Birth from a Baby's Perspective

Supporting Birth from a Baby’s Perspective changes the center of the conversation. Until not very long ago, we thought a baby’s felt experience started after they were born. In fact not so long ago, doctors used to believe that babies didn’t feel anything at birth and psychologists endorsed allowing babies to self-soothe, for example.

In the last fifty years, since the invention of ultrasound and Lennart Nilsson's portrait of an 18-week-old human fetus which appeared on the cover of the April 30, 1965, issue of LIFE magazine we have started to become aware of birth from a baby’s perspective and the implications that has on our own experience of living life fully.

We’ve all been born. Birth impacts each and every one of us. Through the immerging science of pre and perinatal psychology we are beginning to understand the deep impact our experience of being born has on our entire lifespan and the idea that we cannot remember our experience of being born is fast being replaced by somatic experiences on land and in water that reveal that our bodies do remember even if mind and logic to not.

This new awareness implies that we get in touch with our own felt senses, patterns of behavior or movement and how these in turn will impact our own capacity to give birth and the behavior of our future babies and children as a result. And so the patterns repeat themselves unless that brave work that needs to be done is owned. Some of the birth-related practices that are widely used today reveal that we are still unaware of how these impact babies, otherwise, I really cannot imagine how anyone would still use them.

It is not easy for the mind to grasp that a baby’s felt experience in the here and now is as raw, sensitive and present as it will ever be in our human life. We fall into the trap of believing that just because cognitive capacities like speech and reason are not present, then other forms of experiencing are not active either and yet babies are higher, faster and more up to date in their multidimensional capacities of perception than we are.

We can love and care for our babies truly and well, but being aware of a baby’s perspective activates our empathic capacity to relate to them in a deeper and more profound way than previously imagined. Speaking their language, which is primarily vibrational, also means that we cannot stay silent when these layers of awareness cannot yet be seen, felt or respected, especially when they raise questions about how the prevalent status quo in birth, care and education continues to trespass upon their needs.

Let’s have this brave conversation about how we can only meet a baby’s needs as deeply as we are aware and able to meet our own. What do you need to feel safe? I invite you to follow this trail of thought and explore whether you really know the answer to this question before believing that you are meeting a baby’s needs, beneath and beyond the obvious.