by Thom Evans

Michel Odent has revolutionized our understanding of birth and its role in the overall fabric of humanity. Beginning as a surgeon overseeing a small clinic and birth centre in a village just outside of Paris in the early 1960s, he became a leading obstetrical revolutionary, actually referring to himself for a time as a midwife.
Tens of thousands of births later, he maintains the professional notion that an obstetrician should see an average of 1,000 births per year to be considered a fully experienced specialist. He is considered the pioneer of home-like birthing centers. It is Odent who inspired waterbirth, recognizing the remarkable comfort gained by labouring women using baths and pools of warm water to relax and feel secure.
Now a master in his seventies, he currently studies and discusses radically the way humanity develops the “capacity for love,” especially in the moments surrounding birth. His discoveries have implications covering almost every facet of civilization. Odent states: “Today the ultimate priority is not to transform farming or to moderate the emission of greenhouse gasses. It is to make possible the advent of another variety of Homo. This variety of Homo – the authentic Homo sapiens – must be able to invent new strategies for survival at a time when the limits to the domination of nature become obvious. She must be able to wonder how the respect for Mother Earth develops. He must be able to participate in a dialogue between humanity and Mother Earth, which implies a certain degree of unification of humanity. In other words he/she must master the energies of love.”
Odent is founder of the Primal Health Research Centre in London, England, where he is studying what he calls the “primal period,” the development of human life from conception through age one. Modern medical protocols and interventions perpetrated during this sensitive time span, especially at the time of birth, are having a serious and negative impact on what he has come to recognize as fundamental “episodes” necessary for our very survival. He is taking this primal research and correlating it to behaviour and attitudes such as violence and drug addiction in adulthood.
Disruption and intervention of the natural birth experience is not new to culture or history, but the onset of the industrialization of this process is what has escalated the severity of its impact. “The more a society needs to develop the human potential for aggression, the more aggressive are the rituals and beliefs that disturb the physiological process of birth.”
There is a parallel to the industrialization of agriculture as well. The technological and economic interests involved in pharmaceuticals and medical research are also the players in transgenic crop manipulation and the chemicals of agribusiness. We now can splice a fish gene into a tomato, potato seed is grown for industry from germ plasma, and terminator technology designed to make seed infertile and therefore suicidal is the current path of our industrial agribusiness food supply. The chemical fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, as well as preservatives, colourings and flavourings, poured on the planet in the hundreds of millions of gallons annually and in concentrations of ingestion equaling our entire body weight every 10 years. They are transferring at dangerous levels into breast milk, and interfering with the hormonal balances of the mother and fetus. Growth hormones, antibiotics and the like are common in the production of animal products. Odent points out in his book The Farmer and the Obstetrician that mega disasters have already occurred in agribusiness due to this industrialization – mad cow and hoof-and-mouth disease. Now the threat of an avian flu pandemic fills the news. Industrialized childbirth has not yet experienced such a catastrophic crash, but it leads Odent to pose to the proponents of the modern modality of medical childbirth “Which disaster are we waiting for?”
Odent is not even remotely against knowledge or science, quite the opposite. Knowledge and science feeds his position. He has experienced so many births. He follows all the studies. An extensive database is available for perusal at www.birthworks.com
Odent maintains that a woman at the innermost core in her being knows how to give birth. She simply needs the privacy and intimacy required to feel safe and secure. At the heart of his science is the complex but primal release of hormones interweaving with our state of mind and emotions – instinctive urges that have predicated our survival throughout time.
“The scientification of love is the most vital aspect of the current scientific revolution. We have to develop respect for Mother Earth; we are learning how the capacity to love develops. It is a landmark in the history of mankind, something we might compare with the discovery of fire.”
The hormones released during labour are the same as those found in all of our sexual activities and are consistent within mammals, coming exclusively from the primitive part of the brain. In particular, endorphins are clearly linked to our capacity to transcend pain with the feeling of euphoria and pleasure, as well as oxytocin, the love hormone. When we feel inhibited, threatened, afraid, or when the neocortex is stimulated, an entirely different infrastructure is accessed. Adrenaline, commonly referred to as the fight or flight hormone, takes over.
Any number of factors can interfere with the flow of the love hormones designed to encourage ease of birth and mother/infant bonding. Simply nudging the labouring woman’s thinking brain by asking unnecessary or untimely questions is considered risky stimulation to Odent. Harsh sounds and bright lights are others. Even creating an inhibition of shyness or embarrassment by being observed changes the chemistry. This is escalated manifold when you venture into epidural administration of chemical pain killers, monitoring, machines going bleep, and full anesthetic caesarean surgery surrounded by strangers in masks and uniforms.
According to Odent, these disruptions – when performed unnecessarily – have far greater impact than merely the immediate discomfort of the baby or mother. Whatever is happening to the mother is also happening to the fetus. The complex design of how birth is supposed to unfold has many key functions for survival. The natural flow of endorphins and oxytocin experienced by the uninterrupted mother are fed to the baby as well. This stimulates the bonding process, releases the placenta and fosters the infant’s vigor for finding and latching to the nipple. The essential first impressions of the world the child is arriving into are also encoded in this process. Any disruption, Odent has documented, has lasting effects on the individual and society as a whole.
“As a traveller…staying in a city, I need to know how safe the place is. Can I walk the streets after sunset? I just look at local birth statistics. My rule of thumb is that the rates of criminality are correlated with the rates of obstetrical intervention…I’ll be extremely cautious in places such as Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Rome or Athens where the rates of caesarean sections are astronomical…I’ll be more relaxed on the streets of Tokyo, Stockholm, or Amsterdam.”
The higher the rate of major intervention in a given culture’s birthing rituals, the higher the rates of violent crime, drug addiction, and psychological pathologies. These are the statistics. Certain places in the world now have the number of caesarean section surgeries performed reaching 80 percent of all births. In Canada we are hovering at around 25 percent and climbing, despite the legalization of midwifery in some provinces.
Legislated midwifery has tended in varying degrees toward the industrial medical model, and has placed the ancient and once independent craft of midwifery under the control of the mainstream and medicated industrial/medical profession. This has left the art of midwifery, certainly on this continent, fractured. Those in conflict with some of the routine procedures of industrialized birth often find themselves leaving midwifery, or are forced to go underground, causing further unnecessary stress and danger to the natural process of birth.
Michel Odent believes these discoveries represent a scientific turning point in the shaping, and even the survivability, of humanity. Healing our attitudes toward ourselves and to each other in harmony with our environment – this is where we find our true disposition as human beings, beginning at birth. This is birthing humanity.

Dr. Michel Odent will be in Vancouver April 26th – 28th, 2005 for a Public Gala presentation followed by a two day conference entitled Birthing Humanity. For more information you can go to
www.crescentwomb.com, or contact event@crescentwomb.com or phone toll free 1-888-853-5481.