Tuesday 21 November 2017

Allergies and breast milk.

Remember in the post:-
       I reported that research had found oligosacharides in breast milk that were only there to feed certain bacteria in the baby's guts, in exchange they  produced compounds that sealed the stomach so that bacteria couldn't get through infecting baby with gastroenteritis, and developed the brain so that your child could become the person they were always meant to be.

New research has now found that the milk of mothers who eat known allergy foods (nuts, eggs, wheat, shellfish) in pregnancy and while breastfeeding protect their babies from those very allergies. This is of course as long as the mother does not already have an allergy to these foods herself!

Not so long ago women were advised not to eat peanuts in pregnancy in case this is what was causing the rise in children with dangerous nut allergies. This turns out to be the wrong advice and children could have been protected if mothers had eaten nuts in the pregnancy and then continued whilst breastfeeding.

It was found that the immunity from allergies was not fully passed on if the mother did not breastfeed. But when a baby is breastfed, immunity is given. When a nursing mother is exposed to a food protein, her milk contains complexes of the food protein combined with her antibodies, which are transferred to the baby through breastfeeding. Aided by a protein in the baby's gut lining and some immune cells, the food protein-antibody complexes are taken up and introduced to the baby's developing immune system triggering the production of protective cells that suppress allergic reactions to the food. This protection persists after the baby is weaned from breast milk on to a more varied diet at six months.

Now that we understand a little better just how good human milk is for our babies we should be shouting it from the rooftops. Imagine if you, and only you, could not only make your baby's brain develop so that they have a higher IQ, protect them from stomach bugs in their vulnerable early months, but also ensure that they do not develop allergies that could endanger their very lives. WOW. Such power.

And yet UK breastfeeding rates are the lowest in Europe. I often wonder why.

Thursday 1 June 2017

Having a Doula in Labour


Happy International Doula Month!
Post from the wonderful women at Orgasmic Birth.

All the time, I hear from women that they aren’t hiring a doula - because they have a great partner, the nurses will be there, they have a midwife, or that their hospital is great.
I like to ask - just because your car is safe, you trust the driver, and the weather is perfect with nearly empty roads - do you not wear your seat belt anyway?

Doulas are the seatbelts for birth - the continuous, supportive, agenda free safety net that is there only to honor and protect your birthing space. 
Not only is a doula there to protect your memory of birth, science and research supports the many benefits including shorter labor, less use of interventions, and healthy MotherBabies.

“Peace on Earth Begins at Birth”

 Doulas are what midwives used to be before all the paper work was heaped on us. We used to be able to rub backs and work with women in labour instead of sitting down writing about women in labour. And yet I have found that only Jewish women, who take birth very seriously, have a doula during their labour and birth. I love them, they do everything I wish I had time to do and they really help the women take control of their labour and as a consequence, labour much better than most women who do not hire a doula. I do not know how much they charge, could a normal lancashire lass even afford one? Please let us know if anyone out there has knowledge on how much you can expect to pay for a doula during your labour. Thank you.




 
 

MUM'S UP AND MOBILE for labour

MUM'S UP AND MOBILE (MUM)

Research by Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust found that when they got mums off the bed and let them move around in labour. freely adopting positions that they felt comfortable in, their normal delivery rate rose from 59.9% to 64.7%.

At Last! A trust that is giving woman centred care instead of work load led care. They should be given a medal!

OK, my blog has been telling women for the past 6 years that they should never lie down in labour or allow themselves to be laid down by hospital staff who do not give a toss if they get a normal delivery or not. Now I am backed up by the whole of Gloucestershire. Yay.

For women who needed a trace of their baby's heartbeat due to a risk factor they used CTG machines that were wireless. However, I have found that even if you only have the wire CTG machines, you can still get your Mum Up and Mobile, you just have to be a little more inventive.

Comments from mums who took part in the project: "Moving more during labour really helped me as I had a quick labour due to me walking all day and using the ball."
Invited to move around as much as I wanted to, informed about wireless monitoring to enable easier movement." 
"Felt able to move as much as I wanted and I was encouraged to find comfortable positions for myself."
It was nice not to be confined to the bed!"
I was encouraged to move around in labour by my midwife but chose not to."

