Drugging Pregnant Mother Drugs Their Unborn Children

The historians of the future will undoubtedly look back upon our recent past era and refer to it as the "drug" era. The Pharmaceutical Manufacturer's Association estimates that ten thousand types of drugs are being manufactured in this country. We are the pill-takingest people the earth has ever known. Sir William Osier once stated: "The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals." Our fervent plea as advocates of natural childbirth is to imitate the animals in more ways than the physical conduct of labor; we should emulate them also in not wanting to to take drugs. Due to new research demonstrating the ill effects of drugs, I hereby predict the next era, which we are on the threshold of now, will be the "drugless era."

[...]

A great source of irritation to me is the misnomer of a "local" anesthetic. There is no such thing! Let me use the example of a bewildered little boy taken to the doctor to have his sore throat treated. The treatment consists of being stuck with a needle in his bottom. He protests, "It's my throat that hurts, why do you treat my bottom?" The treatment is effective because any drug, including antibiotics, injected anywhere in the human body is rapidly dispersed from that "local" point throughout the entire body. Scalp-vein specimens, taken from the unbom child, have shown that so-called "local" anesthetic drugs placed in the mother's caudal canal, subdural space, spinal canal, paracervical area. pudendal area—it matters not where—enter the baby's bloodstream within seconds after their administration.

What effects does this have on the baby? Newer techniques of recording the fetal heartbeat demonstrate immediate slowing and irregularity. What are the long-term results? We don't know. Only time will tell, and enough time has not passed. What we don't know is possibly more frightening than what we do.

When unmedicated natural childbirth was first introduced in a Canadian hospital, many years ago, I was amused to find a box of badges located in the newborn nursery. When a new shift of nurses took over, one would take the box, walk down the row of cribs, look at each baby, and then pin one of the badges on the appropriate crib. The badge was lettered with the question "Does your mother know you're out?"

The observant nurses had noted the difference in appearance between an unmedicated mother's baby and one whose mother had been drugged to insensibility and truly did not know whether her baby was in or out. It was obvious which were the natural-childbirth babies. They were pink in color, alert, and responsive to stimulation. They coughed or sneezed to clear their throats should mucus occlude them and, let me assure you, their mothers knew they were out. In contrast, the drugged mothers' babies were dusky blue in color, unresponsive, listless, and needed to be aspirated or sucked out if mucus accumulated, because their muscled* were too weak from the mothers' drugs to allow them to cough or clear their own throats.

Later, audiometric technicians were added to nurseries to test the babies' hearing by directing an electric horn at them. The horn makes an irritating noise, somewhat similar to the screeching sound produced by scraping chalk on a blackboard. If the baby was deaf, it would not respond; if it could hear, it would jump or react. When these technicians themselves became pregnant, we had a new group of young mothers coming in for unmedicated natural childbirth, for they had intelligently noticed the immediate reaction of natural-childbirth babies to this irritating sound in contrast to the sluggish, weak, delayed reaction of a baby from a drugged mother.

As an "M.D." I blush with shame that what the "R.N.'s" observed immediately took many years before doctors finally got around to studying. Today, we finally have this new specialty of neonatology in medicine. Research has scientifically verified the assumption I made so man] years ago that drugs taken by mothers have a deleterious effect on babies

What the smart nurses noted as the immediate effects of drugs—dusky color, poor muscle tone, delayed startle reaction-time, inability to clear mucus, and so forth—could be compared to the visible small portion of an iceberg floating in the water, representing only the superficial visible effect. Continuing research by neonatologists, child psychologists, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the interdisciplinary cooperation between the fields of obstetrics and pediatrics have extended the study of drug effects on the baby from immediate effects to behavioral long-term effects throughout the child's life. Although it remains to be proven, we suspect mother medication to produce awkwardness instead of gracefulness in the baby's later life, shortened attention span and memory ability, inability to handle stress, impaired reading ability, hyperactivity, and probably many other subtle effects yet to be discovered.

The American public is peculiarly sensitive to mentally retarded or crippled children—after they are delivered. Even an amateur promoter can make a fortune in donations with a campaign featuring pitiful pictures of crippled or retarded children. Public guilt will cause donations of thousands of dollars to their tender care. But not one red cent has been donated to groups advocating and teaching the prevention of these defects through childbirth and prenatal education stressing undrugged pregnancies, unanesthetized births, and normal labors brought about by training the mother and the father.

And leads to unhealthy, drugged-out newborns.