Excerpted from Birth as an American Rite of Passage
Vitamin K Injection
Description and Official Rationale
This practice was instituted in hospitals during the era of routine mother- infant separation. According to Williams, "although controversial in other countries," injection of the newborn with Vitamin K right after birth is almost universal in the United States (Cunningham et al. 1989:611). The rationale for this is that newborns are born with a "deficiency" of Vitamin K, which they also do not receive in breast milk. This leads to a decrease in Vitamin K-dependent blood coagulation factors, making newborns more susceptible to hemorrhage in the first several days of life until Vitamin K is manufactured in their systems (Cunningham et al. 1989:611). The risk is small--about 1 in 200--but real.
Physiological Effects
Injection of newborns with Vitamin K in large doses has been implicated as a cause of neonatal jaundice (Allison 1955; Cunningham et al. 1989:611). A small dose of 1 mg seems to have no ill effects on the baby beyond the pain caused by the injection itself. If newborns are allowed to suckle soon after birth, the injection of Vitamin K is less necessary, since the colostrum that comes immediately from the mother's breast before her milk lets down is usually rich in Vitamin K (Trevathan 1987:213). In about 1 out of 200 babies, even in those that area breastfed, however, there is significant danger of hemorrhage. For this reason, even midwives attending home births sometimes give injections of Vitamin K. One Anycity midwife, for example, feels that the risk of cerebral hemorrhage is heightened in very fast or very long labors, when the baby has a strongly cone-shaped head, or when the baby demonstrates significant heart-rate decelerations during late labor. Because she believes in their value, she gives Vitamin K injections to around 40% of the babies she catches. But she feels strongly that breastfed babies born with "easy births" do not need Vitamin K, and that it should not be administered routinely to all babies.)
Ritual Purposes
If the pain that the individual newborn feels from a shot with a needle were up for consideration under the technocratic model, then the decision as to whether or not to inflict that pain on a newborn would be made on an individual basis according to specific need. But instead, the medical response to the danger of hemorrhage, as to the danger of blindness from VD, has been to standardize the Vitamin K injection for all newborns. In The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul has written:
Standardization means resolving in advance all the problems that might possibly impede the functioning of an organization. It is not a matter of leaving it to inspiration, ingenuity, or even intelligence to find a solution [to a problem]; it is rather in some way to anticipate both the difficulty and the resolution. From then on, standardization creates impersonality, in the sense that the organization relies more on methods and techniques than on individuals. We thus have all the marks of a technique. Organization is thus a technique. -Ellul 1965:11-12
Symbolically speaking, the standardization of the Vitamin K injection and indeed all the routine procedures performed on the newborn baby reinforce the messages to both baby and mother that nature is inadequate, that they are now dependent on organizations--that is, on techniques--for their lives and health. This message seems a fair and accurate reflection of the realities of technocratic life. In effect, these postpartum procedures form the modern structural equivalent of baptism: they symbolically enculturate the newborn, removing her step-by-step from the natural realm through restructuring her very physiology in accordance with technocratic standardization.
© Robbie Davis-Floyd PhD, Used with Permission
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