[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]If breastmilk is only milk than they are only mothers — and that’s simply unacceptable.[/pullquote]

There’s a saying that fish can’t see water because they entirely surrounded by it. Similarly lactivists can’t see brainwashing because they’re entirely surrounded by it.

Consider these gems:

This came from a mommy group.

If you don’t breastfeed you’re a selfish cunt.

Sherry posted this on my Facebook page.

If I had a tailored 5 star meal defy (sic) every single day vs just a mcdonalds burger every meal … im picking the 5 star meal… Shit food = shit health. Sooner or later the effects will show.

What made Sherry so upset? These quotes come from Pam Lowe’s book Reproductive Health and Maternal Sacrifice.

The underlying assumption … is that women who decline breastfeeding only do so through ignorance or as the dupes of formula marketing campaigns…

That women might have different needs and priorities and could make an informed choice not to breastfeed is not considered seriously.

Sherry certainly hasn’t considered it seriously.

What’s going on here? Why are lactivists reduced to using profanity to describe women who can’t or don’t wish to feed their babies using their body parts?

I believe that they are brainwashed. They are so brainwashed — choosing to marinate in the toxic lactivist stew of minimal scientific knowledge and a desperately desired sense of superiority — that they can’t even begin to see that they’ve been brainwashed.

Here’s where I make the obligatory bow to the benefits of breastfeeding. Yes, breastfeeding has benefits, but in industrialized countries with access to clean water, those benefits for term babies are trivial, a few less colds and episodes of diarrheal illness across the entire population of infants in the first year; there is potentially a reduced risk of SIDS (although that research is plagued by confounding variables), and, in any case, can be duplicated by simply giving a baby a pacifier.

Why have lactivists come to believe that women who can’t or don’t breastfeed are “selfish cunts” feeding their babies “shit food”?

Two reasons: economic and psychological.

The economic reason is pretty obvious to someone as old as I am, who went through medical training before the rise of lactation consultants. Breastfeeding has been around since the beginning of human existence but no one was especially impressed by its advantages until a group of women appeared whose entire income is predicated on convincing women that breastfeeding has extraordinary advantages.

In an effort to keep the customers coming, lactation consultants and the organizations that represent them, have resorted to modern advertising techniques. Unlike toothpaste manufacturers they don’t imply that if you use their toothpaste everyone will like you better. Instead, they imply that if you breastfeed, you will like yourself better because you will be better than other mothers.

The lactation consultants’ search for business has dovetailed nicely with a larger cultural trend — problematizing infant safety in order to convince women that only their bodies stand between their children and disaster. How better to convince women to retreat back into the home than by telling them their precious babies will die (or even worse, fail to get into Harvard) if they don’t?

It’s a form of brainwashing. The law prevents those who fear women’s emancipation from discriminating against them to force them back into the home. In response, they’ve resorted to distortions, exaggerations and lies to convince women to force themselves back into the home.

The new “momism” attempt to convince women that their children face hideous dangers as a result of everything from formula to forced abduction. Therefore women must use their constant physical presence and their very bodies to protect their babies.

Women like the creator of the charming cunt meme and those who denounce infant formula as shit food have completely fallen for the brainwashing. Indeed, they have staked their self-image on the belief that their sacrifices of time, energy and personal boundaries mark them as superior to other mothers.

How devastating for them then when other women fail to acknowledge that superiority. If infant formula is just as good as breastmilk for term babies (and all the real world population data at our disposal indicates that it is) then they aren’t superior at all. They’re dupes who have made immense sacrifices for nothing much.

They’ve been brainwashed but they not only can’t see it; they can’t allow themselves to see it.

That’s why they insist that women who can’t or don’t breastfeed are victims of false information or false consciousness. That’s why they call them cunts and purveyors of shit food. If breastmilk is only milk than they are only mothers — and that’s simply unacceptable.

There are many viewpoints sheltering under the umbrella of the philosophy of natural childbirth — midwife attended birth, home birth, unassisted birth, hypnobirthing and even orgasmic birth — but all share a central belief in the value of masochism.

Ashley Noel Mack writes about the supposed transformative value of maternal masochism in The Self-Made Mom: Neoliberalism and Masochistic Motherhood in Home-Birth Videos on YouTube.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The philosophy of natural childbirth isn’t transgressive; it’s a new way to oppress women by ecouraging them to oppress themselves. [/pullquote]

I explore their role in cultivating a masochistic subjective posture that rationalizes self-governance and subordinates opportunities for feminist systemic critique in favor of celebration of individual autonomy. After detailing the functions of birth stories as self-made narratives that reinforce dominant discourses of masochistic motherhood in a neoliberalist context that conditions mothers to self- renounce, self-deny, and sacrifice in order to be “good” citizens …

While her analysis is based on homebirth, it seems to me to be generalizable to the philosophy of unmedicated childbirth in any venue: from hospital, to birth center and to the great outdoors.

Mack believes that there is more to birth videos and birth stories than their creators suppose:

While the videos likely reflect a deeply felt and real experience of self-empowerment and transformation for the maternal subjects depicted, in the present essay I build a case for complicating the videos’ claims of empowerment by asking questions about for whom and to what end these videos function.

