Abstract
If a new mother is to be able to nurture her child, she herself needs to be nurtured. She is not just a baby-producing apparatus, but a person with emotional and social needs of her own. A facilitating environment for becoming a mother is one in which pregnancy and birth are recognised as personal and intimate experiences. The woman should be enabled to act as an adult, taking on responsibility for a new life, not a passive patient undergoing a medico-surgical crisis. Western society fails to provide such an environment and nursing routines function to impose a ceremonial order on the individual and have the effect of reducing her to the status of a child and also of de-sexing her. The new mother needs to be able to take on responsibility and make decisions. Care in childbirth needs to be changed radically if women are to be equipped for the major challenges that follow after.
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