The Skeptical OB

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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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: […]

“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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

It used to be that sex was tightly culturally regulated and mothering had no oversight. In 2019, in industrialized countries mothering is tightly culturally regulated and sex has no oversight. What happened? For most of recorded history, there were regulations about who could have sex with whom, who pursued and who was expected to resist. […]

Babies die. The most critical difference between obstetricians and homebirth midwives is their response to these tragic deaths: When faced with a dead baby obstetricians ask, “How can we prevent this from ever happening again?” In contrast, homebirth midwives ask, “How can we avoid responsibility?” Don’t believe me? Consider the irresponsible, self-serving blather from Jan […]