The philosophy of natural childbirth isn’t transgressive; it’s a new way to oppress women by ecouraging them to oppress themselves.

The glorification of “the natural” is particularly problematic:

…As a plethora of feminist and gender scholars have previously noted, discourses of naturalism serve to bind women to notions of motherhood and womanness that are then taken for granted as “innate” and inescapable. Considering the fact that giving birth is a biological process of the “female body,” the naturalization of the birth process may seem like an obvious articulation. However, while birth is certainly a biological and physiological process that certain female bodies are capable of performing, its meanings are socially produced …

Women who refuse to root their value in their reproductive organs are pathologized as victims of false consciousness:

Discourses … often suggest that if only the maternal subject would “wake up” from the state of false consciousness imposed on her by the technocratic model of birth, she would become what she has always been predetermined to be. The naturalist orientation, taken to its furthest conclusion, forecloses on possibilities, alternatives, and routes to indeterminacy in birth and mothering by tethering these experiences to privileged, socially produced, and homogenized conceptions of the female body and motherhood.

But perhaps it is natural childbirth advocates themselves who have been tricked into eagerly accepting a philosophy that promotes the idea that pain is good for women.

“Pain” is symbolically negotiated and depicted as a resource for self-optimization in these texts, and the masochistic impulse of the self-made narrative contributes to the reification of modern motherhood on particular terms… I chart how pain is not only framed as central to the narrative but also valorized as maternal subjects are depicted enduring, embracing, or even enjoying their encounter with pain.

Is this is a subversion to the biblical injunction that the agony that women suffer in childbirth is punishment for their intrinsic sin or this merely a way to convince women to accept the punishment? If you believe that women ought to be punished for having sex (and many people do), what better way to enforce that punishment than to have women embrace it?

The pain of childbirth is also valorized as a hardship that the subjects endure or pass through on their way to transcendence… Unsurprisingly, many of the women state that “giving birth naturally was my biggest accomplishment” or proclaim while holding their baby, sobbing and wailing shortly after birth, “I did it, oh my God, I did it,” or that “It was so worth it.”

There’s no better brainwashing than that.

Feminist scholars have written repeatedly about the ways in which women are convinced to punish themselves:

Ehrenreich and English argue that by the mid-20th century, motherhood was defined rhetorically by a dutiful self-denial and renunciation. A good mother gave up her passions and sacrificed her happiness (and often well-being) to take care of her children and her family… To be a good and healthy mother, citizen, and person, then, was to be a masochistic child bearer, mother, and wife.

Betty Friedan questioned this emphasis on self-sacrifice and the woman’s movement seemed to sound its death knell:

Of course, the voices of disenchanted mothers would prove that the experts’ “prescription” of masochism was insufficient to quell the anxieties and disaffection facing house-wives and mothers during the mid-20th century. The depression and anxiety afflicting mothers and housewives became a powerful resource for the radical and liberal feminist movements, the women’s health movement, and critics of the cult of domesticity and the institution of motherhood.

But it has been surprisingly resistant to efforts to kill it:

[I]n the 1980s, pro-family values campaigns returned to emphasize the social responsibility of the family unit, while naturalizing women’s traditional role in the family as a mother and domestic laborer through “dubious psychological theories of maternal instinct, mother–child bonding, and primary maternal preoccupation.”

In the 1990s, a “new momism” emerged that held mothers liable and accountable for “producing ever more perfect children” by exercising a great degree of self-surveillance to be ever-present, both mentally and physically. This new institution of motherhood stipulates that “mothers’ primary occupation is to predict and prevent all less-than-optimal social, emotional, cognitive, and physical outcomes.” Accordingly, an increasing amount of pressure is placed on the maternal body to self-optimize through breastfeeding, staying fit, providing financial stability, creating a stronger bond with her baby, and sacrificing herself for her children.

Although natural parenting in general and natural childbirth in particular wax rhapsodic about the value of maternal choices, but in truth there is only one acceptable choice: masochism.

Therefore, even as popularized motherhood narratives celebrate the freedom of the individual maternal subject to make choices on her own, self-empower, and self-optimize, “the guiding principle of contemporary motherhood is [still] that women who are mothers must act first as mothers and that their self-identity is dependent on optimizing their children’s lives.” Discourses of contemporary masochistic motherhood compel mothers to self-optimize in the name of efficiency and self-empowerment at the same time that they function to normalize the suffering, anguish, or anxiety that this persistent state of self-governance may produce.

In valorizing maternal masochism, the natural childbirth movement reveals itself as profoundly retrograde and deeply anti-feminist.

Bitter grief is often an unselfish motivator.

Consider organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, started by parents who suffered the ultimate loss, to ensure that other parents would not have to endure the death of a child. Consider the various laws named after children who were abducted and murdered, championed by parents who wanted to make sure that no other family’s life would be shattered by crushing grief.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Dr. Christie del Castillo-Hegyi is performing a valuable public service. Why are lactivists chastising her for it?[/pullquote]

Fed Is Best is an organization like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, started by a parent whose baby was starved into devastating brain damage by the relentless promotion of breastfeeding at a so called “Baby Friendly” hospital. It was started by Dr. Christie Castillo-Hegyi.

