Читать книгу I WANT TO LIVE, LOVE & BE LOVED. a plea for all of us to find true joy in life and real human connection in peace and freedom онлайн

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Pregnant women are often called ‘mothers-to-be’. This is not correct. They are already mothers to the child in their womb during pregnancy. At least, to varying extents, the labour protection laws and rules around maternity-leave take this into account. However, the fundamental question from the beginning is not only one of maternity protection, but: Is the mother at all willing and able to accept the love her child both shows her and demands from her?

Motherly love is not something abstract and cannot exist only in the imagination. It shows itself very concretely at the particular moment when a child needs it. For example, in the way its mother feeds herself during pregnancy, whether she consumes medication or drugs, how she continues to have sex, whether she keeps working, whether she is fundamentally considerate of the unborn child in her womb, whether she makes contact with it at all or not.

Motherly love is demonstrated at birth when the mother actively cooperates with the child to make the birth a moment of happiness and a heartfelt gesture of welcome for her child.13 Or maybe she passively surrenders to the obstetric system and, in extreme cases, allows the child to be pushed, pulled or cut from her womb. The current rate of 30% and more of births being caesarean births cannot be explained by extreme emergencies alone. It is a man-made phenomenon due to a medical obstetric system and mothers and fathers who do not give the development of the human psyche the importance it really has for their child from the beginning.14