Take ACTION!
What can YOU do to
Reduce Infant Mortality and Injury
and Improve Infant Health?
1) Send this video to your legislator to encourage health reform in that supports mothers and babies.
2) Write your legislator.
3) Spread the word. Send this website link to your email list. Listen to Obstetricians, Doulas, Neonatologists, Midwives, Psychologists, Pediatricians, and other Physicians explain how our health care system is failing babies and mothers and what we can do about it.
The only thing I would add to the advice from the experrts in the film is that mothers and fathers themselves can learn ALL of the skills, information, and principles of making a healthy baby. They have the ability to do their own prenatal care, birth the babe, and nurture it in the womb and during the early years of life without any expert help.
Here is a wonderful testimonial from a woman who gave birth to a premature baby and saved its life with a snuggle… (H/T to Amy Philo) Mother’s Last Skin-to-Skin Goodbye Saves her 20 oz Baby
Sometimes a preemie doesn’t need to be hooked up to 10 different machines to be given the chance to survive.
When Carolyn Isbister put her 20oz baby on her chest for a cuddle, she thought that it would be the only chance she would ever have to hold her.
Doctors had told the parents that baby Rachel only had only minutes to live because her heart was beating once every ten seconds and she was not breathing. Isbister remembers:
I didn’t want her to die being cold. So I lifted her out of her blanket and put her against my skin to warm her up. Her feet were so cold.
It was the only cuddle I was going to have with her, so I wanted to remember the moment.” Then something remarkable happened. The warmth of her mother’s skin kick started Rachael’s heart into beating properly, which allowed her to take little breaths of her own.
We couldn’t believe it – and neither could the doctors. She let out a tiny cry.
The doctors came in and said there was still no hope – but I wasn’t letting go of her. We had her blessed by the hospital chaplain, and waited for her to slip away. But she still hung on.
And then amazingly the pink color began to return to her cheeks. She literally was turning from gray to pink before our eyes, and she began to warm up too.
The sad part is that when the baby was born, doctors took one look at her and said ‘no’.
They didn’t even try to help her with her breathing as they said it would just prolong her dying. Everyone just gave up on her,” her mom remembered.
At 24 weeks a womb infection had led to her premature labor and birth and Isbister (who also has two children Samuel, 10, and Kirsten, 8 ) said, “We were terrified we were going to lose her. I had suffered three miscarriages before, so we didn’t think there was much hope.” When Rachael was born she was grey and lifeless.
Ian Laing, a consultant neonatologist at the hospital, said: “All the signs were that the little one was not going to make it and we took the decision to let mum have a cuddle as it was all we could do.
Two hours later the wee thing was crying. This is indeed a miracle baby and I have seen nothing like it in my 27 years of practice. I have not the slightest doubt that mother’s love saved her daughter.”
Rachael was moved onto a ventilator where she continued to make steady progress and was tube and syringe fed her mother’s pumped breastmilk.
Isbister said, “The doctors said that she had proved she was a fighter and that she now deserved some intensive care as there was some hope. She had done it all on her own – without any medical intervention or drugs. She had clung on to life – and it was all because of that cuddle. It had warmed up her body and regulated her heart and breathing enough for her to start fighting.
At 5 weeks she was taken off the ventilator and began breastfeeding on her own. At four months Rachel went home with her parents, weighing 8lbs – the same as any other healthy newborn. Because Rachel had suffered from a lack of oxygen doctors said there was a high risk of damage to her brain. But a scan showed no evidence of any problems and today Rachel is on par with her peers.
Rachel’s mom tells us, “She is doing so well. When we brought her home, the doctors told us that she was a remarkable little girl. And most of all, she just loves her cuddles. She will sleep for hours, just curled into my chest. It was that first cuddle which saved her life – and I’m just so glad I trusted my instinct and picked her up when I did. Otherwise she wouldn’t be here today.”
When a parent holds their baby on their chest, skin-to-skin, it is referred to as Kangaroo Mother Care.