Hopefully, this initiative will spread and become a UK wide project. This will happen faster if women actually mention this research in their birth plan and ask to have the choice of movement during their labour. Giving women back control has been found to empower them to feel confident that, yes, they can do this. They are not just a piece of meat waiting to be processed. They have a choice. A real one.

No matter what you see on One Born Every Stupid Minute, get off the bed, it is no place to labour!

Thursday 13 April 2017

One Born Every Minute

 Just had to share this blog with you on a normal midwives view of One Born Every Minute. All the midwives working on OBEM are simply Obstetric Nurses. Do not trust them with your labour!

Midwifes view of one born every minute.

Kemi Johnson
Seriously OBEM midwives are you dumb???? IT'S 2017!!!!!!!!! Why are you still pulling babies out by their heads from women in stranded beetle position? You are supposed to be the experts in normal birth. Do any other mammals lie back with their legs in the air? Do you poo lying down??? You are promoting a drive angle of the baby right at her perineum creating a higher chance of wounding. You are causing babies to cry when many babies could birth themselves from upright women without a murmur. You're deceiving women into thinking that they couldn't have birthed without you.
STOP IT!!!!
And now that all of the defensive comments have started rolling in, some clarification. Some midwives are the best thing that ever happened to a birthing woman. But I refuse to collude with those that blame editing and pressure to work a certain way. Midwifery, for the moment in the UK remains an autonomous profession. It is a very old one. We have access to knowledge, experience and research. There are plenty of midwives around enabling healthy birth without having their hands all over a woman's perineum, encouraging her into an unfavourable birth position and exposing her to a harder labour with more risk of tearing. The health and future health of all takes priority over feelings. I would rather be considered rude on my own profile page than politely steer women into pushing uphill, potentially suffering increased trauma to their perineums that I 'rescue' them from with my hands on their private parts whilst they lay vulnerable on their backs. This treatment of women in childbirth has gone on long enough. It is coercive and unnecessary. Midwives get together and say NO to practices that you KNOW make no sense. We sign the register to keep women and their children in the centre of our care. I won't be silent.

Well said Kemi, we are with you on this one, yay.


Friday 10 March 2017

Spiritual Midwifery in Argentina.

Painting by Annie Ibanez

After reading an article in Midwifery Matters Issue 151 Winter 2016 I was deeply moved by the experience of a newly qualified midwife's experience working her elective in Argentina. Annie Ibanez chose to work with the Awaike school of midwifery in the mountain province of Cordoba. They train lay midwives in the ways of tradition and they celebrate the spiritual journey of motherhood and birth.

The students there are taught anatomy and physiology but also the use of local herbs, songs to be sung during labour and rituals almost lost in the relentless medicalisation of care spreading throughout the world. Annie recognised that the science directing midwifery care in the UK has all but drowned out any traditional 'with woman' care that takes into account the spiritual meaning of labour and birth. The fact that giving birth is intrinsically linked to emotional processes is all but ignored in our high tech obstetric led hospitals today.

The Awaike school is focused on recovering and conserving the wisdom and rituals from native peoples of Latin America. Women in their care develop a trusting relationship with a midwife, a luxury that is often missing in our overloaded GP clinics today. Women are encouraged to rest, bond and feed their baby and are given this opportunity for 40 days after the birth. What a wonderful concept, how high would our breastfeeding rates be if our women were given this time to truly engage with their newborn.

Annie comments that the women she saw in labour were using instinctive behaviour surrounded by the rituals of birth including song and that seemed to be "a powerful analgesic judging by the way women responded". Perhaps the women felt so loved and cared for and free to move, eat and drink as their body dictated that they were simply not afraid of birth as women in developed countries have learned to be. By now all my readers know how damaging adrenalin is in labour. Perhaps women cared for by the Argentinian midwives did not know any fear at all and were free to have a pain free labour as most women could achieve if society would stop treating labour and birth as an illness to be cured.

Annie concludes her article by saying that we need to truly listen to women and honour skills and intuition, to value our ancient as well as our modern midwifery tools. Thank you Annie.

Friday 27 January 2017

Can women orgasm during childbirth?

Article by Julie Revelant, health journalist and a consultant who provides content marketing and copywriting services for the healthcare industry. She's also a mum of two. 

