[image credit: http://www.livescience.com ]
When the news of a woman planning to give birth while swimming with dolphins came across my email, I thought it was a joke…it’s not. Adam and Heather Barrington, a couple from North Carolina, are planning to travel to Hawaii for the birth of their baby in July. They are working with the Sirius Institute, which touts that giving birth while swimming with dolphins can have many benefits. According to them, “dolphins are able to heal or improve a wide range of medical conditions.” Now, I haven’t done tons of research on this, but I imagine that if a dolphin were able to totally heal someone of a major medical condition, we’d hear about it. I do know that dolphins can provide a lot of therapeutic benefits to people with autism, Down’s syndrome, Alzheimer’s, etc…
We do know there are benefits to water birth. Giving birth in the water has been shown to shorten the first stage of labor, be a natural way to reduce the amount of pain a woman experiences, reduce tearing, and have a calming effect on both mom and baby (water birth babies often don’t cry when they are delivered as most babies born “on land” do). I suppose Sirius’ idea is that: waterbirth (good) + dolphins (good) = amazing, healing water birth experience for mom (great).
Sounds great on paper, but when you break it down…I’m not sold. According to Discovery, dolphins are known for doing some pretty terrible things. Dolphins are wild animals; predators that in fact, have been known to kill other animals. They are strong, quick, and very agile. The dolphins that Sirius is talking about using for births are “free dolphins,” meaning they are untamed. They are dolphins in the wild who “are curious about pregnant women and often come to check them out.” According to Medical Daily, “To make any claim that a dolphin-assisted birth is beneficial to mother and child, a researcher would need to unravel the many factors involved in order to tease out the potential effects of the presence of dolphins,” Despite this, Sirius claims that they receive 3-4 requests per week from people asking about birthing with dolphins. “Some of the reported occurrences include a mother and a baby playing with the dolphins within 45 minutes of the birth,” claims the site, “another instance of a free dolphin escorting a newborn human baby to the surface for its first breath.” They claim that wild dolphins will come into shallower pools, massaging the mother to help deliver the child. Despite all of that, when it comes down to it, Sirius has yet to actually have a woman go through with their dolphin assisted birth. “We haven’t gotten there yet.” said one of their founders, Paradise (Star) Newland.
Will the Barringtons go through with it? Would you?
The Water Cooler 