My son was born 8 pounds and 11 ounces after a healthy pregnancy and normal uneventful vaginal delivery. He was placed directly on my chest and was nursed immediately. He was nursed on demand for 20-30 minutes every 3 hours. Each day of our stay in the hospital, he was seen by the pediatrician as well as the lactation consultant who noted that he had a perfect latch. He produced the expected number of wet and dirty diapers. He was noted to be jaundiced by the second day of life and had a transcutaneous bilirubin of 8.9. We were discharged at 48 hours at 5% weight loss with next-day follow-up. We were told by the lactation consultant before discharge that he would be hungry and we were instructed to just keep putting him on the breast…

This went on for several days. Then Christie note:

When I pumped and manually expressed, I realized I produced nothing. I imagined the four days of torture he experienced and how 2 days of near-continuous breastfeeding encouraged by breastfeeding manuals was a sign of this. We fed him formula … and he finally fell asleep. Three hours later, we found him unresponsive. We forced milk into his mouth, which made him more alert, but then he seized. We rushed him to the emergency room. He had a barely normal glucose (50 mg/dL), a severe form of dehydration called hypernatremia (157 mEq/L) and severe jaundice (bilirubin 24 mg/dL). We were reassured that he would be fine, but having done newborn brain injury research, knowing how little time it takes for brain cells to die due to hypoglycemia and severe dehydration, I did not believe it, although I hoped it.

She was right to be concerned:

At 3 years and 8 months, our son was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder with severe language impairment. He has also been diagnosed with ADHD, sensory processing disorder, low IQ, fine and gross motor delays and a seizure disorder associated with injury to the language area of the brain…

Christie took her grief and did something positive with it. She founded the Fed Is Best Foundation along with lactation consultant Jody Segrave-Daly in order to spread the word about the dangers of insufficient breastmilk. She works spare other families her agony.

Not surprisingly, lactivists are up in arms about the foundation and its hashtag #FedIsBest.

This recent post on Meg Nagle’s Facebook page is typical:

#fedisbest takes away the importance of HOW we are fed. In what other area of health does the actual product going into our mouths not matter? It’s not just about being “fed”. Being fed is minimum, and obviously a baby needs to be fed. But being fed the milk that is made exactly for our child and continually changing to meet their needs is the norm…and how we are fed does actually matter.

Here’s my English to English translation:

Breastfeeding has to be best, otherwise I’m not the best mother and that’s just impossible!

Other lactivists, their fragile self-esteem on the line, joined in.

That’s not news, of course. We see this all the time, but every now and then a response is so vicious that it deserves special notice. Like Jennifer’s response:

Christie del Castillo-Hegyi Please learn to accept your child the way they are. Your constantly publicly bemoaning your child’s diagnosis is disturbing. When they are an adult, they will find out how horribly you viewed parenting them, and how publicly you exploited their diagnosis as a tool to build your anti-breastfeeding platform. How will you answer when they ask why you didn’t spend more time working to promote disability justice, accommodation, and advocacy?

Yes, Dr. del Castillo-Hegyi, please stop bemoaning your child’s brain damage. How dare you try to prevent other babies from suffering the same preventable fate? It’s … it’s … it’s exploitation!! How dare you criticize breastfeeding, the source of my self-esteem? My breasts work great; too bad yours didn’t, but it’s time to move on.

Here’s what I’d like to ask Jennifer:

When your child is old enough to read what you have written online, and sees that you just told the mother of a brain-injured child to stop moaning about it, how will you explain your cruelty?

Is your self-esteem so fragile that it can’t deal with the notion that motherhood is powered by love, not by breastmilk. Is your identity so bound up with the function of your breasts that other women must mirror your choices back to you?

No one is interfering with YOUR ability or desire to breastfeed your child. Why are you trying to interfere with Dr. del Castillo-Hegyi’s desire to inform women about the serious, even deadly, consequences of insufficient breastmilk?

She’s generously performing a public service, so why are you chastising? You should be thanking her instead.

Nothing in my nearly 30 years as a mother equips me to understand this.

Baby is eight weeks old now and doing fine, but it was a traumatic time. Went into spontaneous labor at 42 weeks and continued with homebirth as planned for 12 hours. Plenty of dilatations [sic] and effective contractions but descent was lacking and I was struggling to cope with contractions on top of one another. Waaay different to last time. Anyway, to cut a long story short, hospital transfer, c-section, meconium aspiration syndrome, severe asphyxia, hypoxic ischemic encephalitis [sic], persistent pulmonary hypotension [sic] of the newborn, sepsis and pneumonia. Baby was taken to a a nicu 70 miles away for ventilation and cooling….

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Baby suffered meconium aspiration, severe asphyxia, hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, persistent pulmonary hypertension, sepsis and pneumonia.[/pullquote]

The mother transferred to the hospital NOT because her baby was dying; no one had a clue about that. She transferred for her own comfort. It was a bonus that the baby was rescued from near death.

And it’s not over yet.

…[B]aby Seth will need checks up until the age of 2 because of the possibility of brain damage and cerebral palsy.

