Right Livelihood Award: Ina May Gaskin

The world's premier award for personal courage and social transformation, The Right Livelihood Award honours and supports those "offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today".

The wonderful Ina May Gaskin, affectionately referred to as 'the mother of midwifery', was awarded the Right Livelihood Award this year for:

“… for her whole-life’s work teaching and advocating safe, woman-centred childbirth methods that best promote the physical and mental health of mother and child.“

Ina May's acceptance speech is sobering as she carefully catalogues the abuses that have been and continue to be perpetrated against women and their babies in the name of industrialised birth; inspirational as she talks about the brave and loving doctors who have acted in the face of repression and vilification from their less than women centred peers and seek to scare women into submission to the medical juggernaut...

"We must wake up to the fact that it is easy to scare women about their bodies, especially in countries in which midwives have little or no power in policy-making, relative to physicians and the influence of large corporate entities. This takes no real talent. Given such imbalance, fear, ignorance, and greed begin to reinforce each other, and rates of unnecessary intervention soar, with women and the babies suffering the consequences"

Ina May's speech is heart warming as she asks the Hungarian Goverment to release Agnes Gereb, a Hungarian doctor who supported women to birth at home and encouraging as she offers a vision of a better world through optimising midwifery care and supporting women's choices ...

Another site came across my computer screen this morning, and given the content is highly relevant to the content of Ina May's speech, I thought it was entirely appropriate to link it here.

I'm not sure why the midwife broke the sac on this breech baby as she was born, I would have thought it was better left alone to provide that lovely buffer that intact membranes offer.  Even so, I'm grateful to the woman and her family and to the midwives for sharing this delightful photo journey. The explanatory notes are very useful.

Ina May's book Spiritual Midwifery, together with Frederick Leboyer's Birth Without Violence, changed my world when they were released in 1976.  I first heard Ina May speak at a preconfernce workshop at the 1992 Homebirth Conference in Sydney.   I was so emotional on being in the presence of Ina May, that I spent most of the workshop in tears - her passion and 'right thinking' about women and birth still has that effect on me as I watch and listen to her speech accepting her Right Livelihood award.  Thank you Ina May for all you have done and are doing for Women and Birth and Midwifery.  Congratulations on receiving this prestigious award. You certainly deserve it.

Distracted parenting: Hang up and see your baby - The Boston Globe

Claudia Gold, a paediatrician in Great Barrington, wrote in the Boston Globe today:

"RECENTLY I was on vacation sitting by a pool. I noticed a father with his infant daughter who looked to be about 3 months old. Perched on a table in her car seat, she sat kicking and smiling. Her father faced her, but was talking on his cellphone. He distractedly shook the rattle hanging in front of her as he spoke in an animated way with the person on the other end of the line"

Her article continues to talk about how the baby develops her/his sense of self by the way the mother looks at her/him and interacts on a moment to moment basis. Dr Gold cautions that parents are perhaps not aware of the critical importance of the first few months and the vital importance of attending to and engaging with the baby to optimise the way the brain develops and the infant forms her/his sense of self. Fathers are taking more and more of the primary caretaking role of newborns and infants. A recent article in the New York Times outlined the way that social norms are changing as fathers become more engaged in parenting. Gold discusses the role of oxytocin in the way that mothers are preoccupied with their babies. Perhaps males are disadvantaged in this biological aspect? As feminists in the 70's, one of our catch cries was that 'biology is not destiny' but perhaps we were and are wrong not to pay attention to biological factors and instead of seeing these physiological realities as 'biological determinism' we could reframe the way that hormones and other communication molecules behave as 'biological intelligence'.

Mothers behaviour and orientation to their babies displays what D.W. Winnicott called 'primary maternal preoccupation'. Mothers are meant to be fixated on their babies, attending to their facial expressions; responding and reacting to them. In the past, women were told that babies are such 'time wasters'; that sitting staring at a baby was of no value, however, neuroscience has proven the value of primary maternal preoccupation and those hours of staring, awestruck at the wonder of one's own baby. From the beginning, a baby's brain wires itself, connecting and associating neurons to other neurons in response to environmental cues and emotional experiences. These neuronal associations form patterns of connection that from the earliest days form a mental map for security, enabling an infant to feel safe (or not) in the presence of her/his primary care giver. This primary relationship sets the stage for the child's future relationships and how the child perceives the world. As an infant feels more and more secure in her/his attachment to her/his primary care giver, she/he is able to then turn outward to the world and start engaging with the people and events in his/her wider environment. In those early days, the mother's face provides a mirror which allows the infant to see him/herself and form a sense of self that reflects that image. When mothers are fully engaged, smiling, encouraging, reflecting joy in being, the infant emerges emotionally resilient. Research has shown that mothers with flat affect produce withdrawn, less communicative infants.

Walking through any postnatal unit or going to any home where a new mother and baby reside, you see the ubiquitous cell phone in residence, either next to the woman's ear or being pounded by her flashing finger tips as she dashes off messages to cyberspace. Is it possible that primary maternal preoccupation has, in many instances, been diverted to the cell phone. What message and brain patterning do you think the little ones are getting? What do you think Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby would make of this phenomenon?

Talking about the importance of baby's birth experiences at the Mother of all rallies, PH Canberra 2009

I happened upon this video when I was searching for some information on Google! What a rally that was. I was interviewed at the rally for the upcoming film 'Face of Birth' and this is the result of that interview:



There are other snippets of the film in the making on the site.

Carolyn Hastie - Mother of all rallies, PH Canberra 2009