Dolphin Assisted Birth – So crazy it just might work
By most accounts, water births started in Russia in the mid 1960s, when Igor Charkovsky’s daughter was born premature. Despite a lack of any medical knowledge or experience, Charkovsky spent the next two years experimenting with water treatments on his daughter, hoping to help her live a full and healthy life. From this experience, he developed a system of massage, stretching and water training for newborns that he claimed would lead to a cohort of super-babies. In the 70s, Charkovsky started to offer illegal water births in a large glass tank in his Moscow apartment. It wasn't so much that Charkovsky thought this was safer or less traumatizing, as other water birth proponents have claimed. To the contrary, he thought it would toughen the babies up. He also advocated dunking babies in ice water.
By then, inspired by the novel world-views of the 60s, the critique of modern childbirth had been well-articulated, but it didn’t take an expert to imagine how bright lights, medications, stressful medical settings, and technological interventions could traumatize both mother and child. While doctors no longer spank newborns to make them cry, for the most part hospital births are just as abrasive and medicalized as they always were, and water birth, while not mainstream, is an accepted and legal alternative birthing technique.
Inspired partly by John C Lilly’s pioneering work with dolphins, Charkovsky soon moved his operation to the Black Sea, home to the bottlenose and the short-beaked common dolphin. He theorized the dolphins would help acclimate the babies to the water, alleviating their fear by example.
Lilly began his research to communicate with dolphins in the 1950s, when he was told that dolphin brains are more similar to those of humans than monkeys. He published two books on the subject in the late 60s and early 70s. The stories include building and implanting an “orgasm button” into a dolphin's brain and injecting dolphins with LSD. He viewed his work to communicate with dolphins as a sort of scaffolding technique humans would use for their next evolutionary leap. While his intentions may have been good and the results interesting, Lilly’s research led to the suffering of many dolphins and other animals, not the least of which included a dolphin kept in a semi-flooded house in an attempt to strengthen the human-dolphin bond.
Eventually, Charkovsky was run out of Russia. His supporters claim it was persecution, but the legal trouble that prompted his move to the US involved sexual assault allegations. The US wasn’t much more open to Igor’s charms. In an interview, he theorized that Americans just weren’t ready. Others believe it was a video of him dunking a newborn child into an icy lake that cooled people's enthusiasm for his methods. But as for Lilly, his proponents didn’t forget the idea of dolphin-assisted birth.
The Sirius Institute started offering dolphin-assisted birth in Hawaii in the mid 90s and continued up to the pandemic, as far as I can tell. The Sirius Institute more broadly calls their work with dolphins “Dolphinization”, which attempts “establishing full communication with the ancient, intelligent Cetacea and going to live in space with free access to our solar system and beyond”.
Founding partner Star Newland says on their website, “Most cetacea have brains larger than ours (up to six times larger for the sperm whale). They have had brains larger than or equal to ours for at least 15-30 million years (at least 2 times longer than our entire accepted evolutionary history as the genus Homo). It is known that dolphins (and presumably the other Cetacea) have a complex language – with up to a trillion “words” possible, using at least four simultaneous sound sources. Therefore, we conclude that they are more intelligent than we are and have all the characteristics we generally use to define our status as human, i.e., self-awareness, intelligence, language, tool-use, culture, etc.”
As John Zerzan points out in When We Are Human while discussing examples of pre-symbolic culture, dolphins “think, feel, and live communally in a web of culture developed about 30 million years ago” without symbolic culture, or the passing down of non-material concepts from generation to generation.
There’s a 1990 report from a website called gentlebirthmethod.com of a woman giving birth with dolphins at an Israeli resort, against the wishes of Israeli authorities. The resort had a heated glass pool next to the Red Sea, where the woman gave birth under the supervision of a doctor. As hoped, a nearby population of dolphins came to assist. The doctor in charge, Dr. Gowri Motha of London, believes that dolphins send “underwater sonar messages of support” that leads to a “tranquil labor”. The mother described the experience as “the most wonderful experience of my life.” It’s well documented that mothers pass stress hormones onto their kids, and a stressful birth is unhealthy for all involved. Meanwhile, an assistant of Charkosky claimed that water and dolphin-assisted babies reach developmental milestones up to 6 months before other babies, have higher brain weight and are often ambidextrous.
In 2015, the Sirius Institute had a media moment in the US and “experts” roundly condemned the practice as dangerous. Some even claimed it all a fabrication and no such births had ever occurred. “They’re wild animals and they’re known for doing some pretty terrible things” said biologist Christie Wilcox in discover magazine, “males will kidnap and gang-rape females…” and “dolphins will toss, beat, and kill small porpoises or baby sharks…” A Newsweek article warned of drowning, illness, infection and sharks. Regardless, it appears that the practice has been in use, in some form, for at least 30 years. To date, there are no reports of dolphins tearing any newborn babies to shreds (only adults).
Without a doubt, some portion of babies will be more responsive to birth in this environment. Is this a breakaway branch of the human species, the birth of a new race? Will it be an amphibious race or, like Lilly hoped, a space faring one? Or is this the move toward a Fourierist harmony, replete with tails, new organs and lemonade seas? The prevailing theory is that whales and dolphins spent a good portion of their evolution on land before returning to the water. Why not us? Or maybe this is just an excellent opportunity to start looking at every living being/process with a little more respect? What other relationships might this approach inspire? Where else could animals assist us in our ethical rewilding?
It's not so much the specifics of this model that are interesting to me as its proximity to batshit crazy. With our particular nervous system, in this particular environment, at this particular time, the possibilities for humans to explore wondrous, extraordinary, beautiful, erotic, hilarious, as-yet unimagined, harmonious relationships with the big other are endless. The things standing between us and harmony are not science or resources or motivation.
It is imagination.
The line between revelation and insanity is a matter of how well the experience is integrated and organized into useful, novel information or useless garbage. In order to know the difference, we’ll have to test the icy, dolphin-infested waters.
Ian Blumberg-Enge
Ian Blumberg-Enge is a model agnostic anarchist, writer, and utopian kook. His work is focused on the intersection of mysticism and anarchism. He is co-author, with Peter J. Carrol, of Interview with a Wizard, published by Mandrake of Oxford.