But she’s proud. Proud of what? Proud that she risked his life in the first place? Proud that she didn’t kill him? Proud that her narcissism resulted in his brain damage that might be permanent?

She ought to be ashamed, not proud.

I, like most mothers, would do anything to spare my children pain or injury. Who could possibly be proud of causing her child to suffer both?

When I started the predecessor of this blog more than a decade ago I was a lone voice in the wilderness. Now my views — including the notion that natural childbirth is a deeply anti-feminist effort to exert control over women — are generating ever more attention in academic circles.

The latest paper to focus on controlling women through the rhetoric of natural childbirth is Pushing Ecstasy: Neoliberalism, Childbirth, and the Making of Mama Economicus written by Kate Rossiter and published in the journal Women’s Studies. It is Rossiter’s contention that birth has been commodified not merely to make money, but to discipline women.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Natural childbirth disempowers women by forcing them to erase their non-maternal selves.[/pullquote]

Rossiter was inspired to explore the ways that natural childbirth advocacy controls women after she did everything “right” and had a terrifying birth experience nonetheless.

In 2011, I gave birth to my daughter unmedicated, at home, and assisted by a midwife—just as I had planned. She was healthy. I was healthy. It was, in the order of things, the “perfect” birth. Perfect, except that the birth was over- whelming, painful, and frightening, and I came away from the experience feeling as though I had fallen short—had failed, or been failed. When I expected to feel exultant, empowered, and proud, I simply felt empty, sad, and numb. Why had I expected ecstasy, and why did this failed promise indicate my overall failure as a mother? …

Sounds familiar, right?

Rossiter blames the usual suspects:

…I engage three key texts—midwife Elizabeth Davis and doula Debra Pascali-Bonaro’s Orgasmic Birth, physician Sarah Buckley’s Ecstatic Birth: Nature’s Hormonal Blueprint for Labor, and spiritualist Jeanice Barcelo’s website Birth of a New Earth—that illuminate and exemplify the underlying tenets of the ecstatic (or orgasmic) birth movement.

Her description of their rhetoric is spot on:

Through a critical analysis of these three aforementioned texts, I argue that the discourse of the ecstatic birth movement, under the guise of supportive instruction, provides an extremely compelling (and ultimately constraining) construction of the “good mother” as expressed through the birth experience…

I aim to trouble and challenge the underlying politics of the ecstatic birth movement, and to capture the oppressive impact that this discourse has on birthing women.

Rossiter’s analysis follows that of Foucault, arguing that consumerism can be used to control people.

My analysis takes seriously Foucault’s assertion that the body—and discourses about the body and bodily practice—is a critical site for the production and manifestation of particular kinds of power relations.

Natural childbirth discourse is a way to exert power over women, ultimately constraining their choices to those favored by the powerful.

Rossiter postulates the existence of Mama Economicus, the female analogue of Homo Economicus:

…Foucault argues that there are two important facets of the neoliberal construction of homo economicus: first, homo economicus is, at heart, an “entrepreneur of himself [sic]” and therefore invested in schemas of his or her own self-improvement; second, the goal of neoliberal production is not to earn a wage, but rather to engage in consumptive gratification.

Rossiter notes, as I have noted, that the original goals of the natural childbirth movement were valuable but the goals gave been transmuted. It started as an effort to wrest control from the patriarchy; has become an effort to enforce control by society by convincing women to discipline themselves:

…Thus, what on the surface may appear to be an ethic of care that empowers women in their choice-making ability is in fact a tactic that individuates and ultimately disempowers women in terms of their ability to operate outside self-managerial, consumerist frameworks.

It is a source of oppression.

…Anthropologist Gail Landsman points to the ways in which the contemporary discourse of pregnancy and childbirth places total responsibility for the health and wellbeing of children in the hands of the mother, demanding that women do everything right. Specifically, Landsman looks at the rigid instructions for self-care (and self-deprivation) in pregnancy, which contribute to stigmatizing and painful forms of mother-blame in mothers of children with disabilities.

Consumerism is deployed to exert control over women, “the making of mama economicus“:

…[U]nderlying this appeal is, in fact, a highly constraining model of self-regulation where women’s lives and routines are governed by a series of practices necessary for getting it [birth] right… [G]etting it right is not simply a matter of having an enjoyable, fulfilling birth, but in fact is critical to the act of good motherhood…

Rossiter notes:

…[T]his discourse juxtaposes two images of the birthing mother: one wild, and one under technocratic gaze; one pure and authentic, and one living uncritically and irresponsibly within contemporary culture. Paradoxically, in order to access this wild self, the mother must work very hard to regulate herself and her surroundings in order to ensure that her ecstatic potential is realized… This is a mother who, through her diligent preparedness has optimized her natural capacity to birth … This is the mother who forgets herself in the face of her baby’s needs, and, crucially, enjoys this erasure of her non-maternal self…

And it pathologizes women who refuses to go along:

This model holds no place for alternate reactions, such as ambivalence, grief, or anger. Rather, the implicit correlation is that deviation from the ideal of the ecstatic mother marks some kind of failure or pathology—suggesting that the birth circumstances were not optimal, or the mother’s hormonal system is somehow faulty, or that she herself is not a natural mother.