The benefits for all babies of KMC are that they stabilize faster with skin-to-skin care than in an incubator (very few stabilize in an incubator well during the first six hours of life). KMC babies also have stable oxygen rates and breathing thanks to the steady regulation of Mother’s respiration. The heart rate is stable (mother’s heartbeat regulates baby’s heartbeat). The temperature is most stable on the mother – in skin-to-skin care mothers chest automatically warms to warm a cold baby, and mothers core temperature drops if her baby has a temperature.
Sleeping within an arm’s reach of baby (as long as a parent does not smoke) also regulates all of his physiological needs in the same way ~ they are kept steady thanks to Mom’s warm, even-paced body. We lose far fewer babies to prematurity, irregularity of breathing or heartbeat after birth, and SIDS all with the natural help of skin-to-skin holding, or Kangaroo Care.
Read More About skin-to-skin benefits for ALL babies (full term and premature) here: kangaroomothercare.com I loved this movie! Watch it and then share it with your friends and family!
Jenny Hatch
Benjamin Johnson Hatch – 2 hours old after being born at home into his Fathers hands. I did my own prenatal care, birthed him after a six hour labor of love, and he was born Lotus style (we did not cut the cord) and let it fall off naturally six days after his birth. October 25th, 2002 Email
Click on the image to get to the Natural Family BLOG
Some of my readers have expressed dismay that I am so against a Collective approach to Health Care.
It sounds so great, to be able to have the government pay for all those well baby visits, vaccines, c-sections, and mental health care when families struggle emotionally.
Yet this week Zombietime published the most damning article to date on the extremism of John Holden, Obamas “science” czar. John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet
I have been involved in a little spat over Freebirth and Antidepressant use with a blogger named Heather Armstrong. Dooce has the most popular Mom blog on the web, with over four million unique visitors a month. Compared to my thirty thousand or so unique visitors this is sort of David and Goliath in terms of popularity, influence, and writing skill (I am NOT a writer) – but I felt it was important to share my blog post from The Bitter Pill, where I am a guest blogger, so that my readers could look at this argument and then decide for themselves which mother is making the best choices for her children. Jenny Hatch The Natural Family BLOG
Healthy Families Make A Healthy World! Click on the Kindle Image to get to my Books hosted on Amazon Click here to subscribe to The Natural Family Blog on Kindle
Jenny Hatch, expecting baby number five in “Virtual Galts Gulch” Colorado – doing my own prenatal care, preparing to give birth at home, and taking personal responsibility for the whole shootin’ match.
Recent Birth Data from the CDC Indicates: CDC Preliminary Data 2007 PDF: The c-section rate rose 2 percent in 2007, to 31.8 percent, marking the 11th consecutive year of increase and another record high for the United States according to the CDC.
My share page at One True Media
Last night I was reading the instapundit Glenn Reynolds and he linked to a pajamas media video of Ayn Rand Institute president, Yaron Brook talking about “Going Galt.” I watched all 22 minutes of the interview.
In the section of the video titled “Going John Galt”, they talked about a real life version of Galt’s Gulch and where it might exist.
In this post I want to throw out the idea that the most rational way to go John Galt in Family Life is in fact to take personal responsibility for the births of our children.
Yaron talked about a “Moral Revolution” in the interview. Challenging the underlying fundamentals in our society by doing what rationally makes sense.
Capitalism is the only way to pursue happiness because it is the only political ideology that protects the individuals right to pursue his own happiness.
After thirteen years of being steeped (brewed) in socialism during my Michigan public school incarceration from 1973 to 1986, I picked up a copy of The Fountainhead in my English teachers classroom (Bless her for having such contraband available to her students). I was just about to graduate from high school and read the book in a week. This book, along with my study of the Book of Mormon carried the day and rationality became my goal for adult life. (Some modern mothers call this Concious Parenting or Primal Mothering)
Two short years after I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time (1986), I was expecting my first baby, and entered into the irrational world of modern obstetrics as a new mother.
As I applied the principles of Objectivism to my own life, everything that I had been taught by my family traditions, our society, and all of the assumptions that pressed upon my young mind regarding HOW I was going to birth and raise my children overwhelmed my spirit. I found myself thrust into a state of insanity, as the irrational fought with the rational for control. In a state of complete overwhelm my mind broke from reality. This moment for me was the darkest time, but also the beginning of a new dawn.
