YoniFest, Aviva Romm? Really?

Yonifest word

You cannot make this stuff up.

Earlier this month Quebec hosted YoniFest. That’s right, YONIFEST!

Apparently this is a festival celebrating vaginas. Let me amend that. It’s a festival fetishizing the role of the vagina in birth. Just in case you thought natural childbirth and homebirth are about creating a meaningful, spiritual experience for birth, a bunch of immature, giggly girls have held a festival to set you straight.

Can you imagine a group of men’s health professionals speaking at WeenieFest or DickFest? Me, neither. But apparently this makes sense to the homebirth crowd.

According to the doula from Doula Sharing:

Last weekend I had the chance to be part of the very first Yonifest! The yonifest is an emerging space, a festival about birth. Around 400 midwives, doulas, mothers and more gathered at a beautiful piece of land in the eastern townships, for 3 amazing and rich days of learning and sharing about the actual issues around birth. we had the chance to see and hear Ina May Gaskin, Michel Odent, Kathleen fahy, Joëlle Terrien, Isabelle Brabant, Aviva Romm, Betty-Anne Daviss and many more!

Ahh, yes, a bunch of legends in their own minds. It is horrifying to speculate how many infant deaths they may be indirectly responsible for.

But I digress.

Look at all the fun they had at YoniFest!

Yonifest

You absolutely must check out the picture on the doula’s page. It is a classic example of the fact that homebirth advocacy is for fools.

As far as I can determine, the doula has a knitted uterus on her head (I think that’s supposed to be a cervix on top), an anatomically correct placenta bag, a plastic baby, and a knitted uterus/fallopian tubes/ovaries.

I totally understand why the usual clowns are there: Ina May (“I might want to have a cunt one day and a twat the next”) Gaskin, Michel (I hid during my own child’s birth) Odent, Betty-Anne (bait and switch) Daviss. It’s not as if any real medical professionals want to hear the nonsense that dribbles from their mouths. It’s YoniFest or nothing.

But what’s Aviva Romm’s excuse? She has a real medical education, yet there she is at YoniFest, a festival that couldn’t even manage to use anatomically correct words for genitalia.

Apparently, Romm is not too proud of her attendance. On her Facebook page she alludes to “teaching” in Quebec but I can find no mention of Yonifest itself.

So here’s my question for Aviva:

If you were too embarrassed to even mention YoniFest to your own followers, why did you go?

How can you lend your name to a festival where people are wearing knitted uteri on their heads? Do you actually think that the other folks there are doing anything other than making it all up? Doesn’t it bother you that babies die preventable deaths as a result of this nonsense? Or was it simply another marketing opportunity to shill your books and services?

I’m really curious how you justify this to yourself.