KEY POINTS:
Tell me someone got the story wrong, and a 34-year-old woman did not take her unexpected, premature baby to Buller Hospital in a bucket.
Shocked she may have been, but at her age there's no excuse for dumping the child in a bucket on a cold, mid-winter night. Was there nothing warm to wrap up this tiny human being? Even a newspaper would suffice.
Once in the hands of nurses and three doctors, no expense was spared in the 10-hour battle to save the child's life. Helicopters and a fixed wing plane ferried baby - which had to be resuscitated twice - to Hokitika, Greymouth and Wellington.
Meanwhile, the mother was transported by ambulance to Christchurch and reunited with her baby. She is, reportedly, "adjusting to motherhood".
I worry about this child, and I fear overworked maternity staff will be pushed into the same situation as those at Middlemore Hospital charged with caring for the Kahui twins - reluctantly turning a blind eye to inadequate parenting.
This West Coast mother may be different. Chucking baby in a bucket was perhaps a lapse of judgment brought on by the shock of seeing what had emerged, and she's now bonded well with her bundle of joy.
But I'm not optimistic. Current policy concerning mothers and babies is to get them out of the hospital as soon as possible, regardless of how they are coping.
I blame the feminists who, in declaring quite rightly most deliveries are straightforward and mothers are not ill, went overboard in their quest for minimising hospital care (especially if male obstetricians or general practitioners were in charge of the birth) and made mothers feel pressured to get off the delivery trolley, pick up their blinking newborns and sail home pretending they could cope.
Most of us can't. We need those three or four days with nurses close to learn to breastfeed, bathe baby, rock him or her to sleep and yes, just lie there gazing while baby sleeps.
When I catch the train to Wellington I drive past a shabby building in Featherston where two of my children were born 29 and 28 years ago. Now privatised, it was once a purpose-built maternity home, where we had our own rooms and could stay for at least a week if necessary. Presided over by Matron Toohill, every mother was treated like a princess.
Two days after my daughter's birth, when the hormones kicked in and tears flowed for no reason, my partner growled at me for some minor crime.
He fled when the waterworks started, only to be grabbed by matron as he passed her office and berated for being inconsiderate to a mother who had, in her words, completed one of the world's most important tasks.
Why can't we go back to this, at least for those who feel the need?
I don't care if women want to have babies at home, in a spa pool, or horse trough, as long as the babies are safe. But often they are not, and women who don't care should be over-ruled by today's equivalent of matron.
I used to think maternal love was automatic when I had my first child 33 years ago. When that little squawking person, skinny as a boned-out chicken, is placed in your arms you wonder where all that love had been hiding which flows out into your child. Didn't every mother feel the same?
Sadly, no. When my fourth was born 11 years later, I watched in anguish as mothers escaped down to the dayroom to smoke (permitted back then) despite every effort from nursing staff to get them to breastfeed and care for their infants.
As I write this, a "naughty" cow (as the farmer called her because she's not due to calf until mid-July) has just given birth to a little white-faced calf on the hill outside my window.
I tried to photograph it but mum cow moved between baby and me, then frightened me away with her "I'll charge if you come any closer" glare. She'd kill for her baby.
That's not always the way with nature, however. On the farm, ewes which abandoned their starving lambs were culled, their babies mothered up with a ewe whose lamb had died.
This is too draconian for humans. But with increasing abortions, and no reduction in numbers of abused and murdered children, clearly many adults don't want kids. At the same time we have couples desperately seeking children. Maori crossed this divide centuries ago with the concept of whangai. Isn't it time for Pakeha to revisit the adoption issue?
* deb.coddington@xtra.co.nz
