Joseph Pearce documents the damage done by our attempt to replace a faith in biology with a faith in technology with respect to child-rearing. Nature's plan for our children is that they evolve from the inside out through a series of known matrices which serves as secure bases for exploration of the unknown. Each transition from matrix to matrix - from womb to mother, from mother to world, from world to body, from body to mind - should be gentle, providing an optimal balance between the known-familiar and the unknown-unfamiliar.

      The first transition from womb to mother - the process of birth - provides a dramatic illustration of the undermining of the predetermined inside-out plan by our outside-in technological interference. Mothers in traditional societies, without the dubious advantage of technology, provide their child with a gentle transition. Marcelle Gerber, with a research grant from the United Nations Children's Fund, discovered that children in Kenya and Uganda were calm, happy, alert and enormously intelligent. By contrast, birth in industrialized countries is a technological, profit-making event, with little respect for the integrity of the child and the participation of the mother, which lights the fuse of a psychic time bomb with untold subsequent damage.