Will we still be able to birth naturally in the coming decades?

Will we still be able to birth naturally in the coming decades? This doctor thinks not.

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Will we still be able to birth naturally in the coming decades? This doctor thinks not.

Read more:

According to a leading obstetrician, women are at risk of losing the ability to give birth naturally.

French doctor Michel Odent has suggested women risk being unable to give birth naturally or even breastfeed their babies in the future because of modern aids. The 84-year-old, who pioneered the use of birthing pools in hospitals, has argued in his book Do We Need Midwives? that childbirth has become medicalized to the extent that women are at risk of losing their ability to give birth unaided.

Dr. Odent pointed to evidence that women are taking longer in labor than fifty years ago, with huge numbers of pregnant women provided with drugs and surgery in labor. He sited research showing that women giving birth between 2002 and 2008 took two and a half hours longer in the first stage of labor than those who gave birth between 1959 and 1966.

“To me it demonstrates the obvious--that women are losing the capacity to give birth,” he said. “That is the primary phenomenon; the number of women who give birth to babies naturally is becoming insignificant.”

Odent is critical of the rise in cesarean sections. In England, 166,081 births--more than a quarter--were by Cesarean section between 2013 and 2014, a slight increase on the previous year. Women in the U.K. he says, are more than twice as likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth as many European and Third World countries. Odent has also criticized the use of drips of synthetic oxytocin on women in labor. He suggested that it was reducing women’s ability to produce the hormone naturally.

The oxytocin hormone initiates labor and plays a crucial role in breastfeeding. But evolution will erase physiological functions that are underused, said Odent, warning that future generations of women may not produce it.

“I believe that the human oxytocin system--oxytocin being the hormone of love, fundamental to birth and bonding, even in adulthood--is growing weaker. The future of the human capacity to give birth is at risk,” he said in a contribution to Antonella Gambotto-Burk's new book, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution.

In England, the rate of births induced with chemicals such as synthetic oxytocin in 2013 to 2014 rose by 1.7 percentage points to 25 per cent, or 161,726 births.

In the foreword to Gambotto-Burke's book, Odent controversially suggested that midwives should sit quietly in the corner of a darkened labor room, knitting. This, he argued, would calm the mother-to-be, enabling her body to produce the natural hormones needed to give birth.

Soo Downe, professor in midwifery studies at the University of Central Lancashire, told the Sunday Times: “Dr. Odent has in the past said things that seem preposterous but a few years later are borne out by the evidence. Giving women synthetic oxytocin interferes with the balance of hormones. Evidence is growing that there are long-term consequences.”

~ Paraphrased from an article by Rozina Sabur in The Telegraph, May 2015

Stay tuned for my next books, PUSH! The Sequel: 37 more true stories from midwives and doulas and, Stone Age Babies in a Space Age World: Babies and Bonding in the 21st Century.