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Chris Bartlett's avatar

Thanks for sharing your story, I'm sure it will help others, I'm so glad you were both okay.

The way I see things, natural is a great starting point when approaching life, generally working well until it doesn't. Unfortunately natural also comes with the negative side of natural, which, when it comes to childbirth and childhood, up until pretty recently, and sadly still today more often than we'd like, means the all-too-common deaths of infants and mothers too. When I look back at family trees and see ancestors losing so many children and mothers so young I can't imagine how people could carrying on in that situation.

I think people also forget that there's no such thing as natural birthing really. The vast majority of our ancestors who gave birth were in their teens and 20s when they did so (at least the first time), they were mostly athletes all their lives on nutritious organic diets, who had also been already undergone a brutal process of natural selection in childhood for health by the environment. Few of any of us come close to that kind of fitness, and it means there's much more likelihood things can go wrong. Once we started using fire or left the Garden of Eden if you like, we were fated to enter a never ending spiral of advance creating negative consequences require more advances and creating other negative consequences, and that's the price we have to pay for our loss of innocence, it's not one which can probably ever fully escape.

On an important side note, I would urge any young parents to invest in baby breathing monitors, yes they sometimes give false alarms (though they saved vastly more of our sleep than they took away), but I'm convinced they saved both my sons' lives when they were babies, as they both had a frightening tendency to hold their breath to the point of turning blue. I think it's extremely unfortunate that so many medical professionals dismiss such (entirely non-invasive) monitors apparently on the grounds they are an unnecessary expense. Having had 3 close friends now lose babies in cot deaths, I strongly believe they should be handing them out (lending them) to all new parents. If people believe wearing a seat belt is worthwhile they should get a baby breathing monitor too.

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Jorge Arenas's avatar

What an amazing story. God Bless

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