For in the stigma and stereotypes that were thrust on me by well meaning but completely irrational doctors and the ideologies that they were slaves to, I found the courage and the will to run from irrationality to freedom.
These past twenty years since irrationality overwhelmed my heart, I have been able to move from medical slavery to freedom and the results have been a near constant state of personal happiness and fulfillment as a wife and mother.
I was also reading Dr. Amy’s homebirth debate blog last night and read her most recent post dismissing the Brewer Diet for Healthy Pregnancy and many of the comments that followed the post.
Her words and the so called “debate” that followed them are an exercise in Irrationality. And if you would like to see for yourself the semantics of an irrational argument, I offer it up as a prime example of the irrational in the quest for healthy children, which is supposedly what the practice of Obstetrics is all about.
The late Dr. Tom Brewer shared the idea, backed up with a mountain or horse sense, practicality, and good judgement that NUTRITION is the foundation for a healthy pregnancy. I guess the important question new moms should be asking themselves is WHY would the medical profession even waste it’s time doing research to “de-bunk” the Brewer Diet for pregnancy??? If it is such a non-entity of an ideology, why waste precious resources, time, and money to prove to families that the Brewer Principles are bogus???
Is anyone harmed or is any baby left permanently deformed by a mother eating a sound pregnancy diet during the childs gestation?
Why isn’t someone in the medical profession trying to get the word out on Anti-Depressants and the fact that they damage children’s hearts in utero?
Is it possible that the energy that has been used to discredit Tom Brewer and his amazingly researched and proven diet is because medical professionals and hospitals MIGHT lose business because babies are born healthy and don’t need all the bells and whistles of NICU care?
Can’t have all those moms eating healthy and making big, beautiful blue ribbon babies. They might just get the idea that they can take on prenantal care themselves, and then they might just give birth at home alone, and they may never even bother to come to us for help when the baby is ill and on and on and on… Nutrition works! The medical profession KNOWS that once parents take personal responsibility for eating a proper diet for pregnancy, ninety percent of their business will go down the tubes.
Here I am at forty two weeks and three days of pregnancy eating a HEALTHY Brewer diet breakfast of soft boiled eggs, cracked wheat cereal, home baked whole grain muffins, fresh fruit, and red raspberry leaf tea. This was the morning of the day I gave birth to my nine and a half pound son after a six hour labor, and this pregnancy was the one where I utilyzed the brewer diet to its full capacity…every single day of my pregnancy.
We have been having a wonderful chat about Atlas Shrugged at Free Republic these past few weeks. If you would like to read some wonderful discussion and relevant debate, please go here. I chimed in on the most recent chat by sharing one of my favorite quotes from the book. I’ll share it here to outline how I have used Objectivism as a rational tool for raising my children. Since this philosophy undergirds all of my writings, goals as a mother, and also my hope for the future, please know that in all of this objective philosophy, I completely balance the Libertarian thought and practice with my absolute Faith in Jesus Christ and devotion to his gospel and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to which I belong.
I do NOT see the two as being in conflict and the reason why is because no government minder stood behind my back with a gun to force me to get baptised, pay 10% of my income to the church, or spend thousands upon thousands of hours serving in my community. I have done these acts of my own free will and as a witness to my testimony and faith. When I made the sacred covenants in the Temple that were so profoundly mocked by HBO this past week, I was entering into a contract relationship with my Heavenly Father, again of my own free will and choice. Here is the quote from Atlas Shrugged:
P 784:
“The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley – two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it.
They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world – a look of fear, half secretive, half sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred.
The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.
They represent my particular career, Miss Tagart, said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outer world…..
I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.”
