Bonding
BREAST FEEDING - New research shows that breast-feeding mothers are more likely than formula-feeding moms to bond with their infants. They also demonstrate stronger brain responses when they hear their baby cry. This same research suggests that women who don’t breastfeed are perhaps less empathic, less attentive, more likely to ignore, neglect and abuse their children.
Joseph Chilton Pearce has been ranting about industrialized birth practices for years. He believes hospital birthing practices are interfering with species survival by interfering with and often preventing natural bonding to take place.
James W. Prescott, PhD, and many others describe how pleasure hormones experienced during birth and breast feeding play a critical role in mother-infant bonding. See Pearce, Prescott, Mendizza.
The presence of these hormones for love and altruism reaches its peak moments after birth when the mother makes direct skin to skin and eye-to-eye contact with her baby. The ecstatic feelings produced by this flood of pleasure are shared by mother and baby as they connect out of the womb for the very first time. This euphoria establishes a strong and addictive biological bond which changes the brains of mother and baby. And this near orgasmic biological-hormonal bond is repeated and reinforced throughout the first years of life during breastfeeding, though at lower levels.
In an interview with Michel Odent, MD, renowned for his research in birth physiology, Odent observed that synthetic counterfeit of this ‘bonding hormone cocktail’ is used routinely during induced and ceasarean delivery. These synthetic counterfeits trigger some of the physical effects, such as stimulating strong contractions BUT block and prevent this critical and natural ecstatic bonding experience. It simply doesn’t happen and the new mother never knew what she was missing.