And then, of course, there is the experience - and treatment - of the newly-emerged infant. The newborn sustains the many sensations of a natural birth with amazing equanimity - the radical change of immediate surroundings from wet to dry, the change to a lower temperature, the switch to breathing from her own lungs - because all of these sensations are consistent with his "continuum sense."What he has not come prepared for is the feel of cold steel forceps, rubber gloves grasping his flesh, glaring lights, the cold air of a delivery room, nor a whole range of painful practices which cause distress. In many hospitals suctioning the newborn - passing a tube into the nose and mouth to extract any mucus in the airways - is routine practice despite evidence it does more harm than good. Another routine practice - passing a tube down baby�s stomachs to clear gastric secretions - can interfere with their whole pattern of sucking and swallowing. While there has never been a textbook on obstetrics that did not stress leaving the umbilical cord alone so long as any activity is detectable in it, in the majority of cases the umbilical cord is clamped and cut almost immediately after the infant is born. In the first critical moments when the lungs must make the transition to obtaining all the oxygen for the newborn, the system expects to call on the reserve supply held in the placenta. The infant is thus denied reserves of oxygen at a critical point in his life - the physiological/psychological ramifications of this are completely unknown.

He is also deprived of the blood that would normally be squeezed out of the placenta as it is expelled from the uterus. If the cord were unclamped this blood would flow into the baby's body - part of nature's grand design. Without it, he ends up anemic by being deprived of up to 15 percent of the blood his system is expecting to receive.

Future historians will shudder in loathing and horror at the hospital treatment of newborns and mothers in this very dark age of the medicine man and the surgeons and their uses of chemicals and cuttings. The chemicals dull and stupefy both mother and infant, making birth hazardous, prolonged, difficult, and extreme; so tools are used for grappling, clawing, sucking the infant out when the natural processes have been made impossible. - Joseph Chilton Pearce

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