Most references to birth relate to the experience of the mother, not the child. For women, giving birth can be traumatic. It is certainly painful. However, what happens from the perspective of the newborn is often ignored. Only if the infant’s life is endangered does the focus switch from mother to child.
In the developed world throughout most of the 20th century, a newborn baby was traditionally removed by a nurse to be tested for signs of illness or birth defects. It was weighed, washed, and tagged before being returned to the mother, who, having been congratulated on her achievement, was deemed to be exhausted and in need of sleep. The baby, having ideally been held momentarily by its father, was subsequently allowed to sleep in a cradle or, if she seemed up to it, on its mother’s breast.
Frédérick Leboyer was having none of this. The French obstetrician, the author of the 1974 bestseller Birth Without Violence, looked at the birth process from the inside out (he prefaced the book with a quote from Buddha — “to be born is to suffer”). He wrote of the trauma inherent in leaving the warmth and security of the mother’s womb through the sudden eruption into the world, complete with noise, harsh lights and a smack on the backside.
Instead, Leboyer — himself the product of a difficult birth — advocated soft lights, soothing music and that the child, once safely delivered, be placed on its mother’s belly, where skin-to-skin contact and the maternal heartbeat would restore the bond established during pregnancy.
He also believed it was important to bathe a child shortly after birth. “Water,” he wrote, “is a friend . . . Imagine that you go to Beijing. You don’t know anyone and you don’t speak Chinese. And then across a street you see someone you know, and that person’s familiarity makes you feel safer. That is how water is to a baby: because he or she has been in the fluid of the womb.”
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Leboyer was an accomplished and experienced obstetrician, who practised in Paris before writing the book that made his name. He was convinced that babies not only feel pain, but anxiety from the moment they are born and that the manner in which they are introduced to the world shapes the type of adults they will become.
The Leboyer approach earned him an enduring popularity. Birth Without Violence was translated into many languages and made him something of a celebrity, not least in the UK, where he lived between 1982 and 2000, and he was said to be a devoted anglophile. However, the book proved to be less of a succès d’estime with his fellow professionals than he might have wished. The medical establishment, preoccupied with reducing infant mortality and increasing the percentage of healthy births, frowned on the idea that doctors should delay the testing and examination of newborns just so that the child, as they saw it, could enjoy some downtime with its mother.
One unsympathetic practitioner told The New York Times that strong lighting was essential to enable doctors to see what they were doing and that “a good hearty scream” was the way to kick-start the infant’s first breaths.
Leboyer was accused of quackery, and even of a shamanistic belief in good and evil spirits. Such criticism was renewed after the publication of a second book, Loving Hands (1977), which described techniques of baby massage linked to the Hindu goddess Parvati. A third book, The Art of Breathing (1985), based its precepts on hatha yoga, martial arts, t’ai chi, meditation and the recitation of liturgical chants.
Michel Odent, a former colleague whose advocacy of waterbirth was not shared by Leboyer, was more supportive. “His book was not understood by doctors,” said Odent. “It was understood by mothers.”
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Frédérick Leboyer was born Alfred Lazare Levy in Paris in 1918, the son of René Levy, a diamond merchant, and his wife, Judith, an artist. The Levys had been winegrowers in Alsace, but had lost their money after the outbreak of the disease phylloxera. According to Leboyer’s account, he had suffered an “atrocious” birth. He was delivered using forceps when he was deemed seriously overdue and his memory was of “suffering, shouting and screaming”, both his own and that of his mother.
In other respects, his childhood was unremarkable. He did well at school and in 1941 graduated in medicine from the University of Paris. In the meantime, however, the Germans had occupied Paris. The Levys moved to Megève, a village near the Swiss frontier, where he changed his name to avoid being detected as Jewish and maintained a low profile until the liberation allowed the family to return to the capital.
In his late twenties, Leboyer began work as an obstetrician. By the time he wrote Birth Without Violence, he claimed to have delivered more than 10,000 babies, one in ten of them using his “natural” method. He acknowledged that there were times when only surgical intervention could save the lives of mother and child.
Leboyer disdained the choice increasingly made by women in the West to have their babies delivered by caesarean section. “What you have to understand,” he said, “is that birth is a challenge for a woman. To do her best for her baby, she has to face up to that challenge and not chicken out and have a caesarean instead . . . Having a caesarean is like reading a book and missing out a crucial chapter of the story — the most important chapter, in fact.”
Leboyer had no children of his own. In 1998 he met Mieko Yoshimura, who worked for a Japanese bank and lived in the flat opposite him in London. They were married in 2005, when he was 86 and she was 50.
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Frederick Leboyer, obstetrician and author, was born on November 1, 1918. He died at home in Vens, Switzerland, on May 25, 2017, aged 98