What purpose does mama economicus serve? She is a woman bound to her children and bound to her home?

…The work of motherhood here is twofold. First, it is the work of her own self-regulation qua enjoyment. She works on herself so that she may better perform the work of motherhood, which promises unceasing joy and happiness. Perhaps more importantly, though, through her own self-regulation—and by extension the management of her children for whom she has utter responsibility—she relieves the state and other broad structural forces of social responsibility.

Women could reject these restrictions but:

… [They are] presented as extremely compelling and deeply gratifying, perhaps more so than any other form of work. The work of assuming total responsibility for herself and her offspring is her birthright, should she so choose. As exemplified by the ecstatic birth discourse, the work of motherhood is constructed as so deeply fulfilling and gratifying that even labor—a quintessentially agonizing feature of motherhood—is refigured as orgasm.

At a stroke women are disciplined into restricting themselves to motherhood and relieving society of any responsibility toward mothers or children.

Mothers sacrifice. It has ever been thus.

Whether it is sacrificing sleep to soothe a fretful baby, sacrificing the last piece of cake to please a hungry child, or sacrificing tremendous amounts of money to send a teenager to college, sacrifice is part and parcel of motherhood.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Natural parenting posits that the body of the good mother must be literally interposed between children and omnipresent threats to health and brain function.[/pullquote]

Nontheless, we are undergoing a profound change in beliefs about maternal sacrifice. The philosophy of natural parenting has transmuted maternal sacrifice from episodic to the central purpose of motherhood. That change has been harmful for mothers and without being beneficial for babies and children. That’s not surprising since natural parenting isn’t about children and what’s good for them; it’s about mothers and how they ought to behave.

Yesterday I wrote about natural parenting’s problematization of infant/child safety. There has never been a safer time or place to be an infant and small child than 2016 in industrialized countries. Ironically, there has never been greater anxiety about the physical, emotional and intellectual status of those same infants and small children.

Why the disconnect? Natural parenting problematizes infant/child health and safety in order to enforce a “regime of truth” regarding the appropriate role of mothers. The problematizing of safety offers the justification for the central premise of natural parenting.

And the central premise is this: constant sacrifice is the definitive feature of good mothering. But not just any sacrifice is required. Women must sacrifice their bodies. The body of the mother must be literally interposed between children and omnipresent threats to health.

As sociologist Pam Lowe explains in her fascinating book Reproductive Health and Maternal Sacrifice:

…At its heart, maternal sacrifice is the notion that ‘proper’ women put the welfare of children, whether born, in utero, or not yet conceived, over and above any choices and/or desires of their own. The idea of maternal sacrifice acts as a powerful signifier in judging women’s behaviour. It is valorized in cases such as when women with cancer forgo treatment to save a risk to their developing foetus, and it is believed absent in female substance users whose ‘selfish’ desire for children means they are born in problematic circumstances…

But not just any sacrifice will do.

Never mind that perinatal mortality, infant mortality, and child mortality are at historic lows, vaccine preventable diseases have been nearly vanquished, malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies are rare and foods and medications are safer than ever because of government oversight. In the cosmology of natural parenting, infants and small children face unprecedented, omnipresent technological threats to their physical health as well as their emotional and intellectual development. The only thing that can ameliorate those threats is the mother’s physical body.

• Natural parenting rejects pain relief in labor, insisting that good mothers sacrifice their physical comfort, willingly enduring hours of agony to protect their babies from the “dangers” of epidurals.
• Natural parenting rejects formula, insisting that good mothers sacrifice their physical comfort, sleep, body boundaries, and even mental health to breastfeeding because “breast is best.”
• Natural parenting rejects jarred baby food, insist in that good mothers sacrifice time and effort in sourcing organic, GMO free foods, and hand preparing them to protect children from “toxins.”
• Natural parenting rejects routine pediatric preventive care like vaccines, insist if that the mother who sacrifices her time and “does her research” is the best guardian of infant health, and, in any case breastfeeding is protective against all microbial threats.
• Natural parenting rejects putting babies down, insisting that good mothers sacrifice their physical comfort, and need for separation and recuperation, because only close physical contact with the mother’s body protects the bond between parent and child.
• Natural parenting rejects placing babies to sleep in their own rooms, insist if that good mothers sacrifice sleep, privacy and the opportunity for sexual intimacy because only unremitting physical contact through every hour of the day can ensure infant and child wellbeing.

Sunna Simmonardottir expands upon these observations in Constructing the attached mother in the “world’s most feminist country”:

…Within the discourse of attachment and bonding, the ideal Icelandic mother is constructed as being constantly present, happy, and content with her role, happily breastfeeding and fully understanding of her child’s needs. Her body is not her own but shared with her infant, even after birth, for heat, nourishment, and comfort… [M]others are instructed to direct all their physical and emotional capacities at their children and … the maternal body and mind is subject to disciplinary practises… In this way, both attachment and bonding (or lack thereof) are constructed simultaneously as the problem, as well as the solution for mothers…

The maternal body is imagined as always functioning perfectly; all problems are therefore ascribed to the mother’s mind.

