Michel Odent, a French obstetrician whose natural childbirth innovations, including homelike delivery rooms and birthing pools, aimed to make new mothers feel calm and secure, died on Aug. 19 in London. He was 95.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his companion and medical partner, Liliana Lammers, a doula.
Avoiding complex interventions and medical technology whenever possible, Dr. Odent pioneered birthing techniques that became widely adopted. Among them were delivering the baby in a warm bath; allowing the mother to move and even be upright if she wished; creating serene delivery rooms and keeping men out of them; using drugs only minimally during birth; and encouraging breastfeeding immediately after.
He wrote more than 15 books arguing for these methods, gave lectures and speeches around the world, and founded a research center in London for the study of fetal and newborn health.
Behind his ideas was a simple conviction, arrived at early in his career: Birth is involuntary, and the mind must be cut out of the process. “Human birth cannot work as long as a woman is thinking,” Dr. Odent told an interviewer last year.
“What you can do,” he added, “is facilitate it by eliminating the activity of the thinking brain, of the neocortex.”
Dr. Odent had several epiphanies when he was director of surgery and the maternity unit at the provincial hospital of Pithiviers, an hour south of Paris, in the early 1960s. In one of them, he offered a glass of Champagne to a woman who was having difficulties with her birth, as a way of joining in celebration with the woman who had just had her baby in the room next door.
“Ha, labor started immediately!” Dr. Odent recalled, with a triumphant chuckle, in the interview. “She could not reach the birthing room; she gave birth in the corridor. Through anecdotes like that, I learned what was essential.”
The International Confederation of Midwives, in a statement on his death, said Dr. Odent’s “vision and writing reshaped the way we understand human birth,” adding that he “reminded us that birth is not a medical procedure to be controlled, but a primal rhythm to be respected.”
Michel Robert Fortuné Odent was born on July 7, 1930, in Bresles, a town in the Oise, north of Paris, to Paul Odent, who worked at the local sugar factory, and Madeleine (Carpentier) Odent, the headmistress of the local school.
Michel rode his bicycle seven miles each day to attend secondary school. He went on to study medicine at the Sorbonne.
“I was interested in human beings,” he said, “and the best way to study human beings was to study medicine.”
He was drafted into the French Army and served as a doctor in Algeria during that country’s war for independence in the late 1950s. In the hospital to which he was assigned in Tizi Ouzou, he first witnessed a new cesarean section procedure. In 1962, after returning to France, he was offered the direction of the surgical unit at Pithiviers; he remained there for the next 23 years.
Those who came to the Pithiviers hospital to give birth, he realized, were mainly village women. “For many of them, going to the hospital was to die,” he said. “And suddenly, you are going there to give birth. I understood the importance of the environment. So we tried to modify the environment.”
Dr. Odent created darkened, quiet birthing rooms with minimal furniture and medical equipment. There was singing and piano playing every Tuesday.
“He was making Pithiviers a place you would look forward to going to,” Ms. Lammers, his companion, said in an interview.
By the 1970s, Mr. Odent’s small revolution had begun to attract attention. In 1979 the midwife Jane Gillett came to Pithiviers to observe his work for the British medical journal The Lancet. She left impressed.
“To some people the safety of hospital delivery is paramount,” Ms. Gillett wrote, “while others extol the more relaxed atmosphere of the home. Dr. Odent seems to have obtained the best of both.”
“Among the factors contributing to his success,” she added, “may be the friendly atmosphere in his unit; the positive approach to normal outcome; the comfortable and homely birth room; the constant attention during labor and delivery from birth attendants well known to the mother (and in particular Dr. Odent himself).”
Twenty years later, The Lancet called Dr. Odent “one of the last real general surgeons,” describing him as “the obstetrician who introduced in a French state hospital the concepts of homelike birthing rooms and birthing pools.”
A BBC documentary about Dr. Odent, “Birth Reborn,” was shown in 1982, consolidating his fame. That also became the title of his most famous book, published in 1984.
In 1985 he left France for London to establish his Primal Health Research Center and begin a new career writing, lecturing and assisting with home births.
Besides Ms. Lammers, Dr. Odent is survived by a daughter, Sylvie Odent, a geneticist; a son, Pascal; his wife Nicole, from whom he was separated; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Dr. Odent grew weary of being associated with his most celebrated innovation from the Pithiviers years, the birthing pool. But he did not disavow it.
“I thought that immersion in the water might be a good way to reduce the need for drugs,” he said. “So I went to a shop and I bought a bathing pool, a plastic inflatable bathing pool. It worked well. Women were attracted by water.”
By the end of his career, Dr. Odent had grown more pessimistic about medical interventions. His book “The Birth of Homo, the Marine Chimpanzee” (2017) attracted criticism by drawing links between delivery by cesarean section and autism.
He never lost his fundamental belief that the fewer interventions there were during childbirth, the better for the whole process.
“I’ve helped in thousands of births in France and in England,” he told the newsmagazine Le Point in 2022, “and I can assure you that things go so much better when the woman is in a peaceful environment, with nobody around her except for a quiet and experienced midwife.”
What a woman giving birth needs, he added, is not “perfusions, monitoring, constant surveillance; what she needs is to feel secure and protected against everything that might disturb her.”
Sheelagh McNeill and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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