Bond between mother and baby really is the most intimate of all

DOES our law understand the bond between a mother and her infant? I wondered about this when the High Court defended the right of the HSE to take a day-old baby away from his mother to “protect” him last week.

The main source of danger to the baby which was identified was his father. His mother offered to remain with the baby at a friend’s house and an offer to host her was also made by a pastor, but these offers were brushed off by the HSE.

Why was the HSE’s first move not to secure a safe place for mother and baby? Was obtaining an emergency care order from the District Court and sending in the gardaí to take the baby from his mother and pass him to the HSE really the only way of protecting the baby?

If so, how is the HSE managing to protect the baby now that the eight-day care order has expired and he is back with his mam? She plans to refer the case to the Supreme Court later this month because it raises, her lawyers say, “an issue of public importance”. The HSE says it is “pointless” to take the case because the care order has elapsed. I disagree. I think it is of crucial importance that the case be fully argued by both sides because it might go some way towards writing the bond between mother and baby into our legal history.

This is difficult territory, legally, philosophically, biologically. No-one is denying that a baby is a person with rights of his or her own. But because human mothers stand up and drop their babies early, their babies are born incredibly immature. So immature are they, in fact, that some anthropologists call them “exterogestate foetuses”. Foetuses on the outside.

Not surprisingly, these helpless little things are programmed, more than anything else, for attachment. Having mother near has, for more than 50m years, been the best chance of survival for most infants. Another human could offer the infant that protection but in practice, most infants are protected by their mothers, in whose bodies they have already lived for nine months.

By the third trimester of pregnancy, an unborn baby’s heart beats faster when it hears its mother’s voice than when it hears the voice of a stranger. As soon as it can turn, a baby will turn towards its mother, or even her clothes, rather than those of a stranger.

The relationship between an infant and its mother is, quite simply, the most intimate relationship which is possible for human beings. But it is also unsettling to the Western mind-set, dedicated as it is to individualism. One being inside another ... aren’t we into the realms of horror here? What Freud called “the uncanny”? Particularly if we’re male and can’t possibly offer this relationship to an infant, perhaps. And our laws and our legal judgements are almost all made by men.

Men can’t feed babies at the breast, either. Suckling has for more than 50m years meant not just nourishment for infants but also security, because if they are suckling their mothers are there. Breast milk is also necessary for the optimal development of human babies, decreasing, for starters, their chances of getting gastrointestinal, respiratory, urinary and ear infections, eczema, asthma, diabetes, Hodgkin’s disease, possibly leukaemia and later in life, Type 2 diabetes, raised blood pressure and obesity.

It was claimed that the baby in the HSE’s care order case was being fed this miraculous breast milk when the gardaí surrounded the house and took him away. Any mother who has struggled to breastfeed a baby will shudder at the thought. In the first days after birth, the mother produces colostrum, a vital substance which only women can make which is jam-packed with immunoglobins and special laxatives to help the baby pass its first stools. Even if the baby is to have no more breast milk, the first few days offer life-long benefits.

The early days are also crucial in establishing the mother’s milk supply because if she is not suckled her body receives the message that the baby is sick or dead and she produces less milk. If the mother doesn’t produce enough milk, the baby will stop being satisfied until its parents reach in desperation for a bottle of formula. The baby will suckle at the breast still less and may even forget how to do it. Before you know where you are there is no more breast-feeding.

This is the story repeated over and over in Irish homes and hospitals so that only 10% of Irish babies are breast-fed beyond a month, when the recommended minimum duration of breast-feeding is six months.

It beggars the belief of anyone who has breast-fed that the woman in last week’s case was given access to her baby for two hours, five days a week. How was the baby to be fed at the weekend? Was the mother to sit pumping herself night and day to keep up her supply and pass the milk to HSE workers?

Or were these issues even discussed? I don’t know. But I do remember my own distress when, following a house fire, I was put into an adult hospital while my breast-fed baby went to a children’s hospital.

My boobs were bursting, sending a message to my brain that my baby was in distress. I got more and more agitated, but no one was interested in my plight because, it seemed, the medics could not understand that me and my baby were inter-dependent. In the end I discharged myself and fled the hospital to latch my baby on.

THIS story would not surprise any farmer who keeps livestock. An adopted woman once told me of her distress when she heard a cow bellowing for her calf while on holiday in the West of Ireland. She became keenly aware of what her mother must have suffered when she gave up her baby. When she finally made contact with her, she found a woman who had spent a lifetime drinking to blot out the pain.

Our national history is full of stories of mothers being separated from their babies. The damage which this separation has caused to women and their children down the years is unquantifiable. This is not to say that babies haven’t been damaged in their mothers’ care too. But it would be interesting to establish, for instance, whether a mother should have a right to feed her child or if the child should have a right to its mother’s milk. One of the unforgettable scenes in Toni Morrison’s famous novel about slavery, Beloved, is of a mother’s precious breast milk being taken by a slave-owner as a form of torture.

It must be clearly understood that separating a mother from her baby will have lifelong consequences and should happen only when every effort to keep them safely together has failed.

We don’t know if that was what happened in last week’s case. Which is why it must go to the Supreme Court later this month. It is indeed “an issue of public importance” with massive potential consequences for anyone who plans to have a baby and anyone who plans to be born.