I did read some while ago of a midwife who found it very effective to use a
flashlight on the mother's abdomen in a very dark room. She would slowly
move the light in the direction she wished to fetus to turn.
-Rayner
====
In Meryl Smith's excellent piece on how to turn a breech [Issue 2:7], she
says twice that we're trying to get the head out of the pelvis. No, we're
trying to get the bum out of the pelvis and the head into it.
I know that's what she means and it's obvious that she has such a clear
mental picture of the baby being head down she can't even adjust her head
to write an article on breech--I'll bet she has very few breeches in her
practice!
-Gloria Lemay
====
I sat reading, appalled, the long list of interventions, some merely
annoyingly invasive, some dangerously so, being suggested to turn a breech
baby! Why not simply take the baby's advice? Isn't it possible the baby
wants to be born breech for a good reason? For one example, I give you my
father who was born in 1946 at home, unassisted, in a frank breech
position. He had an open myelomeningecele. Had he been born in a vertex
position he might well have been paralyzed. However, due to lack of
intervention, he was born healthy and underwent, at three months old, the
first-ever corrective surgery for this condition in that area of the
country.
Breech birth is not inherently dangerous if medical intervention is avoided
and if the mother is allowed to instinctively choose her birth position and
give birth at her own pace. It really disturbs me to not see this attitude
represented at all among your readers. Every suggestion made, every time
you touch a womon during pregnancy, labor, and birth, every time you hint
that something about her baby, her pregnancy, her labor, or her birth is
not exactly as it should be, is an intervention that could lead to
complications.
-Maka Laughingwolf
maka@maka.net
Reprinted from Midwifery Today E-News (Vol 2 Issue 8 February 25, 2000)
To subscribe to the E-News write: enews@midwiferytoday.com
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