Letters to the Editor

• Hope the baby doesn't have high bilirubin.

  [Read the article: Free Katie Holmes!]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  My son did. You know what the treatment is? LIGHT. They had to put my baby in a lightbox because there wasn't enough light coming into my hospital room or the nursery, and he wasn't good enough at breastfeeding yet to get enough milk to flush it out.

  Seven days in the dark for a bili baby... well, I don't know if it would kill them, but I suspect it would be bad, bad, bad. And since you can't tell the color of a baby's skin in the dark, no one will know the baby has high bilirubin until they take it out. The way you tell a bili baby without a medical examination is: is the skin orange? (at least for a white child, I don't know what a dark-skinned bili baby would look like. I only ever saw mine.) How are you going to see orange skin in the dark?

  Also, it is hard enough to learn to breastfeed without having to do it in the dark. It's really not as simple as "baby glomps nipple" -- both mother and child need to learn. If they're doing formula, ironically, that might be easier, but somehow formula doesn't seem consistent with most of the rest of the Scientologists' ideas.

  Quiet and dark won't hurt the baby if it is frequently snuggled -- not for just seven days. But being abandoned in a room by itself could be very damaging; babies have died of that. So I hope they're not talking about leaving the baby there except when feeding; if they're not going to talk to it, and they have the lights off, they better snuggle it frequently.

  To be honest, I believe that refusing to allow your baby a medical examination on religious grounds is child abuse, and whether you're a Scientologist or a Christian Scientist, you have no right to deny your children medical examinations. (Treatment is another story; the history of medicine is full of dubious treatments that were seen as absolutely necessary until they turned out to be absolutely harmful, and reasonable people can disagree on matters like "will immunizing my children expose them to the risk of developing autism?" or "should I put a cochlear implant in my deaf baby's ear?" An *examination*, however, to determine what *is* wrong with the child, if anything, to allow the parents to discuss possible treatments with a doctor, is absolutely necessary and should be the birthright of all children.)

  Katie Holmes can do whatever stupid thing she wants with her birth; she's a grown woman and if she agrees to something as dumb as "no drugs *and* no sound", whatever. I have no respect for adults who as adults adopt religious beliefs that are harmful to them, particularly women who buy into misogynistic religions as adults (I'd have as little respect for men who buy into misandrist religions, except that, aside from certain extremely fringe radical elements within Wicca, there aren't any.) Holmes deserves what she gets. But people who risk serious harm to their babies for stupid religious reasons are another story.

  Permalink Thursday, March 30, 2006 07:09 AM