Michel Odent obituary | Childbirth

The French obstetrician Pioneer Michel Odent, who died at the age of 95, has spent more than 50 years passionately promoting understanding of the natural physiology of childbirth. From the 1960s, “active work management”, using artificial oxytocin and other techniques, had dominated obstetric practice. Odent’s work reported its traps and offered an alternative view.

Daniela Drandić, of the International Confederation of Midwives, said: “In the 1970s, birth was institutionalized and medicalized. Michel Odent reminded us that physiological processes during pregnancy and birth had to be respected, which was very important because things had gone too far in the other direction. There was not many speeches at the time and he showed us another way. ”

Many practices defended by the ODDER are now taken for acquired: childbirth basins and home delivery centers are common in the United Kingdom, for example, and it is widely accepted that a mother should be able to move in work and needs not disturbed time to bond with her baby.

In 1962, Odent began working at the Pithiviers State Hospital, in a French city 80 kilometers south of Paris. He had trained as a surgeon, but was interested in the obstetrics. When the director of the maternity unit resigned, Odent took over, leading unity until 1985. He had read the work of the French obstetrician Frédéric Leboyer and the Russian Igor Charkovsky, an exhibitor of births of water, who had similar ideas, but he also had the confidence to follow his own instincts and observations. He defended the crouching or standing to give birth rather than going to bed flat, having seen women do it when he worked in Algeria, and he transformed a suite of conventional delivery into a more comfortable room, with cushions and blinds.

Concerned about pain in the lower back of women, he acquired an inflatable wardrobe pool, then continued to install a birth swimming pool in his unit. After the 100th birth using this method, he wrote a historic document, birth underwater, for the medical newspaper The Lancet (1983) explaining how effective it was to reduce pain. In 1982, the BBC brought its methods to a large audience with a documentary, Birth Reborn, on the unit of Pithiviers midwife. He revealed an muffled and home maternity hospital, with dim lights, where women at work could move freely and feel safe.

Odent had enormous respect for the six midwives of unity, which inspired some of his key ideas. He found that a woman at work benefits from a calm private environment with a single experienced midwife, who says little and does a repetitive task like knitting. It was under these conditions, taught that oxytocin is released – “love hormone” as he liked to call it – which stimulates uterine contractions. In a very enlightened and animated labor room with a team of people who examine it, a woman at work is likely to feel stressed, producing adrenaline, which inhibits the production of oxytocin. There was also no fanciful fashion: he encouraged the release of melatonin, a hormone that acts with oxytocin to facilitate birth. These are key ideas. Janet Balaskas, who directs the active birth center in London, said: “We have always known that” nature knows better “, but it was Odent who provided the” why “.”

While the news of Odd’s methods spread, pregnant women from all Europe and the United States contacted the birth of pithiviers and, according to a observer, the midwives arrived in the small town “by the bus” to see its first-hand methods. The number of babies born each year to the unit was quadrupled at the time of Odent, but it began to think that it could be more useful as a researcher and writer and was very demanding as an international speaker.

In 1985, he left Pithiviers and moved to London. He spent the next 40 years there, looking for, writing and promoting his ideas. He also registered with the United Kingdom General Medical Council and continued to help at home birth.

It was the deep conviction of Odent that the way you were born and your well-being in “the primary period” (from design to your first birthday) have life effects. He created the Primal Health Research Center in London and a database to collect epidemiological data and seek his theories. He was a prolific writer, creating many articles and 17 books, in 22 languages. His book The Farmer and the Obstetrician (2002) is a call to arms, affirming that, like agriculture, in the 20th century, had a little respect for nature, using artificial fertilizers and pesticides, the same goes for childbirth has become a “industrialized” procedure with its general use of the Cesarean section and artificial hormones.

Combining the roles of the philosopher and the obstetrician, the Rhapsodized Odent on the Mother Earth and the “Cocktail of Hormones of Love” which precipitates natural birth. He felt that we manipulate nature at our own risk.

The Odd could be controversial: for example, in 2009, he recommended that fathers stay outside the delivery room if they were anxious so as not to disturb their partners. And he exposed theories in his later books that have been encountered by certain experts, such as his bond of autism, anorexia and other psychological disorders to artificial induction of work and cesarean sections.

Born in Bresles, in the north of France, Michel was the eldest son of Madeleine (née Charpentier) and Paul Odent. His father worked for a local sugar factory and his mother, who had a deep influence on his life, led a nursery school and wrote poetry. He attended the school in Clermont nearby, on a bicycle to nine miles in each direction, before moving to Paris at 18, to study medicine at the University of Sorbonne.

Having trained in surgery in 1958, Odent began two years of military service in Algeria, where the war for the independence of France took place. He worked in a hospital in Tizi Ouzou in the Kabylia region and, among other things, witnessed a new Cesarean technique. After his return home, Odent took a position as a surgeon in Pithiviers.

In 1957, Odent married Nicole Toulat, with whom he had two children, Sylvie and Christophe. They remained married but decided to separate. In 1983, he met Judy Graham, a British television journalist, with whom he took up residence in Hampstead, north of London, and had a son, Pascal, in 1985. After their separation, in 1997, he established a lasting relationship with Liliana Lammers, a Doula, providing support around childbirth, and continued to live in Hampstead with her.

Odent is survived by Liliana, Nicole, Sylvie and Pascal, five grandchildren and two great grandchildren. His son Christophe and his younger brother Daniel preceded him.