certain other pregnant females. Among horses, the pregnant mare is capable of holding back her moment of delivery until she feels completely secure. Nine out of ten foals are born in the middle of the night. This is no accident, this is the result of the mares controlling the timing of their contractions. They wait and wait, until they are alone and all is quiet. Only then will they give birth. This is not something they learn. It is an instinctive ability and it helps the mother to make one of her most vulnerable moments also one of her most private.
This same mechanism is at work in humans. If the expectant mother is fearful or anxious, this mood automatically delays her labour. A specific chemical (epinephrine) is released into the mother’s system and this has the effect of delaying the birth. The biological function of this postponement is, of course, to allow the mother to wait fora more relaxed, less intimidating moment before she becomes vulnerable. In primeval conditions this makes a great deal of sense. It helps her to avoid dangers. She can time her delivery to safer moments. But for the modern female it is no advantage at all. It is a nuisance. What is worse, the prolonging of the delivery makes her even more anxious and fearful and this in turn prolongs it still further. It is a vicious circle that sees many of today’s mothers undergoing periods of labour many times longer than normal for our species.
This could be avoided if the mother felt entirely relaxed and ‘among friends’. The less apprehension, the less pain. If mothers must be moved to maternity hospitals to give birth, for reasons of hygiene and access to medical emergency treatment, then those hospitals should be made as familiar and friendly as possible.
It has recently become fashionable for the father to be present at the birth. Although this is usually said to be a return to a ‘natural’ condition of parental sharing, with the father’s presence acting as a bonding device, the truth is that fathers do not seem to have been particularly prominent in the birth customs of ancient or tribal peoples. The supportive friends have almost always been exclusively female. Females who have previously given birth themselves seem to have been more calming in their influence than males. An ‘expectant father’ may be even more anxious than the mother and risk transmitting his fears to her, worsening her state of mind instead of improving it. In other cases, however, the father is the only ‘body-intimate’ a woman has today and so, in some instances, if he is calm and relaxed himself, he can provide the familiarity that she needs. It clearly depends on the individuals in each case.
From this argument it could be concluded that giving birth at home would be better. The mother would feel more at ease and the delivery would not therefore be delayed by internal chemical reactions to anxiety. This would be true if the home could be made hygienic enough and if the mother had around her expert, but familiar help. The problem for the modem female, however, is that she has been so firmly indoctrinated with the idea that it is only safe to go to hospital to give birth, that remaining at home might itself become a cause for anxiety. She is trapped between two alternatives, both of which have their own built-in anxiety factors: the hospital is strange and clinical, the home is lacking in expert technology. The solution must always be to choose the course of action that makes the individual mother feel most secure and relaxed. Then she will not suffer the automatic ‘protection device’ that is built in to her system and which keeps holding her baby back, no matter how hard she struggles to deliver it.
In addition to finding the right place to give birth, there is also the question of adopting the right posture for the delivery. If, again, we look at ancient and tribal societies, it is clear that lying down on your back to give birth is not the favoured position. In fact, looked at logically, it is rather ridiculous, because it makes no use of gravity. Instead of ‘dropping’ her baby, the mother has to be urged to ‘push, push’. She must force the infant out horizontally. Again, this seems a strangelymedical procedure that has no place at a ‘natural’ event. It is as if the mother, having been shipped to hospital, is now being treated as though she really is ill. She is placed in a bed, like a patient, and attended by medical staff, as though there is something wrong with her – when in reality there is something wonderfully right with her. It seems as though this medically dominated atmosphere has been accepted as the inevitable norm for human mothers, but the. truth is that it is no more than a modern fashion.
A survey of birth postures in tribal and ancient societies reveals that squatting, not lying, is the natural delivery position for our species. Even the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic for ‘birth’ shows a squatting woman with a baby’s head emerging from below her body. The same is true in ancient Babylon, Greece and in the Pre-Colombian peoples of Central America. In ancient Rome they made use of special birth chairs. These chairs had cut-away seats that permitted the baby to emerge downwards while the mother clung on to handles fixed to the front of the chair arms. These devices remained popular in Europe for centuries and were still in use in some regions right up to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Giving birth in this way is easier, as we know from careful modern studies by anthropologists in New Guinea and elsewhere. Their observations of the few remaining tribal societies that have not yet been ‘helped’ by advanced cultures, show that the primeval squatting position greatly reduces the effort needed to deliver the baby. There may still be contorted facial expressions and moments of inevitable discomfort and even pain, but the whole process is quicker and more efficient.
We need to re-learn some old lessons when bringing babies into the world. Providing mothers are healthy and there are no signs of complications, we could do well to reconsider both the place and the position for delivery. Birth is a natural process and we should give biology as well as medicine due consideration when planning it.

extracted from ” Baby Watching” by Desmond Morris