GOLD Learning Speakers

The perinatal period is a pivotal time in development for mothers and babies, as well as being a time of exceptional evolutionary investment in mammalian survival. During labor and birth, Mother Nature provides an extraordinary hormonal cocktail that is designed to enhance survival, efficiency and reward for mothers and offspring, and also to optimize life-long well-being by optimizing breastfeeding and mother-baby attachment. In this lecture Dr Buckley describes Mother Nature’s superb design for mothers and babies, and the hormonal systems that contribute to life-long well-being for modern humans, as for our ancestors and our mammalian cousins. She also details the conditions needed to optimize this hormonal orchestration for mother and baby, and how maternity care professionals can support this system of physiologic birth. In addition, she discusses the importance of neonatal bacterial colonization, another pivotal event for life long well-being. Dr Buckley is the author of the up-coming report The Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing (Childbirth Connection, US) and her material is based on the best-available research evidence.

Contemporary childbearing has benefited from many medical advances, and from highly skilled and committed maternity care providers. However, current high rates of maternity care interventions may be disadvantageous for the healthy majority. This presentation summarises the healthy functioning of hormonal physiology in relation to four important hormonal systems, and the benefits of physiologic childbearing for mother and baby. It also explores the possible impacts of common maternity care practices on this hormonal physiology, including induction of labor, epidural analgesia and caesarean section, and suggest midwifery approaches that may optimise hormonal physiology when intervention are needed. Dr Buckley also considers the hormonal physiology of childbearing in relation to other models including epigenetic perspectives and the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) model. This presentation is based on Dr Buckley’s ground-breaking 2015 report Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing.