Weird Scientologism #184: The Silent Treatment

Quit Yellin', It's Only Childbirth

from New York Daily News

Katie Holmes' mission impossible will be giving birth without painkillers - or screaming.

That's because her fiancé, Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise, is a Scientologist.

Practitioners of Scientology are against drugs but insist on "silent birth" because they believe it's traumatic for babies to hear their mothers groan or cry.

"Maintain silence in the presence of birth to save the sanity of the mother and the child and safeguard the home to which they will go," church founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote in his best-selling Dianetics.

That's easier to preach than practice.

Another famous Scientologist, actress Kelly Preston, told Redbook magazine in 2000 that she screamed for an epidural while giving birth at home to daughter Ella.

But her husband, actor John Travolta, who is also a Scientologist, didn't have time to drive Preston to the hospital.

"It got hard-core at the end because she was big," Preston said of her 13-hour ordeal.

Travolta later described it as a "beautiful, still experience that lovingly brings a child into the world without screaming or talking."

Of course, he didn't have the baby.

Scientologists also favor seven days of silence for newborns so their first week on Earth is trauma-free. But this has run afoul of state-mandated blood tests, which require at least a pinprick.