Mother-Infant Bonding

Jock Doubleday
May-June 2003

"Bonding is for ducks. You're not having a duck, are you?"

These words, offered to one mother-to-be by her obstetrician, besides showing an astonishing dearth of sympathy, a grand capacity for condescension, and a complete lack of familiarity with three decades of medical literature showing the benefits of bonding, comprise an outright error in grammar. The poor fellow meant "imprinting," not bonding. (One wonders if there are cesarean-delivered babies following this research- and grammar-challenged obstetrician around this very minute.)

In its infant days, bonding was considered by science to be a substanceless, feel-good concept conjured out of thin air by drug-dazed hippies to justify hugging people, "hanging out," and having sex. Things have changed. There has come to be a general acceptance in the scientific (but not the hospital obstetric) community of the fact and benefits of bonding.

Although we live in a technological age in which all things, including human beings, are seen as machines reducible to component parts, bonding, a mysterious and seemingly irreducible process, has gained credence--a friendly ghost-seed growing somehow in the antiseptic soil of the birth machine.

As with all mammals, in the first hours after birth you and your baby are meant literally to attach to one another. Nature gives new mothers a very strong attachment desire. Many new mothers say they physically "ache" for their babies when they are away from them. One woman described the feeling as "a calling on the soft of my arms." This calling is a physical yearning that, if allowed to be satisfied, starts a physical process with physical results highly beneficial to both mother and baby.

We should not be surprised that nature's plan for skin-to-skin contact with your baby gives physically measurable results by multitudinous measures. Bonding with your baby reduces the probability of mental illness in her later life, increases her IQ, and is highly correlated with improved coordination, exploratory behavior, and a decrease in aggressive tendencies.

Bonding increases your child's confidence, allowing and encouraging a healthy independence at the appropriate time in her later life. Your bonded baby will be less likely to be socially withdrawn. She will have greater curiosity than the unbonded child and more sympathy for the distress of others.

"Incomplete bonding," on the other hand, in the words of Judith Goldsmith,author of Childbirth Wisdom from the World's Oldest Societies, "can lead to confusion, depression, incompetence, and even rejection of the child by the mother."

Though infant-mother bonding is now widely recognized by researchers (and mothers who have bonded with their babies) as crucial to the success of the mother-infant relationship and to the success of the child herself, this news has not reached the ears of the staff at certain hospitals around this continent.There is some talk in the hospitals about bonding, these days-among nurses, Certified Nurse Midwives, and even young doctors--but talking about bonding and actually allowing women to bond with their newborns are two different things.

If in the first few hours after your hospital delivery you are lucky enough to be allowed even to touch your infant, she will still be taken away from you for an undetermined time to be medically "screened" and processed. The integrity of her first defense against the world, her skin, will be violated, and her personhood degraded, as she is enculturated by needle and lance.

Meanwhile, the moments for nature's ancient process of mother-infant bonding will slip quickly away. As the clock ticks, what had been destined will be derailed. In the hospital, you have no authority, no power at all, to assure that bonding between you and your baby will take place. As much as they pay lipservice to bonding, American hospital staff actually consider isolation and observation "proper care" for newborns.In the course of being isolated from you after your hospital birth, your baby will learn the

meaning of abandonment, her subsequent fear of which will, in the words of Joseph Chilton Pearce, "shadow the rest of childhood and become linked with an inevitable sense of impotency."

Your baby's experience of abandonment may be the most devastating event she ever experiences, an event that can leave her an emotional and psychological cripple. Pearce writes: "Bonding is a psychological-biological state, a vital physical link that coordinates and unifies the entire biological system. . . . We are never conscious of being bonded; we are conscious only of our acute disease when we are not bonded or when we are bonded to compulsion and material things."

If the only comfort your baby has in her first crucial hours of life is an incubator blanket, then objects, not people, become her primary source of comfort for the rest of her life. Ever wonder why America is such a consumer society?

In her infinite wisdom, nature gives new parents and newborns the desire to bond, because bonding is beneficial to our species. By cementing the unity of the family, bonding creating a sense of "oneness" between family members.

The hospital institution, on the other hand, has no interest in the promotion of family ties. Seeking profit by inducing sickness, division is the hospital's unstated goal and creed. In the case of the infant, the breaking of the bond results in higher rates of criminality, violence, schizophrenia, and suicide.

In the case of the mother, the breaking of the bond results in higher rates of postpartum depression, child rejection, and child abuse.

Of all the crimes against nature and human life routinely committed by the hospital institution, the breaking of the bond between mother and child is perhaps the most tragic and the most harmful to the family and society.

Excerpted from, "Spontaneous Creation: 101 Reasons Not To Have Your Baby in a Hospital.” Resources available on line at: icpa4kids.com/chiropractic_newsletter_references_2003.htm