Right to the placenta, right to the foreskin, same fight! - Sigismond

From Peaceful Beginnings

Premature cutting of the umbilical cord and development of the brain: psychology or neurology?

“Well birthing, well-being.” Danielle Rapoport

“Extraordinary, marvellous, remarkable, privileged” birth 120 mummies over 120

“The bath, it was marvelous for him.” A dad

“My theory is that the best way to change the world is to change birth procedures.” William Swartley (1)

Frédérick Leboyer's (2) treats the baby as a respectable and extremely sensitive person, with acute feelings and emotions. The result is that “Leboyer babies” are neither violent or depressed but peaceful, gay and energetic; they smile and hold their head from the first day, which was rare before. An enquiry over 120 births disclosed that a great number of them grow ambidextrous (3). Leboyer's recommendations: low voices, filtered lights, half-light in the room after the birth, forbearing from pulling the baby's head, no welcoming through holding by the ankles and spanking the bottom but a little rest on mum's belly (*) while waiting, but for cardiac difficulty, for the pulsations to cease for cutting the cord (which takes at most five minutes), almost immediate putting into nursing, never separating the baby from the mother even for a relaxing little bath (without washing), extreme gentleness, a satiety of massage and caresses, hours of skin to skin contact with mum, so that crying is little abundant, all this in order to minimize the suffering of the child.

The enquiry has also shown precocious manual skill, faster development (walking at 13 months instead of 14-15, cleanliness, feeding and clothing autonomy at 2-3 years old) and remarkable absence of asking of advice with 95% of the enquired mummies. Another observation, over a little more than a hundred babies, revealed 100% ambidextrous, amazingly higher IQs, great ease at acquiring foreign languages (4), 257 and absence of most infantile diseases.

But the publication of “Birth without violence” started an all or nothing polemic of unheard violence, and criticisms ignorant of Benjamin Franklin's maxim:

“The one who gives up an essential liberty for a fleeting and uncertain security does not deserve either security or liberty.” Benjamin Franklin

Enquiries about ambidexterity, in particular, are rejected by a profession that qualifies “anti-scientific” a complex reality (5) without taking care that already made observations – who can the most can the least – are enough to go forward without loitering about the unavoidable inadequacy of reports in such matter. Such rejection amounts to a blindness that could be considered as bad faith or, from lateralized, as the expression of unavowed jealousy. Indeed, ambidextrous make prowess at sports, particularly tennis or combat sports.

Late clamping has also been controversed but an enquiry concludes: “These results allow thinking that Leboyer birth is associated with temporary enhancement of pulmonary and systemic resistance whereas left and right ventricular functions are not affected” (6). A physician remarked that leaving the placenta at the same level as the baby prevents the risk of jaundice due to an excess of red globules. Tired of this questioning, Leboyer resigned his appointment of chief of clinic 7 to dedicate himself to writing. If the lack of vocations in gynaecology in France is today worrying, “Birth without violence” is regularly reedited all over the world and several maternity wards institutionalized Leboyer method “without sacrificing anything to medical requirements” (2).

Leboyer encounters great success in the United States where midwifes and physicians have brought a river to the validity of the millenary technique brought back from Gandhi's country by the gynaecologist yogi. They observed that, right before birth, the mother delivers the baby a bolus of blood that is stored into the placenta. The issuing rise in blood pressure enables the baby's heart to fill in the air cells of the lungs without depriving the other organs from it (hypovolemy). Foremost, this provision is heavily burdened in iron of such quantity and quality that the placental blood of a baby of the same family is used in the treatment of anaemia. Depriving the child of it at a decisive time of their lives seems deliberately antiscientific. As a matter of fact, several enquiries (8, 9, 10), one (11) led till the age of 6 months, on 358 births showed that late clamping highly lessens the risk of anaemia; the rates of iron, ferritin and sometimes haemoglobin are notably increased, very particularly for children threatened either by their low weight or because their mother has little ferritin or because they could not get supplementary feeding in iron. It must be added up to this plea that, the baby being immunized against maternal flora, strictly rooming them in with the mother protects them against UTIs (12), the great pretext of American physicians upholders of circumcision. So, it is demonstrated that, after millenaries of evolution, nature makes things well and that meddling of hurried men into its plans is irrelevant.

