Year: 2012

I just wanted to share a great Huffington Post article I read this week – Should We Be So Very Scared of Giving Birth?.

Let me know your thoughts!

One thing that I come up against all too often is tongue tie.  Perhaps it is because I am contacted primarily by women having “problems” feeding – nipple damage for them, endless feeding by the baby, poor weight gain, fussiness at the breast – the list goes on.  What I am shocked by is the lack of support and care for women who suspect that their babies have this problem.  Indeed, I heard recently that a Paediatrician at a well-known London hospital declared that he didn’t believe tongue-tie existed, and that tongue-tie division is simply a ruse for Breastfeeding counsellors to make money.  I have no doubt  (and have seen) that there are babies with partial tongue tie who can feed effectively and/or who do not cause pain or damage to Mum.  But, I have witnessed first hand what a massive difference a frenulotomy (tongue tie division) can make to Mum and baby with significant feeding problems.  His ill-advised comment made me wonder how isolated and confused parents he had spoken to had felt.  Feeding, particularly at the breast, but also bottle, requires the tongue to work a great deal – to be able to stretch, reach and stimulate – how can it do that effectively if it is anchored to the floor of the mouth by a bit of extraneous tissue?

There is a group who are surveying parents to find out their experiences of tongue-tie.  If you would like to take part then visit http://www.tonguetiehelp.org.uk/surveys.html.  My feeling is that the more information we can gather about parents’ experiences the more we can help future mothers and babies.

For those who don’t know Denis, and I hadn’t heard him speak before the MAMA conference, he is a midwife.  A rare thing to find a male midwife, but I have to say that those I have met along the way have been fantastic, and I have come to believe that if a man decides to pursue midwifery he really must have a calling and a passion to do it, given that it is such a woman-dominated profession.  Denis is now Associate Professor of Midwifery at Nottingham University, having done his PhD in the Birth Centre model, and his research awareness is second to none.  I have to admit that I (and a few others whose names I shan’t mention) now have a bit of a crush on him – I found him truly captivating to listen to and would love to hear more.
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Kerstin Ovnas-Moberg – Oxytocin and the impact on motherhood

I have long wanted to hear Kerstin speaking as I was introduced to her work before I became a doula, and her book, The Oxytocin Factor, became one of the first in my ever-expanding doula library. She described herself as having a helicopter vision, having been an MD in Pharmacology and Physiology. The focus of her work has been oxytocin which she says is the same in all mammals. She describes sex, birth and feeding as the 3 main activities for oxytocin release (though Mars Lord, fellow doula, thinks that eating chocolate is a fourth, and who am I to disagree with that!). What she described is that oxytocin is needed both to initiate and perpetuate bonding; that raised oxytocin levels increase curiosity in the mother, but also encourage the body to work better – our digestive systems are more effective, our skin more sensitive. If regularly administered, oxytocin influences other more well known neurotransmitters which leads to less stress, more growth and healing, and reduced blood pressure levels. It reminds me of the TED talk on oxytocin which summarises that if we all received 8 hugs a day the world would be a very different place.
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I’ve become quite a fan of the Huffington Post – perhaps it is the lazy in me that enjoys the ping of an RSS feed, not requiring me to have to go to the newsagent.  I love information/articles/opinion pieces arriving on my computer without my having to go looking too hard.  However, in the past couple of days a Huffington Post article has really troubled me and I keep thinking about it.  For anyone who hasn’t seen Sarah Cawood’s post I attach it here, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sarah-cawood/what-if-breast-isnt-best_b_1667459.html
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A baby’s sleeping patterns, or lack of, seem to be a major preoccupation of new parents these days.  I often hear that loaded question, “does your baby sleep through the night?” and am fascinated by the answers.  On most occasions I will challenge a group to find out what sleeping through the night means to each of them.  The answers are very varied – from a five hour stint of midnight to 5am, all the way to a twelve hour uninterrupted 7 til 7.  The majority of Mums are happy with a sleep through from a late-night (dream) feed til morning, i.e. the 7 or 8 hour stretch that we need to feel revitalised!  The question is, how can we optimise good sleeping and what are safe practices?
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I’m sitting on a train heading back from Scotland to London and I’m really glad I have a long journey ahead of me. Time to reflect on a very busy three days, time to read through the copious notes I wrote during the sessions at the MAMA conference (www.mamaconference.co.uk) time to plan how I am going to get back there next year!   My first thoughts are more general.  How wonderful it was to have the luxury of so much time to spend with other doulas and people working in the world of birth; the chance to meet so many people who I have only ever met via forums, Facebook pages and emails; and hear some of my idols, for want of a better word, speaking.
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Happy World Doula Week! Now, there is no reason why you would necessarily know that it is World Doula Week, unless you are an avid fan of all things doula, but WDW is drawing to a close and I wanted to reference it! The exciting thing for me about WDW is it gave me the opportunity to revisit all my doula client information in order to complete a comprehensive survey by Doula UK to look into the effectiveness of doula support.

Members of Doula UK were asked to provide as much information about the clients they had supported, both birth and postnatal, in order to see just what a difference can be made by having emotional and practical support during that time. In over 1100 clients the results showed that the necessity for instrumental intervention or caesarean was only 12% as opposed to 37.3% (national figures from the Department of Health). And, breastfeeding results were stunning, with 93% initiating breastfeeding (as opposed to 74.1%), with 70% still exclusively breastfeeding at 6 weeks, agains t a 47% national rate. I felt incredibly proud to have contributed (or rather that my clients contributed) to those figures.
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I wanted to give you all a summary of the Birthplace Study, which was published towards the end of 2011. It was a major study undertaken to assess the provision of services to women in labour. On the whole it was extremely positive. The media, of course, were rather sensationalist about the home birth statistics, which showed an increase in adverse perinatal outcomes for the baby in first time mothers. However, it is worth noting, having spoken to several midwives about this now, that all perinatal outcomes were listed together, from the very mild to the very serious. And, the other thing that midwives wanted to point out is that transferring to hospital from a home birth does not necessarily indicate a major problem requiring blue-lit ambulances, it can just be a decision by the mother that she requires more pain relief, or a concern that Mum is “failing to progress” satisfactorily. Anyway, I will let you read the summary (which I have adapted from a presentation by Julie Frohlich, the midwife in charge of “normalising birth” at St Thomas’s Hospital, where I sit on the Maternity Services Liaison Committee) and come to your own conclusions.
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