gentle, gentle birth

If I could, I would be in Vancouver April 26 to 28 to see Michel Odent, the man who invented water birthing. He's speaking at a conference called Birthing Humanity .

Odent  says that the bright lights, noise and distraction of a hospital birth -- to say nothing of the drugs -- can encode an impression of a hostile world into the baby's brain. Instead of a blissful birth, the baby can get locked into fight-or-flight mode.

"My rule of thumb is that the rates of criminality are correlated with the rates of obstetrical intervention,"

Common Ground quotes him as saying.