> This has been recommended by ayurveda long back. Most ayurvedic
> medications/herbs recommended during pregnancy try to increase
> progesterone. The animal with plenty quantity of oxytocin,
> progesterone is Indian cow. The love towards the offspring is the
> unique feature found in maximum quantity in cow. Hence, Indian
> mythology often depicts lord Krishna with his cow, and calf drinking
> milk from the cow. Most medications to aid fertility, to help baby
> grow healthy in the womb and/or to increase the chances of full term
> pregnancy are made using Indian cow ghee.

i can't imagine that there is any oxytocin or progesterone in cows milk
- i hope not!!
i think there is a better defense of cows milk and ghee, namely, in its
capacity to nourish ojas

>
> The reason cow is so holly in India is not far to seek. Author has
> seen cow deliver the calf in an hour or so, without any medical help.
> Tribal women also deliver normally, in less than few hours, no
> anasthesia needed. Certain hebal decoction is givebn prior to second
> stage of labor, and the pregnant lady keeps holding certain roots in
> her hand. Those roots she must release after the birth, to limit the
> post partum hemorrage. Within a day, she starts household work again.

hee hee! so much for Indian women being treated like a goddess! :-)
but seriously, tribal women are much healthier for a number of reasons,
not just cows milk

my wife gave birth to our second son in India (Coimbatore), so i have
some experience with the system there in this regard
btw, it was impossible to find a midwife anywhere (and I was studying
at an Ayurvedic hospital, with female drs)
apparently those that exist do so out of necessity only in the rural
areas not served by modern medicine - in contrast, both my other
children have been born at home in Canada with midwives in attendance,
registered with a hospital in case of emergency - not all things are
so backward in the West as suggested

anyway, the situation you describe for tribal women is probably very
much the same for the "underclasses" as well
we rejected the private health care system in India primarily because
we did some research and found that the caesarian rate was 75%
in contrast, the public system has a caesarian rate less than 5%

i think the difference is two-fold:
1. the private system has a greater proclivity to using invasive
medical techniques simply because there is a certain "status" attached
to using them
2. the women using the private system are usually overweight and very
unhealthy - a side effect of being wealthy is that you can hire
somebody else to do your housework for you

among the women in the public system, the rock-breakers,
street-sweepers and ditch-diggers: these women were strong and sinewy,
often working right up until the day their water broke, and then within
a day or so were back at work with the baby firmly swaddled their back

while i'm not sure that this is a good idea - i think women should get
a break from their duties pre and post-partum - it does illustrate the
need to be healthy, fit and strong - i can't imagine any other ordeal
that will tax a women to such an extent as giving birth

***

there is no doubt that human fertility rates are in decline - we are
accumulating compounds in our body from environmental pollutants at an
unprecedented rate, and these are interfering with our fertility

but lifestyle factors also play a huge role in this: diet, coffee,
alcohol, cigarettes, drug use etc., these are only a few major factors
that can drastically reduce fertility and interfere with pregnancy and
fetal development

interestingly, by expending so much of our collective resources to
ensure that previously infertile couples get pregnant we are trying to
reverse what is probably a natural biological process to weed out those
humans that cannot produce viable offspring and thus dilute the gene
pool

Todd Caldecott
todd@...