Being born within gentleness has foremost long-term positive psychological repercussions and, if everything goes well, the only birth trauma is that of the early cut. Ambidexterity of Leboyer babies shows that one does not destroy an organ in the middle of its functioning without lastingly traumatizing the brain. But what is thus the mechanism of the trauma that forbids ambidexterity?

Making lateralization a consequence of the normal development of the brain, Janov's explanation by brain neurology (13) seems tautological to us. The entire contrary, the existence of ambidextrous proves that lateralization is a pathological consequence, not a cause. The ambidextrous are normal, the right-handed and left-handed are not. For the early cut provokes submission (or opposition) to adult norm. Absurd, this submission or opposition does not stem from trust but from the unconscious terror issuing from the brutal extinction of placenta alimentation before its natural, gradual and peaceful stopping. Nature has allowed, for a while, a double system of supplying in oxygen and nutrients; as long as the cord pulses, the placenta enables progressive adaptation, gentle transition between both systems. The cut by iron does not only deprive the child from natural iron; occurring before term (in nature, in absence of medical hurrying, he mother has no reason to cut the cord that dries up and falls down by itself), it brutally interferes into the management of their body by the baby who see themselves forced to take their first breath under the effect of unheard of violence, rather than nature should decide it. Provoking terrible anguish, it is felt as cruel mutilation. Intimately and for life terrorised by adults including the mother, the child will foolishly comply with the norm. A first trauma, the early cut creates universal neurosis, its conformism and stream of inhibition. The placenta is the baby's ownership, nature alone may separate them from it.

Consciously or not, the matter is, from attendants to birth (nurses, mid-wives, gynaecologists), individual or collective appropriation of the baby within compulsive desire to enjoy the child. All pretexts are valid in order to grab the baby from the mum and have them for oneself for a while: “Now for weighing!” but the balance is elsewhere, or the mother catches a cold and the child must absolutely be placed in the nursery, at the risk of nosocomial infection. The mechanism of this appropriation is that of fetishist, infantile or primitive thought that, according to the discovery of psychoanalysis, likens the part to the whole. It is exploited by voodoo manipulators; in order to enslave their gullible victims and force them to prostitution, the voodoo robs them a lock of hair, so becoming their master. As painfully experienced by Romberg-Weiner (14), having a Leboyer birth is useless if the child is to be circumcised later. Similarly, there is no point in having a gentle birth if the cord is to be cut early, that is violently. Leboyer opposes that tyranny. His message can be summarized by: “Leave the baby, their placenta and the mother alone.”

Leboyer also condemned excision and circumcision (15). What is true for the cord is a fortiori so for autosexual organs, very rich in erogenous and tactile nervous endings. Much more invasive since destructive, feminine and masculine excision provokes much graver trauma. The same cause: violence, induces the same effect: deep submission, repetition of the weird crime. Submission is amplified by the traumatic breaking of baby-mother bonding, of dramatic reciprocity when the mother does not find again the marvellous initial smiles, so that she “does recognize” her child any longer and, in the worst cases, ill-treats it (2).

Provoked by the premature cutting, the symptom of lateralization is a limpid illustration of the Freudian theory of circumcision as technique of submission. The likeliness of the psychological process acting in the early cut of the umbilical cord and circumcision points out the fact that routine societal cuts upon young generations, may they be ritual or medical, have for consequence and aim, through separating the child from the mother, to submit them to a despotic society. At any rate, for the umbilical cord cutting, no psychologist can pretend that the matter would be submission to the father, affirmation through which Freud amalgamated the case of Jewish new-borns with that of other culture adolescents.

