Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (111 page)
Read Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom Online
Authors: Christiane Northrup
Tags: #Health; Fitness & Dieting, #Women's Health, #General, #Personal Health, #Professional & Technical, #Medical eBooks, #Specialties, #Obstetrics & Gynecology
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Pediatrician Harvey Karp, M.D., author of
The Happiest Baby on
the Block
(Bantam Books, 2002), shares several very helpful suggestions in his book that parents can use to help fussy babies calm themselves and get to sleep. (For more about Dr. Karp’s ideas, or to order his videos and DVDs—which brilliantly show how to elicit the calming reflex quickly, using actual crying babies—visit his website at
www.thehappiestbaby.com
.) His advice includes:
Using a white-noise machine or a
shhh
ing sound. Either a white-noise CD or a white-noise machine will work well, as does shushing the baby yourself (at a volume as loud as her crying is, and right near her face). This re-creates the noise level in the womb— which is anything but silent—and makes the baby feel more secure.
Circumcision of baby boys is another example of a painful procedure that is unnecessary. (See also
chapter 8
, “Reclaiming the Erotic.”) In fact, I’ve done hundreds of circumcisions—and I have publicly apologized to every one of those little boys years after the fact, hoping that this gesture might prevent a mother from unconsciously consenting to this procedure. Though I often used a local anesthetic, even inserting the needle for this caused the baby unnecessary pain and didn’t always work very well. Increasingly, doctors and parents alike are appreciating the fact that babies are born with a nervous system that is fully capable of feeling pain and that circumcision without anesthesia is barbaric.
In the past when I did the procedure, I would ask mothers to come into the nursery to comfort their babies while they were being circumcised, but they wouldn’t do it. They couldn’t stand the idea. I always made sure I personally took the newly circumcised baby to his mother as soon as I was finished, so that she could comfort her child. I didn’t want him wounded and then left alone in the nursery. There is no medical justification for routinely circumcising newborns. George Denniston, M.D., sums up the circumcision issue very nicely: “To me the idea of performing 100,000 mutilating procedures on newborns to possibly prevent penile cancer in one elderly man is absurd.”
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The discussion of circumcision is a perfect example of the strength and influence of first-chakra tribal programming on our thought and emotional responses. This programming is so ingrained that many people cannot even discuss the subject of circumcision without guilt, denial, or other strong emotions. I know that merely addressing the subject of the baby boy’s bodily integrity, choices, and pain (if the procedure is done without anesthetic) can cause a “kill the messenger” reaction. But first-chakra programming can be successfully questioned and worked through, if desired. Even many Jewish couples, for whom circumcision is a religious ritual, have rethought the entire circumcision issue and have decided not to have it done to their sons.
Circumcision is known to cause sleep disturbances for at least three days.
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It also has profound implications for male sexuality. (see
chapter 8
, “Reclaiming the Erotic.”) In fact, it’s a form of sexual abuse. We certainly feel that way about female clitoridectomy, circumcision, and infibulation, but we justify male infant circumcision by pretending that the babies don’t feel it because they’re too young and it will have no consequences when they are older. I was taught that babies couldn’t feel when they were born and therefore wouldn’t feel their circumcision. Why was it, then, that when I strapped their little arms and legs down on the board (called a “circum-straint”), they were often perfectly calm; then when I started cutting their fore skins, they screamed loudly, with cries that broke my heart? For years, in some hospitals, surgery on infants has been carried out without anesthesia because of this misconception. Women who are going through memories of abuse in childhood know how deeply and painfully early experiences leave marks in the body.
Artificial infant feeding is another area that requires rethinking. In the 1940s, infant feeding became very “scientific.” Mothers sterilized nipples, bottles, and everything else, and the medical profession as a group systematically undermined breast-feeding as inferior. Rubber and glass took the place of a warm human breast. Feedings were timed. Even if a child showed a need for frequent feedings, the mother was warned not to feed her before four hours had passed. This information was based on a very early study of dead babies (who had been sick enough to die!) that found that at one, two, and three hours there was still food in the stomach, but that four hours after a feeding the stomach was empty. Like routine episiotomy, the four-hour feeding schedule was accepted into the culture and after a while simply became standard practice. The needs of the individual child were sacrificed on the altar of efficiency and “science”—with all its measuring and weighing. Can you imagine the pain of an infant who cries out to be held or fed, and yet the mother does not do so because the “experts” have told her to ignore all her instincts so she won’t “spoil” the baby? (Babies were often weighed before and after a feeding to make sure they “got enough”—a practice that does
not
yield reliable data.)
Even now, women ask their doctors, “How will I know if I have enough milk?” Here’s how you know: If the baby is growing, happy, and healthy, she is getting enough. Since women’s trust in themselves has been systematically undermined in every area of their lives for cen turies, how could we be expected to trust our bodies’ ability to feed our babies? (Thank goodness that over the years a few did.) I don’t for a minute expect that every woman will want to nurse her babies. For some, it’s too anxiety-provoking, while for others bottle-feeding is the only way a woman can get child care from her husband, because he will be able to help with the feeding. We all have to start from where we are, but we should start from knowledge—not ignorance.
An analysis published in 2007 of more than five hundred breast-feeding studies (selected from some nine thousand abstracts) concluded that breastfeeding reduced the risk of ear infections, gastroenteritis, severe respiratory tract infections, eczema, asthma, obesity, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, childhood leukemia, necrotizing enterocolitis (a gastrointestinal disease that mainly affects premature babies), and sudden infant death syndrome.
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(Breast-feeding cuts the risk of SIDS
in half,
according to a 2009 study done in Germany.)
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The 2007 analysis further found that breast-feeding is health enhancing for women, too: Mothers who breast-fed were less likely to get type 2 diabetes, breast cancer, and ovarian cancer.
A 2009 study that followed 704 women for twenty years found that breast-feeding reduced the mothers’ chances of later developing metabolic syndrome (a cluster of risk factors such as high blood pressure and high triglycerides that are associated with obesity)—especially for mothers who had gestational diabetes. Researchers found that those mothers who did not have gestational diabetes and who breast-fed for more than nine months cut their risk of metabolic syndrome by anywhere from 39 percent to 56 percent. And a similar group of mothers who did have gestational diabetes cut their risk by anywhere from 44 percent to 86 percent.
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The study reported that risk declined further the longer women breast-fed. It’s no wonder that the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Academy of Family Physicians all recommend that mothers breast-feed exclusively for six months. WHO and UNICEF recommend that mothers continue nursing (along with giving age-appropriate foods) until age two or longer.
Nature set it up so that when a baby is put to the breast right after delivery, the suckling action causes the hormones oxytocin and prolactin to be secreted by the mother’s pituitary gland. Prolactin induces milk production as well as mothering behavior, and oxytocin is the bonding hormone. The longer a mother breast-feeds, the less likely she is to neglect or otherwise mistreat or abuse her child within the child’s first fifteen years of life, according to a 2009 study of more than seven thousand mother-child pairs.
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