THE FARMER AND THE OBSTETRICIAN

In this follow-up to his recent book The Scientification of Love Michel Odent pursues an original line of thinking by comparing the effects of the industrialisation of farming and childbirth. The former is a more familiar phrase while the latter is chilling but no less true. Michel begins by demonstrating the link between the two (see www.birthworks.org/primalhealth) with the effect of chemicals on breast milk and foetal development. He then charts the rise of the Caesarean section and the transformation of mother into patient with a corresponding medicalisation and decline in the importance of the midwife. It is not then surprising to see parallels between campaigns for organic or biodynamic agriculture (Steiner prefigured the causes of BSE in 1923) and natural childbirth.

Michel looks at the physiology of childbirth and comments on the adverse effects of cameras on the required privacy and controversially but logically finds the presence of fathers at the birth an aberrant side-effect of the industrialisation process where mothers feel alienated in the artificial hospital environment. However, the issue goes further back to the antenatal clinics where potential problems are constantly highlighted. This itself may turn out to be a dangerous form of the nocebo effect since the emotional state of the mother during pregnancy (in this case worry about problems) can have a damaging effect on the foetus.

This brings Michel to a larger issue: 'the enormous discrepancy between the capacity to find solutions to old problems through clever, sophisticated and powerful techniques and, on the other hand, an inability to think long term and to anticipate the effects of a mass utilisation of emerging inventions'. Among the examples he gives are underpollinated apples due to a shortage of bees killed of by insecticides; and the deterioration of soil quality through industrialised farming. Returning to his central theme he also applies this to childbirth: studies only consider short-term outcomes and do not look at the implications of technological developments whereby 'for the first time in the history of humanity most women have babies without releasing a flow of hormones of love (oxytocin)…(so)..the future of our civilisation is at stake'.

This may seem a strong statement but Michel expresses it in terms of an 'impaired capacity to love', which he sees manifest in many of our social problems. It is ironic that obstetricians now routinely inject a drug to replace the natural maternal oxytocin. In his prescription for the future, Michel sees medical control of childbirth as the root of the problem; this is in fact a modern variant of cultural control and exceeds the traditional treatment of pathological and abnormal situations. Instead, he urges, we should follow a biodynamic path of working with rather than against nature, realising the limits to the domination of nature. This does not mean a return to the past but rather a balancing of our current excessive bias towards interference and control. This is an important book that should be read by professionals and general readers alike: childbirth is too important to the future of our culture.