“For first time blood begins to flow through the pulmonary system, allowing oxygen to enter the bloodstream in the lungs. If the cord is clamped too early the baby ends up blood deficient.”
“The way we are treated at birth can impact the extent to which we actualise our full potential.”
Humanity is evolving toward love. In our age of terrorism and increasing political repression this may not seem obvious, but it is true. A greater proportion of people are loving and compassionate than ever before in Western history. A major reason for this is that more and more children are being raised without intimidation, so both their love and full intelligence are free to develop unimpeded. This bodes well for the future, because a positive future can only be created by compassionate people who care. Humanity’s great agenda, now that our ecological and social issues are so manifest, is to apply our resources to helping ourselves and the next generation to become truly great people. Our challenge is to become the kind of people who have the creativity and good will to actually create a world that works – a world that is ecologically sustainable and humane.
The way we are treated at birth can impact the extent to which we actualize our full potential. Two approaches to birth that help babies start life with a foundation of pleasure and security are Dr. Frederick Leboyer’s approach to birth without violence, and Lotus Birth.
Birth Without Violence
More than 30 years ago a French pediatrician, Frederick Leboyer, became aware that newborn infants are conscious beings who suffer great agony from typical hospital birthing procedures. So he thought through how to greet babies in a warm loving way. He made the birthing room warm, with low lighting and soft voices, so that the transition from the womb would be as comfortable for the newborn as possible. The baby was given immediate contact with the mother, and then a warm bath reminiscent of floating in the womb.
As for the umbilical cord, it was not cut until the blood stopped the pulsing. This might be for up to 20 minutes after the birth. This gave the newborn time to ‘sip’ her first breaths. A newborn infant’s lungs have never been exposed to oxygen, and presumably the first sensations are extremely intense. Leaving the cord uncut gives the baby time to get used to oxygen at her own pace.
Leboyer’s revolutionary book Birth Without Violence (1975) is not about technique. It is a book about seeing. It opens our eyes to the nonverbal language of the newborn – its overwhelming pain if it comes into the harsh world of traditional birthing practices; its bliss when it is greeted lovingly and has immediate contact with its mother. I had the privilege of attending one of Dr. Leboyer’s lectures in San Francisco. Asked if his method was in use around the world, he responded, “There is no ‘Leboyer method’. All I ask you to do is to use your own common sense and caring to think through for yourself what is the best way to greet a newborn baby.”
Many people have adopted Leboyer’s approach, and given their newborn infants a soothing greeting. In Australian hospitals it is no longer routine to slap the baby to make it breathe. This is a significant shift that will make the next generation less prone to violence, because people born without violence tend to have an inner core of peace despite the outer difficulties we all experience.
Lotus Birth
Humanity’s journey to love may be described as a progressive reduction in blindness. We can be blind to other people. We can also be cut off from our own feelings. If we have been traumatised in childhood this capacity to block out feelings is necessary for survival. Blocking out traumatic memories enables us to function despite our inner emotional disturbance. But the buried disturbance doesn’t disappear. It surfaces later in life in ways that disturb our relationships and our inner sense of well-being. For this reason many people engage in psychotherapy, rebirthing, or other forms of inner exploration that reactivate the buried memories and feelings, and allow them to be resolved. Such journeys are never easy, but the payoff is that we greatly increase our capacity to have loving relationships in the present.
Australia teacher of spiritual midwifery Shivam Rachana engaged in such a journey. In her book Lotus Birth (2000) Shivam reports that through a series of primal therapy sessions she re-experienced the pain of having her umbilical cord cut. “My stomach ached and throbbed like an enormous heart. I was angry and most distressed – I knew it wasn’t necessary and felt, ‘How dare they!’” At one point she curled up hugging a pillow. She realized that the pillow represented the placenta. For a time if anyone had tried to take the pillow away from her she felt would have killed them. This state lasted for about one and a half hours, and then suddenly the pillow was simply a pillow again, and the episode was over. Shivam reports that afterwards she felt exceptionally peaceful. This experience led Shivam to think about the placenta itself, and what it means to separate the infant from the placenta too early. Until recently it never occurred to anyone that cutting the cord, or the timing of cutting the cord, would make any difference.
The placenta grows from the fetus’ tissues at the sixth day after conception, and attaches to the wall of the womb. It carries oxygen and nutrients into the fetus, and takes waste out. This much is well-known. But more than that, the placenta is the infant’s companion through pregnancy – a constant presence, like a twin. Ultrasound observation shows that fetuses play with the placenta. If the placenta is experienced as a companion by the fetus, then to be separated from it is a loss.
This is an unusual insight, one that is implausible to people who think that newborns aren’t really conscious and aware. Shivam experienced the loss of her placenta quite powerfully under the special conditions of psychotherapy, but is there anything to suggest that there is anything more to it than her own unique experience? As a spiritual midwife, Shivam has had the opportunity to observe mothers and their newborns during the period after birth. She noticed that often babies would cry when their cord was cut. She also observed that some babies showed signs of distress when the cord was about to be cut, and if the parents and doctor refrained from cutting the cord the babies settled down again. There is something quite mysterious going on here, since of course infants would have had no experience in this life of scissors or knives. They were responding to the intent.
Other practitioners have made similar observations, and initiated the practice of not cutting the cord at all, but instead waiting until it falls off naturally. This occurs three to seven days after birth. After the blood stops pulsing through the umbilical cord to the baby, the placenta is placed in a strainer and drained of any remaining blood. Then the placenta and cord are cleaned and dried with a cloth nappy and placed in the placenta bag. Every 24 hours the placenta is patted dry and coated liberally with salt. The placenta may emit a mild smell, however there has been no recorded infections from the cord being attached. This way of managing the period right after birth is called Lotus Birth.
