Wisdom and Births

The techno-medical management of birth is pervasive. I struggle to understand the origination of some obstetrical interventions, such as the immediate (or quick) clamping and cutting of the umbilical cord. The umbilical cord develops between 3.5 and 8 gestational weeks and sustains the baby throughout the pregnancy and even in the minutes after birth by transferring nutrients and oxygen to the fetus from the placenta and carrying fetal waste away. The transfer of nutrient rich and oxygenated blood continues after birth and is important for all babies to receive, but particularly important for babies that are slow to start breathing on their own. I recently watched a youtube video of a Grand Rounds lecture from M.D. Nicholas Fogelson ( AcademicOB/GYN ) about delayed cord clamping and the importance of this as a standard of practice in medicine. He gives an excellent presentation and discusses several large well-executed research studies in which the evidence for delayed cord clamping is...

It was once a common thought among some (often more western) cultures that children didn't feel pain before the age of 3, or if they "felt" the pain, they didn't remember it so it didn't matter anyway. This belief has persisted throughout many, many generations and our current medical model of care often manages to ignore the important fact that unborn and newborn babies DO feel pain. As for "remembering", we may not be able to recollect the things that happened to us in our infancy, but that doesn't mean they aren't a part of our unconscious thoughts, foundational behaviors, and cellular memory. An article from Science Daily addresses recent research about painful procedures being performed on newborns in ICU's (this article is addressing research conducted in Paris, but our procedures are very similar), particularly how many procedures newborns undergo and that some of these are performed without any pain medication. It is important to kno...