Postpartum - the most sacred time of your life. Unless you have syntocinon?

Postpartum can be the most sacred time of your life. Syntocinon likely hampers this possibility.

The time following the birth of your baby can be the most sacred, expansive, wholesome, full hearted and embodied experience of your life. You have the capacity to feel so much bliss, ecstacy and awe, as well of course, as discomfort, trepidation, anxiety and fear. However your experience turns out, your capacity to feel the fullness of life is never greater than when you have just had a baby. Your spirit is open and expanding into new territories you never knew existed. And the love. Oh, the love just keeps on flowing, and flowing, and flowing. You’ve never known anything like it.

There are many ways that this can be hampered, mostly they infiltrate through the maternity care model offered through medical care providers worldwide. They range vastly from having to venture into hospital to give birth – one of the most private and domestic affairs one can imagine to being bombarded with people, protocols, monitoring devices, bright lights, noises and sharp stabby things. But what I am focussing on today is the frequent and blasé use of syntocinon (otherwise known as Pitocin) which is a synthetic version of the naturally occurring Oxytocin – aka the love hormone.

Syntocinon is used extremely frequently - all the time - on all women, despite a lack of evidence to support its use in most cases. It is used to either bring on labour artificially, to sustain labour artificially, and to birth the placenta artificially. Or in some cases, all  three uses are deployed.

First of all a brief note on Oxytocin, which you probably know about as one of the main hormonal protagonists of the birth piece. It is the hormone of love, it creates strong loving bonds between mother and baby and when left to it, oxytocin is accompanied by a beta endorphins which act as pain softeners in labour.

This synthetic ‘oxytocin’ as it is called, does not really deserve that name. Lo and behold, it turns out you cannot compartimentalise the complex interactions of the human masterpiece, and syntocinon, as an attempt to mimic oxytocin, falls extremely short. It does not come with these beta endorphins, and when used in an induction context or augmentation (to speed labour up to suit the needs of the hospital machine) it causes an experience of labour which most women only know as extremely painful. If you ask a woman who has given birth completely unassisted (and with natural oxytocin) she will tell you that yes, she may have experienced pain AND she also experienced a whole number of other sensations and experiences, both physical, energetic, emotional and spiritual. Syntocinon was a good try guys, but its not the same. It leaves women feeling completely battered by the synthetically induced contractions which don’t make sense to the rest of the woman and baby’s system, in its entireity.

In the context of placental birth, syntocinon is employed often in the hospital setting. There are a number of reasons for this including that labour has gone on ‘too’ long, that the mother is ‘too’ old, or that she has had ‘too many’ babies. Ultimately the concern comes down to having a tired uterus and bleeding. It is also of note that if you had syntocinon in labour, or any drugs for that matter, then the risk of bleeding will genuinely be higher because of the stress on the uterus and yes, it is no surprise it would be very tired after having contractions repeatedly forced onto it with strong drugs. So anyway it is injected into the thigh and delivers the placenta quickly in a lot of cases. Doesn’t sound too bad? Well, here’s the thing. Once this drug reaches your system it blocks the uptake of the naturally occurring oxytocin. And remember earlier I wrote about oxytocin being the hormone of love, bonding and connection?

I’ve seen many women struggle to relax and sink into their postpartum with their newborn after receiving syntocinon. Without syntocinin it is a time that invites the most lucid presentness. The whole family is coated in a lovely fuzziness, sinking into its new dynamic, in awe over the magic of new life and this whole new person to have joined them and the whole new people who have been made from existing members – mothers and father, brothers and sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunties…it is a time of immense joy, of embodiment and being with excactly what is there, and nowhere else. Nowhere else exists. You sink deep and deeper in love with your baby and family. This quite simply, is hampered when you do not have the same ease of access to your oxytocin supply. It dampens that amount of joy that we are able to experience, and leaves women often feeling deflated, confused and fragmented.

My advice? (as if anyone asked ;)Think very seriously about entering a space where this kind of drug will be willingly administered without true understanding of its impact. Think carefully about what ‘care’ means to you and don’t rely on anyone else to have the best interests of you or your baby at heart.