The Mid-Atlantic Conference on Birth and Primal Health Research from the point of view of a Brazilian midwife
I participated last February in the Mid-Atlantic conference on Birth and Primal Health Research (Las Palmas, Gran Canaria) as a midwife and also as an organizer. This is how I received afterwards countless spontaneous comments. Most of them included adjectives that were variants of the word “special” (e.g. “unique”,” unusual”, “unforgettable”, “extraordinary”, “surprising”, “amazing”, “unprecedented”). I think therefore that the best way to offer a report on this conference is to explain why it has been perceived as special.
The first reason is that the participants came from 39 different countries and were representative of 42 professions. This means that the common points between the 1250 participants were neither geographical nor professional. However this conference brought together people who had strong common points. All of them had already reached a high degree of awareness regarding the future of humanity and the importance of the “primal period”, and were anxious to share their capacity to think long term. As a midwife I was personally pleased to observe that among this extraordinary diversity of participants there were colleagues – I would say “sisters” - from countries as different as Japan, Chili, Brazil, the USA, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and, of course, Spain and Portugal.
In the same way, there were no obvious links between the speakers. In conventional conferences, speakers know each other in advance, or, at least, know of each other. In the case of the Las Palmas conference it was the opposite. For example, the expert in surgical technique had never heard of the expert in behavioural effects of oxytocin, and none of them had heard of the doctor coordinating maternal and perinatal health at WHO. In fact the link between the keynote speakers was Michel Odent, who knew all of them personally and had conceived the objective of this interdisciplinary conference. The main objective was to offer an overview of recent technical and scientific advances that will undoubtedly influence the history of childbirth, so that new appropriate questions can be phrased. All these speakers were finally happy to discover each other and to socialize, particularly in the restaurant, at the official evening party, and in the corridors. It is difficult to imagine in a conventional conference a dialogue between a British Professor of International health and a Korean childbirth activist who is originally an actress. It is as if many of the speakers were discovering other ways of thinking.
In such an atmosphere all the speakers demonstrated a huge capacity to adapt to an unprecedented situation. For example, Pr Michael Stark, as the “father” of the new fast simplified technique of c-section (commonly called the “Misgav-Ladach Method) had the apparently difficult task to talk about surgical techniques to participants who – for most of them – will never perform a c-section. He found a way to fascinate the whole public by presenting surgery as an art, particularly when he explained that women have different tissues that should be explored through sensitive fingers before the operation starts. We often talk about the art of midwifery but rarely of the good surgeon as an artist: a link that I – and other midwives - had rarely thought of. The climax of his talk was reached was he finally spoke, as a grandfather, about his daughter who gave birth vaginally. Everybody understood that, although we now have at our disposal a simple easy technique of c-section, we have also good reasons to relearn how to make the births by the vaginal route as easy as possible.
In a different style, Kerstin Uvnas-Moberg, Professor of physiology at the prestigious Karolinska institute in Stockholm, also induced an attentive silence in the big auditorium of the conference centre when summarizing the work of her research team regarding the behavioural effects of oxytocin. Obstetricians in particular were listening to her open-mouthed.
After these two authoritative complementary presentations, it was easy for Michel Odent to explain the urgent need to introduce new criteria to evaluate the practices of midwifery and obstetrics. If we only take into account the short list of criteria established during the twentieth century (perinatal mortality and morbidity rates, plus maternal mortality an morbidity rates) it will be soon justified to advise almost all pregnant women to give birth by c-section. Examples of new criteria were offered: in the current scientific context, the quality and the duration of breastfeeding in relation to the way the mother has given birth, and the establishment of the gut flora at the very beginning of extra-uterine life, should also be taken into account. This was an opportunity, in this conference about primal health research, to present the primal health research database (www.primalhealthresearch.com) as a tool to train ourselves to think long-term and also to introduce the collective dimension, since epidemiologists often need huge numbers to detect tendencies and statistically significant effects.
Anthony Costello, Professor of International Health at the London Institute of Child Health, justified his reputation of outstanding speaker when explaining the possibility to positively influence birth statistics through community based approaches and the concept of women’s group intervention developed by his team in Nepal and India.
The need to think globally was eloquently addressed by Mario Merialdi, coordinator for maternal and perinatal health at WHO. Mario Merialdi, who studied in Italy, France and the USA, justified his label “citizen of the world” when, at the last minute, after discussing (in French) with Michel Odent, he decided to do his presentation in Spanish rather than English.
Sylvie Odent, Professor of medical genetics at the University Hospital in Rennes, France, explained why and how amniocentesis should become an almost obsolete intervention. After recalling that it is the only diagnostic test accepting a risk of killing one subject out of one hundred, she presented techniques developed in France in particular to detect fetal cells and free DNA in the blood of pregnant women. The obstacles to vulgarize such practices are not technical: they are mostly economical. Towards a revolution in fetal medicine?
It is of course impossible to report the contents of the 27 concurrent sessions and of the 160 posters that involved actively dozens of midwives. An amazing diversity of topics were developed and discussed. Let us just mention that the concurrent session that attracted the greatest number of participants (250) was entitled “transcendent emotional states in childbirth”. Introduced by Michel Odent, who explained the subtitle of his latest book (“The Functions of the Orgasms: the Highways to transcendence”) this highly successful session was presented by Cathy Daub and Elizabeth Davis (an American midwife).
It is difficult to express with words the atmosphere that characterized these three days. Everybody had the feeling to participate in an important event. There was a contagious gradual optimism. It is in such a context that, at the climax of the last day, Michel Odent improvised a conclusion by saying: “this conference in the middle of the ocean should not be a one off. We’ll meet again at the Mid-Pacific conference in Honolulu in 2012”. I first thought he was not serious. Today we are already well advanced in the project of Mid-pacific conference, which will occur at the prestigious Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu on October 26-28, 2012. English, Japanese and Spanish will be the official languages. We can already rely on the help of highly motivated friends in Hawaii and in Japan, in particular. To be updated, visit regularly
Heloisa Lessa