TAn essential practice for safe and healthy birth is to keep mothers and babies together and ensure unlimited opportunities for skin-to-skin care and breastfeeding. Mothers and babies have a physiologic need to be together during the moments, hours,and days following birth, and this time together significantly improves maternal and newborn outcomes.Childbirth educators and other health-care professionals have a responsibility to support this physiologic need through education, advocacy, and implementation of evidence-based maternity practices.Routine separation of healthy mothers and babies can be harmful and can negatively influence short- and long-term health outcomes and breastfeeding success.