Preconception and pregnancy

"Once I became pregnant, the Centre really came into its own. We had had a pre-marital consultation with the doctors, and then a pre-natal one."

Preconception care and planning
· The first 48 hours admissions to hospital for the confinement
· Recognition of the vital role played by healthy food during pregnancy
· Identification of and research on pregnancies within the first two weeks
· Recognition of the importance of the early weeks of the pregnancy
· Fortnightly check-ups throughout the pregnancy
· Talks with both prospective parents at key times to give information about pregnancy and birth

The Pioneer Health Centre delivered all these, more thoroughly than any provision in the National Health Service today!

Parental nurture

In view of our findings of relatively few adult individuals without disorder, it becomes apparent that it is necessary to 'grow' health before it can be studied. Thus the focus within family life from which it is most convenient to move is that of pregnancy in the family. The life of the individual begins when its genetic inheritance is laid down at the moment of conception. From that moment its nurtural development demands study. For nine months the body of the mother is the immediate source of all influencing it. Hence pregnancy becomes for us the beginning of the study of nurture…….. …………..

Labour

…..There is a hiatus in [the] parental service. We lose care of the mother during labour and the puerperium, and, more important, during the initiation of lactation. Much of the educational work of the Centre is in this way negatived by experience of a different point of view and practice at a critical juncture. This is particularly the case with labour and lactation.

It is true that we work in close liaison, doing our ante-natal care with certain hospitals and Maternity Clinics, but, while better than nothing, it is not satisfactory either to us or indeed to the Clinics, Hospitals, General Pracitioner or Midwifery Service.

To fulfil the necessary conditions for research into Parental Nurture, it is essential that we should ourselves conduct the delivery of the healthy pregnant woman, and that the conditions that maintain at the Centre should be available to her during parturition and the initiation of lactation.

Biological considerations imply that the chick should be hatched out in its own nest, rather than, cuckoo-like, in hospital - unless of course there is some abnormality needing correction. Parturition in the family is but another natural stage in the process of maturation, and in our experience should take place in the home. Housing conditions, however, are such that this is at present seldom expedient. Therefore one of our immediate requirements is a 'Maternity Hotel' to accommodate the wife during delivery, directly after which she may return home attended by the Centre's midwives."

Taken from "The Quality of Life. The Peckham approach to Human Ethology by Innes H Pearse, pp 172 and 173.) See Publications

"It was the tenth day; she thought she might be pregnant. Could she see the 'doctor'? In the Centre, pregnancy took priority over other check-ups, so there and then she went over to the laboratory for specimens to be collected for routine tests and a time was found for her re-overhaul the next day.

It was the same girl we first met at her pre-marital consultation. She and her husband had both come before marriage for advice on control of conception. A year later the pair were wanting to start their first baby so they arranged to have their second periodic overhaul before going on holiday in early September. They already knew the importance of being fit."

It is possible that a visit within the first two weeks may give a fairly good indication of a probable conception without a pregnancy test. Later it would be impossible to attempt any opinion till a month or two later when a firm diagnosis can be made. If a woman appears well and complains of nothing there is little it is necessary to do from the medical point of view before the diagnosis is confirmed. Presenting herself at an ante-natal clinic before the second or third month she might be considered somewhat of a nuisance. In terms of the cultivation of health on the other hand, pregnancy is one of the important 'biological junctions' in the development of the family, so from the moment of conception no time is too early, nor any trouble too great to take for the pair at this time.

"We were able to arrange that with any family who before and during pregnancy were without disorders, the wife might be admitted to the hospital for delivery at the actual onset of labour, staying there for only forty-eight hours, after which mother and baby would return home, remaining under our own midwives' supervision for the required statutory ten days. This was the first use in hospital in this country of a planned forty-eight hours admission for labour."

"…We have set up in association with the Centre a Home Farm from which some members' food can be provided fresh, uncontaminated and untreated in any way. Pregnant families have priority for the purchase of these products at the cafeteria where 'live' milk (i.e. unpasteurised), cream, free-range eggs, freshly-gathered organically grown vegetables and sot fruits in season, can be bought daily' and where bread made from 100% unsterilised wholemeal flour from which nothing has been extracted, can be had."

(Taken from 'The Quality of Life' pp 48, 55, 64. Innes H Pearse) See Publications

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