Jenny Hatch The Natural Family BLOG The Natural Family Company “Healthy Families Make A Healthy World!” The Brewer Pregnancy Diet Plan You must have, every day, at least: 1. Milk and milk products–4 choices
1 cup milk: whole, skim,1%, buttermilk
1/2 cup canned evaporated milk: whole or skim
1/3 cup powdered milk:whole or skim
1 cup yogurt
1 cup sour cream
1/4 cup cottage cheese: creamed, uncreamed, pot style
1 large slice cheese (1 1/4 oz): cheddar, Swiss, other hard cheese
1 cup ice milk
1 1/2 cup soy milk
1 piece tofu, 3″x3″x 1/2″ (4 oz)
2. Calcium replacements–as needed (2 per soy exchange from group 1)
36 almonds
1/3 cup bok choy, cooked
12 Brazil nuts
1 cup broccoli, cooked
1/3 cup collard greens
1/2 cup kale
2 teaspoons blackstrap molasses
4 oz black olives
1 oz sardines
3. Eggs–2 any style 4. Protein Combinations–6 to 8 choices**
1 oz lean beef, lamb, pork, liver, or kidney
1 oz chicken or turkey
1 oz fish or shell fish***
1/4 cup canned salmon or tuna
3 sardines
3 1/2 oz tofu
1/4 cup peanuts or peanut butter****
1/8 cup beans + 1/4 cup rice or wheat
(measured before cooking)
beans: soy beans, peas, black beans, kidney beans, garbanzos
rice: preferably brown
wheat: preferably bulgar
1/8 cup brewer’s yeast + 1/4 cup rice
1/8 cup sesame or sunflower seeds + 1/2 cup cup rice
1/4 cup rice + 1/3 cup milk
1/2 oz cheese + 2 slices whole wheat bread or 1/3 cup macaroni (dry) or noodles or 1/8 cup beans
1/8 cup beans + 1/2 cup cornmeal
1/8 cup beans + 1/6 cup seeds (sesame, sunflower)
1/2 large potato + 1/4 cups milk or 1/4 oz cheese
1 oz cheese: cheddar, Swiss, other hard cheese
1/4 cup cottage cheese: creamed, uncreamed, pot style 5. Fresh, dark green vegetables–2 choices
1 cup broccoli
1 cup brussels sprouts
2/3 cup spinach
2/3 cup greens
collard, turnip, beet, mustard, dandelion, kale
1/2 cup lettuce (preferable romaine)
1/2 cup endive
1/2 cup asparagus
1/2 cup sprouts: bean, alfalfa
Whole Wheat, Flax, Fennel Waffles 6. Whole grains–5 choices
1 waffle or pancake made from whole grain
1 slice bread
whole wheat, rye, bran, other whole grain
1/2 roll, muffin, or bagel made from whole grain
1 corn tortilla
1/2 cup oatmeal or Wheatena
1/2 cup brown rice or bulgar wheat
1 shredded wheat biscuit
1/2 cup bran flakes or granola
1/4 cup wheat germ
Raspberry Cinnamon Kamut Muffins 7. Vitamin C foods–2 choices
1/2 grapefruit
2/3 cup grapefruit juice
1 orange
1/2 cup orange juice
1 large tomato
1 cup tomato juice
1/2 cantaloupe
1 lemon or lime
1/2 cup papaya
1/2 cup strawberries
1 large green pepper
1 large potato, any style 8. Fats and oils–3 choices
1 tablespoon butter or margarine
1 tablespoon mayonaise
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/4 avocado
1 tablespoon peanut butter++ 9. Vitamin A foods–1 choice
3 apricots
1/2 cantaloupe
1/2 cup carrots (1 large)
1/2 cup pumpkin
1/2 cup winter squash
1 sweet potato 10. Liver–at least once a week (optional)
4 oz liver
beef, calf, chicken, pork, turkey, liverwurst 11. Salt and other sodium sources–unlimited
table salt, iodized–to taste
sea salt–to taste
kelp powder–to taste
soy sauce–to taste 12. Water–unlimited
Drink to quench thirst, but do not force fluids
Real juice or milk might make better use of limited stomach space. See more info about water here
Avoid pregnancy teas and juices which include nettle, dandelion, alfalfa, bilberry, or celery (they have diuretic properties). 13. Snacks and additional menu choices–unlimited
More foods from groups 1-11
14. Optional supplements–as needed
Vitamin pills, powders, herbs, yeast, oils, molasses, wheat germ, etc.
“Note: Vitamin supplements are in routine use in prenatal care; they do not take the place of a sound, balanced diet of nutritious foods.
