There she goes again. Melissa Bartick has published yet another paper, Suboptimal breastfeeding in the United States: Maternal and pediatric health outcomes and costs, claiming to demonstrate that breastfeeding saves ...
Spotlight
More passive-aggressive crap from lactivists
Galina Nemirovsky, in Who Cares How She Feeds Her Baby?, is so ...
How betrayal aversion makes anti-vaxxers more afraid of vaccine complications than of disease
How do people analyze risks to determine the best course of action? ...
The rise in US maternal mortality: the cause will surprise you
Recently, two important papers were published that shed a great deal of ...
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Breastfeeding doesn’t save lives in reality, but what about in theory?
There she goes again. Melissa Bartick has published yet another paper, Suboptimal breastfeeding in the United States: Maternal and pediatric health outcomes and costs, claiming to demonstrate that breastfeeding saves lots of lives and billions of dollars. Bartick continues to model the impact of breastfeeding rates on death rates and healthcare spending while utterly ignoring […]
Birth warriors or just beneficiaries of white privilege?
There’s a story currently making the Internet rounds that purports to be a tale of heroic anti-vaxxing birth warrior parents who are being harassed by child protection authorities for their unconventional choices. Hermine Hayes-Klein, of Human Rights in Childbirth, was appalled at the way a young couple, Rachel and Dustin, was treated. Rachel had an […]
When your baby has a homebirth complication, I don’t win but you lose
Several weeks ago someone forwarded a picture posted in an unassisted birth group. The mother noted that the baby’s umbilical cord was unusual; it looked like a candy cane or barber pole. As the mother recognized, this is abnormal; it’s often associated with a serious infection of the placenta, the baby or both. I publicly […]
More passive-aggressive crap from lactivists
Galina Nemirovsky, in Who Cares How She Feeds Her Baby?, is so not judging you. See? I don’t care how you breastfeed your baby or don’t breastfeed your baby, yet our whole country has been engaged in a dialog about if it’s OK to see photographs of women fulfilling biology’s mission. Galina is so not […]
How betrayal aversion makes anti-vaxxers more afraid of vaccine complications than of disease
How do people analyze risks to determine the best course of action? Imagine that you were given a choice of two different rental apartments, and you were planning to make your decision based on which offered the most protection from death in a fire. The first apartment had an older smoke alarm and a 2% […]
The rise in US maternal mortality: the cause will surprise you
Recently, two important papers were published that shed a great deal of light on a previously murky topic, the US maternal mortality rate. Up to this point the observed increase in maternal mortality has been difficult to parse because the new US death certificate, redesigned to capture more instances of maternal death, was only gradually […]
Another benefit of vaccines: reducing antibiotic resistance
Anti-vax advocacy is unethical. Most of us are familiar with the reason: Withholding vaccines from your children doesn’t merely deprive them of protection and put them at risk for life threatening diseases. It deprives other people’s children of protection from those same diseases. Vaccines work by making it impossible for pathogens to jump from person […]
Fed is best? Intolerable!
How dare The Leaky Boob advocate tolerance! Jessica Martin-Weber of The Leaky Boob wrote an ode to tolerance of infant feeding choices Why I’ll stick to saying “Fed IS Best”. In it, she chides lactivists for their intolerance of tolerance, lactivists who say things like “…[I]t is scientifically proven that breast is better. This is […]
I pull back the curtain and show the often ugly reality of homebirth
In the world of homebirth, I am known as “Satan,” or “she who must not be named,” or worse. Why? Because I pull back the curtain on the often ugly reality of homebirth. Promoting homebirth (or natural childbirth, breastfeeding or attachment parenting) depends on commodifying a romanticized ideal. The clearest expression is the hiring of […]
Japan has high rates of co-sleeping AND high rates of teen suicide. Coincidence?
An opinion piece in the LA Times promoting co-sleeping between infants and mothers is generating a lot of discussion in the mommy blogosphere. Entitled It’s OK to sleep next to your infant child. In fact, it’s beneficial was written by Robert and Sarah LeVine, scholars in education and human development. It’s meant to counter the […]
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) is available 4/5/16. She can be reached at DrAmy5 at aol dot com... More
