Parenting Quote by Frederick Leboyer

Leboyer doesn’t flirt with metaphor here; he swings a moral sledgehammer. By insisting “Yes, hell exists,” he borrows the certainty of religious threat only to relocate it from cosmic punishment to a mundane, preventable scene: birth. The provocation is strategic. Call it “hell” and you force the reader to feel what medical language often anesthetizes - the brutality that can hide inside routines labeled “standard procedure.”

The subtext is an indictment of adult comfort masquerading as necessity. “Before he gets to us” is the tell: the infant’s ordeal is framed as a toll paid to enter our world, our systems, our schedules. The pronoun “us” makes the accusation collective. It’s not about one cruel doctor or one chaotic delivery; it’s about a culture that treats the newborn as an object to be managed rather than a person arriving. Leboyer pushes responsibility upstream: if hell is “at the beginning,” then it’s designed, not destined.

Context matters. Leboyer, a French obstetrician, became famous for advocating gentler childbirth in the 1970s: dim lights, reduced noise, immediate skin-to-skin contact, less rough handling. In that era’s hospital obstetrics, efficiency and control often trumped sensory care. His rhetoric mirrors that fight. The shock value isn’t accidental; it’s a lever to move institutions. He’s saying: if we can create the first suffering, we can also choose to stop rehearsing it.