Consider the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative. Descibing its founding statements Lowe notes:

Whilst it suggests that the purpose of the BFI is to support parents in making informed decisions, the outcome of their deliberations should be an increase in breastfeeding… That women might have different needs and priorities and could make an informed choice not to breastfeed is not considered seriously. As the name ‘baby friendly’ implies, women’s position is assumed to be synonymous with what experts deem to be ‘best’ for their baby…

Indeed:

The underlying assumption behind BFI, and many other breastfeeding campaigns, is that women who decline breastfeeding only do so through ignorance or as the dupes of formula marketing campaigns. Palmer is typical of this position. She suggests that infant feeding companies as well as ill-informed experts have contributed to a loss of faith in breastfeeding… “[W]hilst women should have a choice, they should all be informed that formula milk is signicantly detrimental to their baby’s health.” This is hardly a neutral position and is not necessarily based on the evidence…

In other words, a mother who is not willing to constantly use her body in a never ending pageant of maternal sacrifice is pathologized as ignorant, emotionally immature and selfish: a “bad” mother.

Why has constant maternal bodily sacrifice come to be defining characteristic of the “good mother”?

Simmonardottir postulates:

When older structures of oppression start to disintegrate, new structures develop and become “regimes of truth.” Within the discourse of attachment certain “truths” become scientifically sanctioned and reasonable, while conflicting discourses are made to seem inappropriate or even unnatural. Within the discourse of attachment and bonding, the ideal Icelandic mother is constructed as being constantly present, happy, and content with her role, happily breastfeeding and fully understanding of her child’s needs. Her body is not her own but shared with her infant, even after birth, for heat, nourishment, and comfort… [M]others are instructed to direct all their physical and emotional capacities at their children and how the maternal body and mind is subject to disciplinary practises.

The inevitable and desired result is that women are forced back into the home.

The political, legal and economic emancipation of women in industrialized countries is arguably one of the greatest achievements of the 20th Century. It allowed women to leave the home and seek their own destiny. Seismic social changes generate backlash. Natural parenting is part of that backlash.

By imagining a world full of omnipresent, never ending dangers to infant/child health and insisting that only mothers can protect their children from these dangers and only by constant bodily sacrifice,  women can be disciplined into returning home, not for the original sexist justification that women are inferior but for a new sexist justification — that sacrifice of the maternal body is best for babies.

There has never been a safer time or place to be an infant and small child than 2016 in industrialized countries. Ironically, there has never been greater anxiety about the physical, emotional and intellectual status of those same infants and small children.

Why is there an extraordinary disconnect between reality and anxiety? You can thank the cultural conceit of “natural parenting” for problematizing infant and child health … at the very same historical moment when infant and child health are extraordinarily good.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Natural parenting problematizes infant safety in order to pathologize women who don’t conform.[/pullquote]

Perinatal mortality, infant mortality, and child mortality are at historic lows. Vaccine preventable diseases have been nearly vanquished. Rates of sudden infant death syndrome are falling. Congenital defects like heart disease can be treated. Malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies are rare. Foods and medications are safer than ever because of government oversight.

But you’d never know that if you are part of the natural parenting culture, which justifies its intrusiveness into maternal choice by promoting fear in regard to infant and child health. Natural parenting advocates inflate risks of rare events to monstrous proportions or invent theoretical risks that have never been seen in real life.

For example, childbirth is inherently dangerous, but has been made dramatically safer by the liberal use of obstetric interventions. Yet to hear natural childbirth advocates tell it, childbirth is inherently safe and any dangers that exist are caused by technology.

Obstetricians are desperate to prevent brain injuries from lack of oxygen. Natural childbirth advocates pretend that the placenta is a miracle organ that never deviates from perfection and that “drugs” used to control labor pain threaten neonatal health.

Infant formula has never been safer or more nutritious. Yet to hear lactivists tell it, breastmilk is lifesaving and formula is deadly.

Vaccines have never been safer or more effective (as evidenced by the bottoming out of incidences of childhood diseases), but anti-vaxxers utterly ignore both medicine and history in denying the public health triumph of universal vaccination. Instead they obsess about rare or even fabricated vaccine injuries.

Food has never been safer. Natural parenting advocates have never been more afraid of food, wasting money on organic produce, blithering about GMOs, and dosing their children with unregulated supplements.

Pediatrics has never been safer or more effective at preventing disease and suffering. Natural parenting advocates have never been more sure that nonsense — homeopathy, cranio-sacral therapy, and herbal preparations — is the key to good health.

Why is there such a tremendous disconnect between reality and belief? Two reasons: privilege and problematizing.

The privilege issue is distressingly blatant. The only fears that count in the world of natural parenting are the fears of Western, white, well off parents.

Poor children and children of color face a plethora of truly life-threatening issues including hunger, lack of access to healthcare and gun violence. Poor children and children of color die each and every day because of these problems, but many privileged Western, white well off parents could care less. They oppose life saving free school meals, Obamacare and sensible gun regulations. Instead they are preoccupied by birth plans, brelfies and baby slings, though none of those do or could save lives.