Once people began think more deeply about the role of the placenta and the umbilical cord many new insights occurred. At birth the babies circulatory system changes. For first time blood begins to flow through the pulmonary system, allowing oxygen to enter the bloodstream in the lungs. If the cord is clamped too early the baby ends up blood deficient. Much of the available blood goes to the lungs, leaving the organs undersupplied. The blood in the umbilical cord also has stem cells that migrate to the baby’s bone marrow where they become various types of cells for making blood. So it is essential for the baby to have all of its blood from its placenta available to it.
Birth panic in doctors
In typical hospital births until recently newborns were greeted with bright lights, held upside down (thus extending their spines far too rapidly), slapped in order to induce crying, and placed on a cold scale. In a sense, this was an assault on the baby. Their umbilical cord was also clamped before the blood stops pulsing through it, throwing the baby into a breathe-or-die emergency situation.
It has been theorised that doctors possibly behave in this way because of their own unresolved birth trauma. People can become psychologically reactivated without realizing it when they see things that remind them unconsciously of painful events in their own past. One experienced midwife observed that in the process of attending births many doctors hold their breath involuntarily. Holding your breath puts you into a state of physiological panic. Doctors in this situation may then attribute the ensuing sense of emergency to the external circumstances, not to their own internal physiological state. Consequently they perceive the actual birth that is going on as an emergency, and hurry it along instead of trusting the natural process. If this is the case, then doctors like the rest of us would do well to do inner work such as rebirthing in order to resolve any residual fear from their own birth. Then they would be emotionally far more capable of trusting the natural process.
Evolving to love
Now let us look at gentle birth in the context of the larger needs of our time. As we said, humanity is evolving to love. However, our increasing environmental deterioration and social polarization shows that as a species we are not very good at love yet. Albert Einstein famously observed that a serious problem can never be solved using the same mode of thinking that produced it in the first-place. Can we identify a way of thinking that can lead to a positive future?
Futurist Riane Eisler suggests that there are two fundamental ways of relating. She calls them partnership/respect relating and domination/control relating (The Chalice and the Blade, 1987). People who use partnership/respect relating support the well-being of others. People who use domination/control relating willingly seek personal advantage at the expense of the environment and the larger community.
Riane Eisler states “In the domination model, somebody has to be a top and somebody has to do the bottom. Those on top control those below them. People learn, starting in early childhood, to obey orders without question. They learn to carry a harsh voice in their heads telling them they are no good, they don’t deserve love, they need to be punished. Families and societies are based on control that is explicitly or implicitly backed up by guilt, fear, and force. The world is divided into in-groups and out-groups, with those who are different seen as enemies to be conquered or destroyed.
“In contrast, the partnership model supports mutually respectful and caring relations. Because there’s no need to maintain rigid rankings of control, there is also no built-in need for abuse or violence. Partnership relations free our innate capacity to feel joy, to play. They enable us to grow mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. This is true for individuals, families, and whole societies. Conflict is an opportunity to learn and to be creative, and power is exercised in ways that empower rather than disempower.”
The partnership ideal has been phrased in various ways. The Buddha talked of compassion and right livelihood; Christ said, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Abraham Lincoln’s “Government of the people, by the people and for the people” succinctly captures the idea of government for community well-being. The Conflict Resolution Network teaches “win-win” negotiating skills. Today there are increasing numbers of people who embody partnership relating. Some do organic farming and permaculture, others engage in psychotherapy so they can have more loving relationships, while yet others work for social justice or child health. The Feldenkrais method of body awareness, Aikido and improvisational acting, while externally quite different, all teach a style of working with others rather than imposing on them. Leboyer, Lotus Birth, the Nursing Mothers Association and parent support groups also have the effect of making people healthier and happier in themselves, and therefore less dependent on ‘consumption’ in order to feel good.
While the call to love one another is perennially profound, it can seem simplistic or even trite. It can be taken as a call to feeling friendly towards other people, when in fact something vastly beyond simply a positive feeling is required. Valuing community well-being is essential if we want to become a viable human species, and we must make the personal and institutional changes to make community wellbeing real.
By contrasting partnership relating with dominator relating we gain a better grasp of what we are Dealing with. Since the first city states arose in the Middle East 5000 years ago Western history has been characterized by domination and war. We still attempt to dominate nature through industrial agriculture and manufacturing. Virtually everything that is produced and consumed causes environmental damage, yet we use advertising to increase people desire to consume things they do not actually need. The goal, of course, is to increase wealth for shareholders. This dominator system is rapidly undermining the ecological base of our global civilization. If it is true that a dominator mentality is driving our current ecological destruction, then we may fairly say that the fate of the world depends on partnership values coming to set the tone.
Spiritual leaders have preached this for millennia, but only recently has humanity developed the weapons and poisons that poises us on the brink of species self-destruction. We are the first civilization that has scientifically predicted its own demise. So now actualizing our loving spiritual ideals is no longer an idealistic dream, but a practical necessity of our time.
The dark side is not the whole story. Increasing numbers of people are engaging in personal growth, education for sustainability, industrial redesign and other activities that are part of our evolution to a positive future. There are far more positive things going on than most people realize, because they are not highlighted in the mass media. Unreported in the press, and not clearly seen by most of us, a massive number of people are contributing to a transition to wellbeing. New breakthroughs in our psychological understanding of birth and the first days of life are part of this larger movement to a society based on wellbeing.
Approaches such as Birth Without Violence and Lotus Birth are important steps in our cultural shift to a healthy society based on partnership values. Whenever we thoughtfully apply a partnership approach we are contributing to the evolution of a world that works – a world that is ecologically sustainable and humane. Whatever is good for babies is good for humanity!
