Lamaze

Lamaze International is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote, support and protect normal birth through education and advocacy. Lamaze members and volunteers include childbirth educators, labor support specialists, lactation consultants, maternal-child nurses, midwives, physicians, physical therapists, social workers, hospital nursing managers, students and parents.

Philosophy

* Birth is normal, natural and healthy.
* The experience of birth profoundly affects women and their families.
* Women's inner wisdom guides them through birth.
* Women's confidence and ability to give birth is either enhanced or diminished by the care provider and place of birth.
* Women have the right to give birth free from routine medical interventions.
* Birth can safely take place in homes, birth centers and hospitals.
* Childbirth education empowers women to make informed choices in health care, to assume responsibility for their health and to trust their inner wisdom.

Care Practices

Lamaze’s six recommended care practices are a guide for creating a birth environment that lets you tap into your innate birth wisdom and give birth simply and easily. Regardless of your baby’s size, your labor’s length and complexity, or your confidence level, these care practices will help you keep your labor and birth as normal as possible.

* Care Practice 1: Labor should begin on its own
* Care Practice 2: Laboring women should be free to move throughout labor
* Care Practice 3: Laboring women should have continuous support from others throughout labor
* Care Practice 4: There should be no routine interventions during labor and birth
* Care Practice 5: Women should not give birth on their backs
* Care Practice 6: Mothers and babies should not be separated after birth and should have unlimited opportunity for breastfeeding

History

The Lamaze Technique is named after French obstetrician Fernand Lamaze, who travelled to the USSR in 1951 and witnessed there the use of the technique that now bears his name. This method of childbirth preparation and pain management was developed in the Soviet Union by a number of obstetricians and psychotherapists, most importantly I.Z. Velvovskii of Kharkov (Ukraine) and A.P. Nikolaev of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia). The method, known as psychoprophylaxis, emphasized relaxation as a conditioned response to labor contractions, coupled with a vareity of patterned breathing techniques designed not only to improve oxygenation, but to interfere with the transmission of pain signals from the uterus to the cerebral cortex. After his return from the USSR, Lamaze devoted the rest of his life to the dissemination and popularization of psychoprophylaxis in France. Doctors and other medical professionals came from all over the world to train with him and his collaborators at their clinic in Paris and then went back to their home countries to promote the method there. The publication of Marjorie Karmel's book Thank You, Dr. Lamaze catalyzed the spread of psychoprophylaxis in the United States. Karmel was joined by childbirth educator Elisabeth Bing, obstetrician Benjamin Segal, and others in founding the American Society for Psychoprophylaxis in Obstetrics (ASPO) in New York City in 1960. Psychoprophylaxis gained in popularity throughout the 1960s and 1970s. ASPO, in alliance with other organizations, such as the International Childbirth Education Association and La Leche League, helped to change the way women in the US gave birth through their advocacy for the presence of the father or other family member during labor and delivery, for combined labor and delivery rooms, for breastfeeding, and for rooming in.

The rise of the epidural by 1980 as a standard care practice changed the nature and purpose of the Lamaze method. Modern Lamaze childbirth classes teach expectant mothers a philosophy of birth rather than the technique created by Dr. Lamaze. Breathing techniques are no longer a hallmark of Lamaze, and often are not taught at all; instead 'breath awareness' may be taught, as are many other ways to work with the labor process to reduce the pain often associated with childbirth, such as hot and cold packs, changing positions, the use of a "birthing ball" to remain in an upright position, and orgasm to induce or hasten labor.

ee also

* Natural childbirth
* Lamaze in India
* [http://obstetrica-ginecologie.com/despre-metode-alternative/lamaze-13.html Lamaze in Romania]

External links

* [http://www.lamaze.org Official site of Lamaze International]