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Author denounces childbirth practices, day-care emphasis |
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 Author denounces childbirth practices, day-care emphasis
Source: Kalamazoo Gazette Date: 10/28/2008
Natural childbirth helps promote not only healthier births but healthier societies,
according to natural-childbirth pioneer and advocate Suzanne Arms. But
many people are not truly educated about this option, she says.
Arms,
author of the 1975 best-seller "Immaculate Deception" and its sequel,
"Immaculate Deception II," visited western Michigan last week and spoke
in Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids.
"There
is a lot that is different (since 1975)," Arms said in an interview
during her Kalamazoo visit. "But in terms of the core of it, nothing
significant has changed. We continue to place enormous stress on
pregnant women and to intervene in the normal biological processes of
birth and breast-feeding and mother-baby bonding."
Arms
spoke to about 44 people Wednesday at the Kalamazoo Center for the
Healing Arts in a visit sponsored by Birth Kalamazoo, an organization
of doulas that offers childbirth education.
"People
look at having a baby like buying a car, but they do far less research
on the subject," Arms said. "They say, 'I'm going to buy a birth, but
I'm going to buy a birth based on the pathological fear that most women
and most men have of birth."
Despite
advances in natural childbirth and better-established networks of
doulas and midwives, many women still choose to be medicated during the
birth process and to deliver in hospitals, Arms said. She argues that
this is not a healthier option for either baby or mother.
Particularly
alarming, Arms said, is the continuing rise in Cesarean births.
Although some have suggested the rising rate reflects a trend of
mothers scheduling births for convenience, hence the phrase "Cesareans
on demand," Arms said the increase does not reflect true choice.
"Women
have been led to believe birth is so dangerous and intolerably painful
that there's a good reason to avoid labor altogether," she said. "Women
are not told of the risks of Cesareans, which are major surgery."
But
Arms, who in addition to being the author of seven books is also a
filmmaker and founder of the advocacy group Birthing the Future, said
that childbirth is only one part of the problem with how society deals
with mothers and children.
Women,
she said, are placed under tremendous stress during pregnancy, which
can result in high-risk pregnancies, and they are under great strain to
return to the workplace too soon after birth and to leave children in
day care, which results in poor bonding, guilt and additional stress.
"Long
ago in this country, women made the unfortunate decision that women's
rights had to be about day care and had to be about getting women into
the workplace," Arms said.
The
good news, Arms said, is that society seems to be on the verge of
making a shift toward placing greater emphasis and value on the family.
"It's
not appropriate to feel guilty or ashamed" about the paths we have
taken in the past, she said. "But it is time for us to erase the
ignorance."
Contact Linda S. Mah at
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or 388-8546.
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