The grueling, intense pain that (can) come along with labor is something pregnant women are warned about and told to prepare for and fear. It’s how childbirth is almost always portrayed in movies and a part of most women’s birth stories.
Some women however, say labor and childbirth doesn’t have to be this way and the experience can be pleasurable— even orgasmic.
When Kenya Stevens, of Asheville, North Carolina, went into labor with her first child, she was prepared to use meditation— which she’d practiced for years— to help her through her planned home birth.
Something the now-42-year-old hadn’t prepared for however, was that when it came time to push, her contractions stimulated an orgasm.



“I was laughing and crawling around the room as if I was intoxicated,” Stevens recalled. “I am in bliss,” she recalled telling her mom during the birth.
With her second child, she labored quickly but the feeling was the same.
“I felt like a tiger in the forest, just pushing and enjoying the flow,” she said.
When she gave birth to her third child, Stevens labored in the shower and enjoyed the water running down her back and the pleasure that ensued.
“Because I had the breathing techniques and the understanding, I could easily shift into orgasm the third time,” she said.
Orgasmic birth and “birthgasms”
“Giving birth is a part of our sexuality as women,” said Debra Pascali-Bonaro, director of the film “Orgasmic Birth,” and co-author of “Orgasmic Birth: Your Guide to a Safe, Satisfying and Pleasurable Birth Experience.”
“The term ‘orgasmic’ also includes all kinds of pleasure from experiencing birth with joy, ecstasy, intimacy, connection [and] bliss because so much of our language around birth is about pain and fear and we don’t give voice to the many other emotions that can be felt,” she said.

Not only are there women who say they have orgasmic births, but some report having an orgasm during birth or as Pascali-Bonaro calls it, a “birthgasm.”
According to a survey by the Positive Birth Movement and Channel Mum, 6 percent of women said they had an orgasm during birth.
Midwives say they’ve attended approximately .3 percent of births where the mother had an orgasm, according to a survey published in the journal Sexologies.

Although it’s not entirely clear how an orgasm is possible during birth, experts say it makes perfect sense from a physiologic perspective.
“You have a baby that’s moving down, through our bodies, through our vagina and many times hitting the G-spot, which is certainly a place, as women, many of us know from bringing great pleasure that can also sometimes trigger orgasm,” Pascali-Bonaro said.
Although a “birthgasm” can be triggered by a kiss or the touch of a partner, most occur from G-spot stimulation while the baby descends or as the baby is delivered. Some women may even choose to masturbate and use a vibrator.
“Pain and pleasure really travel on the same pathway. Women are literally taking things into their own hands,” Pascali-Bonaro said.
Instead of reporting pain, these women describe labor as “intense” or “challenging.”
Hormones also play a significant role. Oxytocin, also known as the “love hormone,” is the same hormone responsible for both bringing on labor and having an orgasm.
To get labor moving, midwives will often give the couple privacy to kiss, and have the partner stimulate the woman’s nipples and sexually arouse her.
“Often that will initiate regular contractions,” said Dena Moes, a certified nurse-midwife and writer in Chico, California.
Experts agree that in order for women to experience an orgasmic birth or a “birthgasm,” they must feel safe, unobserved and given the same level of privacy they would have while being intimate with their partners, whether that’s at home, in a birthing center or at a hospital.
“We should be creating environments and giving women and their partners more intimacy and birth would be easier,” Pascali-Bonaro said.
In fact, when women feel afraid, they are more likely to feel tense and experience more pain, something that’s referred to as fear-tension-pain syndrome.

Pascali-Bonaro said. “Giving birth is an incredible day in our lives and every woman— however birth turns out for her— I hope she feels pride in her achievement to bring life into the world,”


Wednesday 18 January 2017

Babies remember their birth language.

Dr Jiyoun Choi of Hanyang University in Seoul led this research into how talking to a baby in any language during the first year of life can imprint on them the individual nuances of different languages. Dr. Choi advises all new parents to ''Try to talk to your babies as much as possible because they are absorbing and digesting what you are saying.''

The process of acquiring language starts extremely early, even while the child is still in the womb. Babies have learned their mother's voice by the time they are born.

If you have any friends or family members who speak a language taught at school then invite them over to talk to your baby so that when they are at high school, learning French or German, they will have a natural advantage.



One young lady I met in pregnancy had a toddler with her and she told me that she only spoke English to him even though she was from France. I advised her to speak both languages to him as this was the time that children picked up the flow of language and it would not in the long term confuse him. I do not know if she ever took this advice but turns out I am now backed up by science! Yay.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38653906