Violence upon children is the great source of criminality and individual or collective mental disease. Correlating birthing techniques with adult behaviour: “obstetric procedures should be carefully evaluated and possibly modified to prevent eventual self-destructive behaviour.”, Jacobsen's enquiry (16) comforts the finding of Leboyer. But the examples of Galileo, Copernicus, Freud... etc., have shown that one does not solve the world's problems easily. Like all so-called liberal professions, medicine is a universe of dogmas, incompetences and arrogances, prejudices and coteries in the hands of all-powerful mandarins. It took it half a century to accept the discovery of hygiene (Semmelweiss). For Leboyer, the profession soon grabbed hold of his recipes of gentleness but for the most important one for which he was keenly criticized. In spite of the major interest for humanity of his works, he did not get the Nobel prize. Non-violence succeeded in driving the English out of India, will it manage to get the better of the castratist, Western, Judeo-Christian medical order, the accusations of which, in matter of experimental science, seem mere slandering towards the multi-millenary learning of India? Faced with psychoanalytical learning, these techniques enable to assess that the premature cutting of the umbilical cord constitutes the first grave trauma, generator of the universal neurosis.

Sigismond (Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux) - oldsigismund@hotmail.com

Psychoanalysis researcher and a specialist of infantile sexual mutilation (ISM), author of “Sexual mutilation, the child’s point of view”, for free at http://groups.msn.com/circabolition or intactwiki.org.

(1) Swartley W. Self and society, the primal issue. Interview by Rowan J. Brit J June 1977. http://primal-page.com/rowan4.htm

(2) Birth without violence. New-York: Alfred A. Knop; 1975.

(3) Rapoport D. Bulletin de psychologie 1976, XXIX, 322: 552-560.

(*) It is desirable that the mother, or the father in case she cannot do it, should be the first person to hold the baby and place it herself on her belly.

(4) Lyon H. www.halcyon.com/REALIZINGYOURPOTENTIAL3.26.08.htm

(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambidextrous

(6) Nelle M., Kraus M., Bastert G., Linderkamp O. Effects of Leboyer childbirth on left- and right systolic time intervals in healthy term neonates. Journal of perinatal medicine 1996, 24 (5), 513-520 (22 ref.) http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=3245212

(7)http://www.holistika.net/parto_natural/parto_fisiologico/entrevista_con_el_dr._frederick_leboyer.asp

(8) Grajeda R., Perez-Escamilla R. and Dewey K., Delayed clamping of the umbilical cord improves hematologic status of Guatemalan infants at 2 months of age, Am J Clin Nutr 1997, 65: 425–431.

(9) R Gupta and S Ramji, Effect of delayed cord clamping on iron stores in infants born to anemic mothers: a randomized controlled trial, Indian Pediatr 2002, 39: 130–135.

(10) van Rheenen P. and Brabin B. Late umbilical cord-clamping as an intervention for reducing iron deficiency anaemia in term infants in developing and industrialized countries: a systematic review, Ann Trop Paediatr 2004, 24, 3–16.

(11) Chaparro C., Neufeld L., Alavez G., Eguia-Líz Cedillo R. and Dewey K. Effect of timing of umbilical cord clamping on iron status in Mexican infants: a randomised controlled trial. The Lancet 2006, 367 (9527): 1956-58.

(12) Winberg J., Bollgren I., Gothefors L., Herthelius M., Tullus K. The prepuce: a mistake of nature? Lancet 1989; i: 598-9. http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/UTI/winberg-bollgren/

(13) Birth without violence: an evening with Doctor Leboyer. J prim ther 1975, II (4), 289-300.

(14) Romberg-Weiner R. Circumcision, the painful dilemma. South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey; 1985.

(15) 4.06.1980 letter to R. Romberg-Weiner. http://Sexuallymutilatedchild.org/leboyer.htm

(16) Jacobsen B, Eklund G, Hamberger L. et al. Perinatal origin of adult self-destructive behavior. Acta Psychiatr Scand 1987; 76 (4): 364-71. http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/jacobsen1