Lotus Birth Campaign for Babies

On May 2008, we gave birth to our second child Ophelia.  We did not have any outside intervention and therefore didn’t cut Ophelia’s umbilical cord.  This is a practice known as a Lotus Birth.  It was named after a woman named Clair Lotus Day, who in 1974 became pregnant and started to question the clamping and cutting of the cord.  It is slowly becoming more known that the longer you wait before cutting the cord then the healthier it is for the baby as they receive more of their necessary blood volume. So why not go that extra step and allow the baby the right to detach from the mother and placenta in their own time and receive all of their blood, nutrients and oxygen?  Surely as parents we should protect our little ones and give them the best start in life we can.  Lotus Birth slows down the whole after birth process, and gives the baby a natural and comforting way of coming into the world from the warm and loving safety of the womb.
The main question, I feel, I have circling around inside me is, why is Lotus Birth not offered to all parents as an option when designing their birth plans?  Why is the third stage of labour not considered to be part of the whole birth experience?  Birth is not being given the time and respect it deserves on a whole, it has become mismanaged, over managed and for most just plain unmanageable so intervention is the first port of call, lacking belief in their own bodies and opting to have a c-section than ‘endure’ labour and ultimately a traumatic birth.  We have had the power taken away from us, we have been told birth is dangerous, but by whom?  The media!  Childbirth in the media and movies are always portrayed as inherently dangerous.  Doctors and midwifes have also taken this on board, they believe what they hear and read, they like many believe in what they fear.
Who are the ‘professionals’ to tell us that they know our bodies better than we do?  Humans run off different systems in our bodies, those systems are run off different glands, those glands are run off different hormones, and those hormones are released through our instincts, which are run off our senses.  Now if you told that to a obstetrician, who thinks that c-sections are the best route when considering your birth plan, because woman’s bodies are poorly designed and that intervention is inevitable, then he would tell you that you are crazy and that you are just a stubborn or naive woman putting the life of yourself and your baby in danger, nothing to do with the fact that you may be boldly independent and want to give ‘it’ your best shot to birth naturally. It is understandable that for a lot of woman who may feel that after such a long and difficult struggle, (of being told when to push and when not to push, to lay on their backs when it is uncomfortable for them to do so, when they would rather stay active, through what may feel like an eternity), may just want to get ‘it’ out of the way, but if mothers and fathers are not given the choice to begin with then how will they ever even begin to understand what birth can be like and actually tune into the needs of the child that they are about to live the rest of their lives taking care of?  The care starts the moment we reach puberty, the way we look after ourselves effects our fertility and immunity.  If we have a healthy conception, we have a healthy pregnancy, a healthy birth and healthy life and the cycle continues.
This brings me on to Stem Cell harvesting in placental blood from newborns.  Currently with the new Stem Cell technology being developed and the possibilities that are presented to us, the price of this blood is actually higher than gold.  I have read that some parents are even selling the blood of their babies before the baby is even born, so the severance is immediate and in other cases I have read of doctors intentionally causing the need for intervention, which lead to c-section which lead to immediate severance for the offer of high payment for the delivery of the richest blood, in every sense of the word, in the world.  Parents are also buying into the idea that if they bank their babies blood from its placenta then if, and more likely when, the child gets sick they would have been clever and backed themselves up from the beginning paying a company thousands of dollars over the years to ‘look after and hold’ the blood ‘safely’ for the inevitable. We are learning that the stem cells found in the blood can actually restore different parts of the body back to health.  We have to question why we have these illnesses in the first place and why our natural immunity cannot cope with what ‘life’ throws at us?  Stem Cell blood is also taken from aborted foetuses and developing embryos, which is debateable, but to actually take it from a live, there in the flesh baby is catastrophically damaging and should be made illegal.
There has been a more recent development in 2007 of harvesting Stem Cells from menstrual blood, which for me makes perfect sense and I have started to already benefit from looking differently at my own menstrual blood and my cycle itself.  It is the time of the month that most women dread but I had a breakthrough last month and actually enjoyed menstruation and engaged myself with a new found respect for this time and release of life cells. I have been artistically reviewing what being a woman means to me and what we as woman can do with the help of men to change our perceptions of our entire existence.  I have been developing a series of works, (collaboratively with my lover and soul mate Will Thielker), entitled Blood and Humanity, which embodies the whole concept and idea that we create and destroy sacred rituals and the wisdom that comes with them. Our aim is to bring about a new awareness of birth, how it can be and how it can change the way we live as humans on the Earth.  A Doula friend of mine once said, “If you want to save the earth start with birth”, and it’s this positive and active mindset that is the heart of our Campaign.