The pioneering French obstetrician Michel Odent, who has died aged 95, spent more than 50 years passionately promoting understanding of the natural physiology of childbirth. From the 1960s onwards, “active management of labour”, using artificial oxytocin and other techniques, had dominated obstetric practice. Odent’s work flagged up its pitfalls, and offered an alternative view.
Daniela Drandić of the International Confederation of Midwives said: “In the 1970s birth was institutionalised and medicalised. Michel Odent reminded us that physiological processes during pregnancy and birth should be respected, which was very important as things had gone too far in the other direction. There wasn’t much discourse at the time and he showed us another way.”
Many of the practices Odent championed are now taken for granted: birthing pools and home-like birthing centres are commonplace in the UK, for example, and it is widely accepted that a mother should be able to move around in labour and needs undisturbed time to bond with her baby.
In 1962, Odent began working at Pithiviers state hospital, in a French town 50 miles south of Paris. He had trained as a surgeon, but was interested in obstetrics. When the director of the maternity unit stepped down, Odent took over, running the unit until 1985. He had read the work of the French obstetrician Frédérick Leboyer and the Russian Igor Charkovsky, an exponent of water births, who had similar ideas, but he also had the confidence to follow his own instincts and observations. He championed squatting or standing to give birth rather than lying flat, having seen women do this when he was working in Algeria, and he turned a conventional delivery suite into a more comfortable room, with cushions and blinds.
Concerned about women’s lower back pain in labour, he acquired an inflatable paddling pool, and then went on to install a birth pool in his unit. After the 100th birth using this method, he wrote a landmark paper, Birth Under Water, for the medical journal The Lancet (1983) explaining how effective it was at reducing pain. In 1982 the BBC brought his methods to a wide audience with a documentary, Birth Reborn, about the Pithiviers midwifery unit. It revealed a hushed, home-like maternity unit, with dimmed lights, where women in labour could move freely and feel secure.
Odent had a huge respect for the six midwives on the unit, who inspired some of his key ideas. He found that a woman in labour benefits from calm private surroundings with just a single experienced midwife, who is saying little and doing a repetitive task such as knitting. It is in these conditions, Odent taught, that oxytocin is released – the “love hormone” as he liked to call it – which stimulates uterine contractions. In a harshly lit, busy labour ward with a team of people scrutinising her, a woman in labour is likely to feel stressed, producing adrenaline, which inhibits production of oxytocin. Dimming the lights too was not some whimsical fad: it encourages the release of melatonin, a hormone that acts with oxytocin to facilitate birth. These were key insights. Janet Balaskas, who runs the Active Birth Centre in London, said: “We always knew that ‘nature knows best’ but it was Odent who provided the ‘why’.”
As news of Odent’s methods spread, pregnant women from all over Europe and the US got in touch wanting to give birth in Pithiviers, and, according to one observer, midwives arrived in the little town “by the busload” to see his methods first-hand. The number of babies born each year at the unit quadrupled in Odent’s time, but he was beginning to think that he could be more useful as a researcher and writer and was much in demand as a speaker internationally.
In 1985 he left Pithiviers and moved to London. He spent the next 40 years there, researching, writing and promoting his ideas. He also registered with the UK General Medical Council and continued to assist at home births.
It was Odent’s profound belief that how you are born and your wellbeing in “the primal period” (from conception to your first birthday) have lifelong effects. He set up the Primal Health Research Centre in London, and a database to collate epidemiological data and research his theories. He was a prolific writer, authoring numerous articles and 17 books, in 22 languages. His book The Farmer and the Obstetrician (2002) is a call to arms, saying that just as farming in the 20th century had scant respect for nature, using artificial fertiliser and pesticides, so too has childbirth become an “industrialised” procedure with its widespread use of caesarean section and artificial hormones.
Combining the roles of philosopher and obstetrician, Odent rhapsodised about mother earth and the “cocktail of love hormones” that precipitates natural birth. He felt we manipulate nature at our peril.
Odent could be controversial: for example, in 2009 he recommended that fathers should stay out of the delivery room if they were at all anxious so as not to disturb their partners. And he expounded theories in his later books that were met with scepticism by some experts, such as his linking of autism, anorexia and other psychological disorders to artificial induction of labour and caesarean sections.
Born in Bresles, northern France, Michel was the elder son of Madeleine (nee Charpentier) and Paul Odent. His father worked for a local sugar factory and his mother, who had a profound influence on his life, ran a nursery school and wrote poetry. He attended school in nearby Clermont, cycling nine miles each way, before moving to Paris aged 18, to study medicine at the Sorbonne University.
Having trained in surgery, in 1958 Odent started two years of military service in Algeria, where the war for independence from France was taking place. He worked in a hospital in Tizi Ouzou in the Kabylie region and, among other things, witnessed a new technique for caesarean sections. After returning 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 TV journalist, with whom he made his home in Hampstead, north London, and had a son, Pascal, in 1985. After they separated, in 1997 he formed a long-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 younger brother, Daniel, predeceased him.