BFUSA presents breastfeeding as natural yet requiring medical and administrative oversight, mothers as empowered but uniquely vulnerable, and medical staff as responsive to mothers but driven by objective goals and ...
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Midwifery and breastfeeding ideologues have hijacked evidence based medicine
Midwives and lactation professionals use the term “evidence based medicine” so often, ...
Breastfeeding and the canonization of false facts
“Breast is best.” Except that it’s not. How did an ideological claim, ...
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Breastfeeding rhetoric is designed to silence and coerce women
BFUSA presents breastfeeding as natural yet requiring medical and administrative oversight, mothers as empowered but uniquely vulnerable, and medical staff as responsive to mothers but driven by objective goals and unquestioned medical evidence. BFUSA policies frame mothers as capable of, and entitled to, individual choice but then undermine this “choice” by repeatedly pointing to the […]
Ever more desperate efforts to find ever more arcane “benefits” of breastfeeding
Breastfeeding research is a flawed paradigm in which statistically illiterate methods, meaningless “benefits” and ideological censorship dominate the literature. It’s the inevitable result of the fact that lactation professionals made extravagant claims about the benefits of breastfeeding more than a decade before they bothered to check if those claims were true. By now it’s become […]
Natural mothering and the subversion of women’s empowerment
On the face of it, it makes no sense. How can women be empowered by rejecting the lifesaving technologies of modern obstetrics in favor of “natural” childbirth? How can women be empowered by refusing pain relief and laboring in agony? How can women be empowered by breastfeeding exclusively for years at a time? How can […]
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Midwifery and breastfeeding ideologues have hijacked evidence based medicine
Midwives and lactation professionals use the term “evidence based medicine” so often, you might think they actually practice it. You would be wrong. That’s because evidence based medicine is often hijacked by ideologues and industry. Dr. David Sackett, credited with popularizing the phrase and concept, explained it in an influential 1996 paper, Evidence based medicine: […]
Breastfeeding and the canonization of false facts
“Breast is best.” Except that it’s not. How did an ideological claim, never proven with scientific evidence, get accepted as a “fact”? Nissen and colleagues explain the canonization of false facts: Science is a process of collective knowledge creation in which researchers use experimental, theoretical and observational approaches to develop a naturalistic understanding of the […]
What should we do when underperforming big ideas — breastfeeding saves lives — become entrenched?
I’m frustrated. Every year tens of thousands of babies are hospitalized for breastfeeding complications at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, despite 20 years of aggressive breastfeeding promotion and rising breastfeeding rates, the benefits we have been promised, from lives and money saved to conditions and diseases reduced, have failed to appear. […]
Women can’t reclaim their agency from doctors by ceding it to midwives and lactation consultants
How did the natural childbirth and breastfeeding industries go so wrong? Why do I receive emails and Facebook messages from desperate women nearly every day detailing their guilt, self-abnegation and torment over “failing” to give birth vaginally or to breastfeed? Why, when I talk about my writing with friends and acquaintances, do women years removed […]
How we know natural mothering is about re-domesticating women: there’s no natural fathering.
A lot of angry women have parachuted onto my Facebook page to berate me on my claim that the philosophies of natural mothering — natural childbirth, lactivism and attachment parenting — were promulgated for the express purpose of re-domesticating women. It’s not my opinion; it’s empirical fact. Grantly Dick-Read (a fundamentalist and eugenicist) made it […]
Medicalized birth is a feminist triumph!
Childbirth is a reproductive rights issue. Every woman deserves access to high quality obstetric care, and every woman deserves access to state of the art pain relief. That’s because medicalizing birth is a feminist triumph and all women should be able to share in its benefits. Childbirth, in every time, place and culture, is a […]
Amy Tuteur, MD
Dr. Amy Tuteur is an obstetrician gynecologist. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1979 and her medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine in 1984. Dr. Tuteur is a former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. She left the practice of medicine to raise her four children. Her book, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting (HarperCollins) was published in 2016. She can be reached at DrAmy5 at aol dot com... More
