A substantial body of research, including a recent Cochrane review (1), demonstrates that positioning a newborn skin-to-skin during the first hour after birth has beneficial effects on the health of the baby and the mother. The instinctive behavior pattern of norm al, unmedicated neonatal infan ts during the first hour after birth while in continuous skin-to-skin contact with their mothers has been documented elsewhere and includes suckling as the eighth stage (2,3) in the progression of nine instinctive neonatal behaviors. Breastfeeding within the first hour has been shown to have an inverse relationship with breastfeeding difficulties (4) and neonatal mortality (5).