As a midwife, I’ve spent considerable amount of time with young parents to-be in their springtime season. In this hopeful chapter, they often expect to birth their baby and mostly get back to their busy lives with a baby in tow. “But babies,” I tell them, “are not on iPhone time.” I teach them that we need to slow down for our babies, and take the time to be with these fresh little humans. Pretty consistently, the mothers who take the time to spend the first few weeks a little more quietly with their babies on their chests, especially with some “skin-to-skin” time, seem to ‘luck out’ more often with calm, bright-eyed babies who pretty comfortably settle into life along side their families....

Time is a frequently unnamed and unacknowledged medical complication plaguing most births currently taking place in hospitals and even birth centers. Considering the fast-paced nature of modern culture, perhaps it follows that the issue of time is having a never-before-seen, and increasingly disastrous effect, on pregnancy, birth and postpartum recovery.