What’s even more outrageous is that they are so insulated by privilege that they actually believe they are promoting safety by fetishizing birth, breastfeeding, organic food, vaccine opposition and homeopathy.

Using and misusing the language of science, natural parenting advocates problematize infant and child safety.

The natural childbirth industry of midwives, doulas and childbirth educators claim it is evidence based when the truth is that it is based on no evidence at all. They publish papers in industry trade papers disguised as scientific journals like the Lamaze International’s Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care.

Lactivists howl that low breastfeeding rates compromise infant health despite the fact that breastfeeding rates have no correlation at all with infant health. Infant mortality rates dropped precipitously through the 20th century despite the fact that for most of that time period breastfeeding rates dropped like a rock. Indeed, the countries with the highest infant mortality rates in the world have the highest breastfeeding rates.

Attachment parenting advocates have hijacked attachment theory (which postulates that children need only a “good enough” mother) in order to problematize infant attachment. The truth is that mother-infant attachment happens spontaneously, easily and is not contingent on any specific behaviors. In contrast, attachment parents obsess about promoting “bonding” through ritualized behaviors like baby wearing.

The philosophy of natural parenting is a “regime of truth” that has little to do with infants and children and a great deal to do with controlling women’s bodies and women’s lives.

As Sunna Simmonardottir writes in Constructing the attached mother in the “world’s most feminist country”:

…[T]he discourse on attachment has become another site for the medicalization of motherhood and maternal emotion… The role for women as mothers within attachment theory is considered to be narrow and conservative, promoting beliefs that are contrary to the interests of women. Cleary states that any feminist consideration of attachment theory should be mindful of the way it “not only describes but actively prescribes the nature of our psychological lives and ills”. This prescriptive nature of attachment theory has in turn led to the objectification and pathologization of women and presented women with the need to monitor themselves when it comes to their behavior toward their children.

By promoting fear about their children’s well-being, the philosophy of natural parenting causes women to tightly regulate their behavior so it conforms with the “rules” of natural parenting and to pathologize and blame themselves when they fail in conforming to those rules. Hence the outpouring of guilt and recrimination for epidurals, C-sections, formula feeding and other deviations from natural parenting diktat.

In other words, natural parenting problematizes infant safety in order to pathologize women who don’t conform.

• Natural childbirth problematizes pain relief in childbirth in order to pathologize women who don’t accept that pain ought to be part of mothering.
• Lactivism problematizes infant formula in order to pathologize women who don’t breastfeed.
• Attachment parenting problematizes maternal independence in order to pathologize women who think there is more to life than mothering.

Why has natural parenting become popular despite the fact that it imagines threats to children that don’t exist?

Simmonardottir notes:

… According to Hays, the answer lies in the way the theory fits so neatly with our pre-existing cultural beliefs about the appropriate role of the mother and “operates so effectively as a means to keep women in their place”. Attachment theory “makes sense” for us as it taps into pre-existing ideas about the essential nature of men and women as well as the biological and evolutionary purpose of women’s reproductive abilities, where the relationship between mother and child is made to seem biologically determined but not socially constructed and historically specific…

And, of course, it reinforces the privilege of the privileged:

Additionally, it is important to acknowledge how middle-class, hetero-normative, and Anglo-centric norms of child rearing are assumed within the discourse of attachment theory, making it impossible for certain groups of women to discursively position themselves within the narrative of “good mothering”…

The bottom line is that children are not facing unprecedented threats to health that can only be ameliorated by natural parenting; they’ve never been healthier. Natural parenting problematizes infant/child health and safety in order to enforce a “regime of truth” regarding the appropriate role of women, robbing women of the opportunity to make the choices for themselves and their families that they deem best.

This is the 201st piece I’ve posted in 2016, but I’ve been privileged to be able to write for othe publications as well.

These are my ten most popular pieces of the year:

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The Skeptical OB blog and Facebook page reached more then 7 million people in 2016![/pullquote]

1. Closing Newborn Nurseries Isn’t Good for Babies or Moms on TIME.com. 68,090 shares

I’m deeply disappointed to learn that the hospitals in my state, Massachusetts, are closing their newborn nurseries. It’s a submission to the entreaties of breastfeeding activists (lactivists), and doesn’t accomplish its stated aim. Most importantly, it’s unsafe…

2. Why is American Home Birth So Dangerous? in The New York Times Sunday Review. 29,825 shares

IS home birth safe? That depends on where you ask the question…

But there are places in the world where home birth is relatively safe, like the Netherlands, where it is popular at 16 percent of births. And in Canada, where it appears safest of all, several studies have demonstrated that in carefully selected populations, there is no difference between the number of babies who die at home or in the hospital.

In contrast, home birth in the United States is dangerous. The best data on the practice comes from Oregon, which in 2012 started requiring that birth and death certificates include information on where the birth occurred and who attended it. The state’s figures show that that year, the death rate for babies in planned home births with a midwife was about seven times that of births at a hospital…

3. Dunning Kruger nation and the disaparagment of expertise. 18,399 shares

We live in Dunning Kruger nation.

What do I mean?

