Birthing guru says labour over-managed

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This article was published 12/05/2011 (5499 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IN the 1970s, while his colleagues were plugging in their new electronic fetal monitors, French obstetrician Dr. Michel Odent was encouraging mothers to give birth squatting in silent, dimly lit rooms at his low-tech birthing centre outside Paris.

Later, he introduced the concept of birthing pools and stirred up controversy by suggesting that a father’s presence in the delivery room is not only unnecessary, but also hinders labour.

Today, the London-based Odent, 81, maintains that cultural conditioning and technological advances have made childbirth so over-managed and over-complicated that soon there will be nothing natural about the process.

And dads in the delivery room are just the tip of the iceberg.

“After being involved in childbirth for more than half a century — in hospitals, at home, in France and the U.K. — I’m obliged to recognize that the participation of the baby’s father is one of the most common reasons for difficulties in childbirth,” Odent, who still lectures around the world, says during a phone interview from Christchurch, New Zealand.

“The best environment I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody around the labouring woman, apart from an experienced and silent midwife, who is perceived as a protective mother figure.”

Odent will conduct a workshop and lecture at the University of Winnipeg this weekend to explore what he says is the need to rediscover the basic needs of labouring women.

Thanks to modern physiology, he says, we know the most important of those needs is for a labouring woman to be protected against any stimulation of the thinking part of her brain, the neocortex, so she can release a cocktail of “love hormones” — namely oxytocin — that is vital to both the birthing and bonding processes.

That means the primal, instinctive part of her brain has to take over, not the part that deals with nervous or chatty observers who may or may not be wielding a video camera. And that includes so-called birthing coaches.

Odent actually takes issue with the “natural birthing community” for perpetuating the mistaken belief that women can’t give birth without being surrounded by people who bring support and/or expertise.

“Birth is an involuntary process,” says Odent, who runs the Primal Health Research Centre in London. “You cannot help an involuntary process, but there are situations that can inhibit it, make it more difficult.”

Not only is the hormonal love cocktail vital to the birth process, Odent says recent scientific research confirms that what happens during the “primal period” (from gestation through the year following birth) can affect a person’s health and personality later in life.

We are at a turning point in the history of childbirth, he says, because technological advances, such as “fast and easy” elective caesarean section surgeries, epidural anaesthesia and synthetic oxytocin, is rendering nature’s love cocktail obsolete.

“The number of women who give birth to the baby and to the placenta thanks to the release of their natural hormones is approaching zero,” Odent says, pointing to China, where nearly half of all births are C-sections. (Canada’s rate is around 25 per cent.)

Odent will launch his book, The Functions of the Orgasms: The Highways to Transcendence on Friday, 7:30 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers. A workshop — Rediscovering the basic needs of labouring women thanks to modern physiology — will be held Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at U of W’s Convocation Hall. A lecture — Childbirth: Can we get out of the trap? — will take place Saturday at 7 p.m.

For more information or to register, go to www.thesabertree.blogspot.com or call 219-6629 or 998-0690.

carolin.vesely@freepress.mb.ca