If we look at the most serious issue of all I think, and that is the automatic practice of separating the infant from the mother at birth.  Now this is changing.  More and more hospitals are beginning to put the infant with the mother.  There are shorter and shorter periods of stay in the hospitals than there used to be.  A lot of improvements are being made as a result of hospitals trying to protect their financial investments.  But the situation is still far, far from good and we are now dealing with the cumulative effect of 40 some years of serious outrage of the newborn infant and the mother.

Now if we look at the most serious issue of all I think, and that is the automatic practice of separating the infant from the mother at birth.  Now this is changing.  More and more hospitals are beginning to put the infant with the mother.  There are shorter and shorter periods of stay in the hospitals than there used to be.  A lot of improvements are being made as a result of hospitals trying to protect their financial investments.  But the situation is still far, far from good and we are now dealing with the cumulative effect of 40 some years of serious outrage of the newborn infant and the mother.  

This separation of infant and mother that was practiced for all those years is the most serious of all the things.  The minute the infant is out of the womb, the umbilical cord was cut, we know that they are very sensitive to bright lights and the amphitheater, the operating theater is very brilliantly lit and they peel the infants eyes back and then drop those chemicals in as you know to protect them against syphilis or gonorrhea, something like that, and they infant is then weighed and whisked off to a nursery.  Now this went on and it’s still the case in a awful lot of hospitals in the United States, that follow the same practices.

Now let's look at what happens when you separate a child immediately at birth and you put him into the nursery's and so on.  That child undergoes what's called psychological abandonment.  They feel abandoned.  They've lost their matrix, they've lost contact with every stimulus they've had for nine months, they're given only this strange barren isolated world and there is a retreat of the system and it takes and average of 9 to 12 weeks for nature to compensate for this and for nature to compensate for the lack of physical nurturing and stimulus.  They're generally taken home, kept in cribs, kept in playpens and so on, always at a distance, never with close contact, they're bottle fed, breast feeding disappeared in 97% of our mothers, and they’re bottle fed.  We were told back in the fifties by our Obstetrician and Pediatrician not only to bottle feed, they didn't like the idea of breast-feeding at all, but to use bottle holders so that there would be no personal contact.  And so what do you have happening? 

You have happening a whole generation of young people appearing, not only who have an underlying, unnamable anxiety and fear of the world, but an enormous hostility against the world and who feel alienated, cut off, not belonging, not being a part of why was I born with a strange face, I'm a stranger in a strange land.  Why can't I be one of them out there, each child feeling that.  Why?  Because literally these great bonding structures of the limbic structure which hold us together as a species have not been activated in that infant themselves.  They themselves will be far less able to respond to their own infants, particularly if the same travesty is perpetrated on their children that was on them.  So we find a cumulative effect, a kind of cycle again escalating of the damages taking place.

Now where do these appear.  These appear at all of the major bondings.  I know Dianne Ayers was so contemptuous of people who speak of further bondings beyond birth, but I promise you this, and I know this to be the case, and common sense if you look at all of the data will show it, that when we have that brain growth spurt at birth, age 1, age 4, age 7, and so forth, at each of these periods new bonds are established.  That's what they are, bonds meaning simply new relational patterns.  This is all biological.  First of all with the mother, then with the family and then with the whole world, the environment around the child, and then what around age 7 the great social bonds.  All societies throughout history have recognized the appearance of the social ego and our social inclinations around age 7.  Our matrix begins to shift from the family toward the society as our main source of information and so on.

Now those bonds, and then of course the great pair bond between male and female and later adolescence on which all life rests.  Maybe you can get it from a test tube, but it won't be the same.  All life rests on that and those pair bonds all depend on the establishment of these very basic biological neural structures in this body brain system.  Establishing the bond at birth is no guarantee of any other bond taking place.  That whole thing can come to not at any point.  But without the establishment of the foundation you're pretty well assured that it will be dog-gone difficult to establish further bondings later on.  So again, the preliminary structures must be established in order for the higher structures to open.  So for these very high bonds, bonds of the spirit, don't think there's not a bond of the spirit that should open up later in life, none of those stand much of a chance if that initial foundation is missing and we systematically eliminated it from our children, cumulative affect over a 40 or 50 year period.  

There is a raft of children being born to the world who are abandoned, abandoned very quickly.  And the plight of the unwanted child became a focus of international studies centering in Czechoslovakia recently, and a couple of years ago they published their final reports on this.  And they find that the child who is unwanted, who is abandoned at birth, or who senses that they are unwanted and abandoned at birth, the plight of that child is extreme.  They are at risk on every level of human development.  The intellectual system is severely at risk for development.  Their immune system is at risk.  Why?  Because immunities are controlled by the emotional cognitive, it's interaction with the heart and the hormones there.
We speak of America as the world of the touch-starved child.  Actually Montagu wrote a marvelous book about it and we speak about our touch-starved children, children who have critically lacked the stimulus of their physical body system in the early years of life from isolation, separation.

Now I'm just trying to hammer this down to make sure that we recognize the full scope and not only touched on a very minor part of it.  Full scope of the critical need of the infant’s interaction with either the mother or permanent caretaker of some sort, immediately at birth from then on.  This doesn't mean if the separation takes place that all is hopeless.  Any of these processes can be compensated for and the deficiency overcomes later on with sufficient work and intelligence.  Unfortunately those two are too often absent.