I’ve heard from quite a few women that they initially found my website when they were googling “am I a bad mother for not breastfeeding?” or something similar. They write ...
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Milk Meg and the normalization of infant starvation and maternal exhaustion
I have an advantage over most of you, including most lactation professionals. ...
Natural childbirth and breastfeeding are class signifiers, not signs of maternal devotion
Natural childbirth advocates and lactivists like to claim that I hate vaginal ...
It’s good if your baby doesn’t sleep through the night? That’s misogynistic mothering bullshit.
This is public service announcement on how to protect yourself from misogynistic ...
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You have my permission to stop breastfeeding
I’ve heard from quite a few women that they initially found my website when they were googling “am I a bad mother for not breastfeeding?” or something similar. They write with gratitude that I reassured them that breastfeeding has nothing to do with it, that the benefits of breastfeeding have been exaggerated, and that their […]
Scientific American is DEAD wrong about midwives
We can thank the Editors at Scientific American for illustrating the famous H.L Mencken quote: …[T]here is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. The U.S. Needs More Midwives for Better Maternity Care is a truly execrable piece lacking common sense, scientific support and historical accuracy. It’s neat, plausible […]
Your baby doesn’t need you to suffer
Yesterday I wrote about Meg Nagle, the Milk Meg, and her strenuous efforts to normalize infant starvation and maternal exhaustion. She’s hardly alone; nearly all lactation professionals have been desperately working to normalize infant suffering. It’s integral to the ongoing effort to promote breastfeeding regardless of the increasing rate of neonatal dehydration, starvation, brain injuries, […]
Milk Meg and the normalization of infant starvation and maternal exhaustion
I have an advantage over most of you, including most lactation professionals. I’m old enough to remember when neither infant starvation nor maternal exhaustion were touted as “normal.” I did my medical training — and I breastfed my four children — before promoting breastfeeding was deformed by lactation professionals into dystopian efforts to force women […]
Natural childbirth and breastfeeding are class signifiers, not signs of maternal devotion
Natural childbirth advocates and lactivists like to claim that I hate vaginal births and breastfeeding. Never mind that I had four vaginal births and breastfed all four of my children. It seems beyond their powers of reasoning to imagine that someone could choose something for herself without insisting that everyone else ought to choose it […]
It’s good if your baby doesn’t sleep through the night? That’s misogynistic mothering bullshit.
This is public service announcement on how to protect yourself from misogynistic mothering bullshit (MMB). Sadly, too much of what passes for parenting advice in 2019 is MMB. Consider the latest example. Why it’s actually a good thing if your baby doesn’t sleep through the night is misogynistic mothering bullshit of the highest order, involving […]
The road to patient hell is paved with quality metrics: breastfeeding edition
Why do hospitals let bad things happen to good people? The reason can often be found in efforts to meet government quality metrics. As a recent editorial in JAMA, Unintended Harm Associated With the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, explains: … The HRRP [Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program] imposed financial penalties on hospitals based on rates of […]
Breastfeeding and the arrogance of preventive medicine
Does this remind you of any providers you know? Preventive medicine displays all 3 elements of arrogance. First, it is aggressively assertive, pursuing symptomless individuals and telling them what they must do to remain healthy. Occasionally invoking the force of law …, it prescribes and proscribes for both individual patients and the general citizenry of […]
What’s missing from contemporary breastfeeding advice? Compassion!
Shell shock was first described one hundred years ago: During the early stages of World War I in 1914, soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force began to report medical symptoms after combat, including tinnitus, amnesia, headaches, dizziness, tremors, and hypersensitivity to noise. While these symptoms resembled those that would be expected after a physical wound […]
Breastfeeding increases right-handedness? Yet another example of misusing data to make insupportable claims about breastfeeding.
No sooner did I finish writing a post reviewing the large and growing body of evidence that the benefits of breastfeeding have been exaggerated out of all proportion to the data, another researcher comes along making another unsupportable and absurd claim. I’m glad because it can serve as an object lesson and in how and […]
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
