love hormones

We were shown a very brief clip from the film The Business of Being Born during our Bradley Method childbirth class this evening. The segment featured French obstetrician Micheal Odent discussing the incredible cocktail of hormones that are released in the mother's body during the moments immediately preceding birth. He calls them "love hormones." According to Odent, these hormones (chief among them being oxytocin) "prime" both the mother and baby to connect with one another and form an "addiction" for one another. He argues that using pain-blocking drugs or giving birth by caesarean section impedes this consequential hormonal release and perhaps diminishes the ability of the mother and baby to fully bond with one another in those first crucial moments.

While he spoke, the film showed clip after clip of mothers reaching for their just-born infants, tears staining their faces as they clutched their infants to their chests. Their faces shone with pure joy as the agony of the past moments receded into memory. The babies, wet and wrinkled and confused, gazed up at their mother's faces as they made their first clumsy efforts to latch on. These mothers were active and engaged and immediately available to their babies during those critical first moments in the living world.

The film also showed a drugged mother, stretched out on her back, wired up and plugged in, her eyes drifting listlessly, her manner languid and strange. The doctor showed her the newborn infant and the mother smiled a slow, drunken smile and waved a hand as the baby was whisked away to be cleaned or tested or taken down the hall to a cold nursery until the mother could sober up.

It was a powerful contrasting visual and the message of the film definitely struck me full force. One of the primary reasons I am choosing to attempt a natural childbirth is to experience this rite of passage unhindered and unmitigated. I want first-person, intimate, in-the-moment, immediacy, whatever the cost in pain and suffering. I've experienced sedatives and numbing agents in the past, whether recreationally or to ease various medical procedures, and I know that to be anything less than my very own clear-headed self would be bothersome and strange and wreck the moment to my thinking. I cannot help but want to be as present as possible and feel the full gamut of natural sensations and emotions during this crucial moment in my life and that of my new baby boy. I want our very first meeting to be a pure and undiluted affair.

I recognize that there are circumstances in which drugs or intervention of another sort may prove necessary, and I hope I can be flexible enough in the moment to permit a change of plan when change is required. But I am committed to the course that I have chosen. There really isn't a choice, as far as I am concerned.