Also there's this one comic (or maybe more, but only one that I have seen) where she rails on people giving birth in hospitals or in anything except a TOTALLY NATURAL environment because apparently anything except a natural unassisted birth means you don't release the right hormones and form a proper bond with your child. There's just so many things that can go so wrong during a birth that this point of view really bothers me. I'm fairly open minded until people start giving advice which has serious probability of endangering lives. Rant off, back to boobies.
Okay, well, here's the thing about that. 40 years ago, my dad wasn't allowed in the delivery room to see my brother's birth. When I was born in '79, my dad was there -- but the hospital had just that year started allowing fathers to be present. Women were routinely shaved, administered enemas, and often given episiotomies as a matter of course, whether they needed them or not. Some women were strapped to tables so they wouldn't "thrash" with the pain. Women who screamed too much or moved too much were sometimes given nitrous and knocked unconscious. Everything was geared towards making things easier on the doctors, not the moms.
After birth, babies were whisked away to the nursery, and new moms had to request visits with their own children. Women who would otherwise have wanted to breastfeed often had nurses who, in a kind-hearted effort to afford Mom some much-needed rest, would give their babies bottles during the hospital stay, which can interfere with mom's milk supply, especially during the first 24 hours after delivery.
Women used to have to go outside the hospital setting if they wanted to their husbands present, move around during labor, not be forcibly administered medications, or see their babies after birth. Because so many women were dissatisfied and raised a ruckus about their treatment at hospitals, hospitals have become much more mom-friendly. The only interventions I had in the hospital that I would not have had at home were induction (which was medically necessary due to me being diabetic) and continuous fetal monitoring (which quite possibly saved my son's life). Everything else, I declined, and nobody pressured me to reconsider once the decision was made.
Most hospitals are now very mom-centered, but some women cling to this outdated notion that doctors and nurses are out to get them, and as a result can be quite poisonous about the whole thing. So the anti-hospitals thing is based on something that used to be true, but is no longer. I just hope this women never has another child who turns out to have some kind of birth defect or a complicated delivery, because she may end up regretting her decision to have a home birth for the rest of her life.
This is coming from someone who seriously considered having a home birth with my son. Pedro talked me out of it, and if he had, I do not think my son would have survived. No question in my mind that a hospital is the place to be.
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Topic: Salma Hayek breastfeeds a starving baby in Sierra Leone (Read 4043 times)