A variety of very loud “confident idiots” — anti-vaxxers, homebirth advocates, climate change deniers — actually think they know more than the experts in the respective fields…

4. How the natural childbirth industry sets mothers up for guilt and shame 11,385 shares

…[F]or today’s new mothers, the expectations for childbirth and breast-feeding are higher than ever. Women are supposed to have the most authentic possible experience: They should reject pain relief; eliminate C-sections; embrace midwives, doulas and childbirth educators; and even defy standard obstetric recommendations when they conflict with those goals.

Two powerful forces have arisen to push this dogma. First, the crunchy natural-birth subculture has slowly morphed into an industry, mainly catering to the most privileged women in society. Second, a cabal of natural-birth activists — online, on the air and even inside hospitals — has formed to shame pregnant women who eschew the right-thinking path. For these forces, childbirth has become less about having a baby and more about having an experience. And those who don’t have “the perfect birth” can’t possibly be good mothers.

5. What if we’re doing breastfeeding all wrong?. 8526 shares

It is an article of faith among them that formula supplementation interferes with breastfeeding, dooms exclusive breastfeeding and causes dangerous alterations to infant gut flora. What if they’re flat out wrong? And what if babies are being injured and even die because we aren’t recapitulating nature? …

6. The ultimate appeal of anti-vaccine advocacy: it flatters the ignorant. 8152 shares

One of the most attractive aspects of anti-vaccine advocacy, indeed of all alternative health, is that no particular knowledge is necessary to declare yourself an expert.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t have even the most basic knowledge of science and statistics. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have any understanding at all of the complex fields of immunology or virology. Your personal experiences count for more than the collective wisdom of doctors, scientists and public health officials. Hence Jenny McCarthy, a B movie actress with no training of any kind in science is touted by herself and others as an “expert” on vaccines. Hence Modern Alternative Mother Kate Tietje and similarly undereducated mommy bloggers parade themselves as “experts” on vaccination…

7. Seeing toxins everywhere is just another form of privilege. 7616 shares

It is axiomatic among quacktivists — anti-vaccine activists, organic food devotees, natural parenting advocates — that our world is filled with toxins.

But toxicophobia, fear of toxins, is really just another form of privilege. Only those in wealthy, industrialized societies who have access to copious food and clean water, and are protected from epidemics of infectious disease have the leisure time and financial resources to indulge in internet fantasies of being poisoned by toxins…

8. The theology of quackery; how pseudoscience has become a secular religion. 7606 shares

…It seems to me that for a large proportion of people, particularly people on the political Left, pseudoscience has become a secular religion, complete with creation myth, demons and ultimate salvation.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s plenty of pseudoscience on the political Right, too. But often that is motivated by adherence to standard religious philosophy, the idea that the Bible is the world of God and that anything that contradicts it cannot be allowed to be true. On the Left, where many abjure religion, quackery has become the new religion…

9. Why do anti-vaxxers think “nature intended” for them to survive? 5470 shares

…In reality nature doesn’t “intend” anything. Nature doesn’t “intend” the sun to shine; it shines because nuclear fusion is occurring inside it. Nature doesn’t “intend” the tides to rise and fall; it happens because of the moon’s gravity acting on the oceans. Nature doesn’t intend for people to survive or succumb to infectious diseases; it happens because bacteria and viruses attack people in order to feed and reproduce themselves.

Nature no more “intends” for people to survive infectious diseases than it “intends” for people to survive having a limb bitten off by a tiger. True, your survival might be aided by blood clotting factors that staunch the bleeding and antibodies that combat infection, but it’s equally likely that you’ll die in spite of your body’s defenses against traumatic injury and hemorrhage…

10. Vaccination is far more baby friendly than breastfeeding. 4344 shares

There’s a simple thing that every mother can do to keep her baby as healthy as possible. That’s why we should have a ten step hospital based program to support it.

No, it’s not breastfeeding; it’s vaccination, which saves a thousand times more lives in practice than breastfeeding ever could in theory.

This post also generated the most comments of the year, 2711 and counting.

My most popular meme of the year was this:

It reached 733,100 people on Facebook.

Overall the blog plus The Skeptical OB Facebook page reached more than 7 million people in 2016!

Of course, the most important thing I wrote this year was my book PUSH BACK: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting, published in hardcover, kindle and audio editions. The paperback version will be out on January 10, 2017.

It was a very good year!

Apparently my book PUSH BACK: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting made Professor Laura Freidenfelds feel stung. Unfortunately it did not make her feel curious enough to reexamine her assumptions about midwifery and childbirth.

In Nurse-Midwives are With Women, Walking a Middle Path to a Safe and Rewarding Birth, Freidenfelds writes:

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Freidenfelds piece is profoundly disappointing because when challenged on her personal beliefs she responded as a partisan, not as a person interested in the truth.[/pullquote]

Recently, obstetrician and blogger Amy Tuteur published Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting, in which she made fun of women stupid enough to believe that they might have a better birth experience without an epidural, and excoriated anyone who would refuse any of the bells and whistles of modern obstetrics.

Her title was a response to journalist Jennifer Block’s, Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care, an exposé of callous obstetricians who damaged women and their babies with the thoughtless overuse of standard obstetric interventions such as the induction agent cytotec and the drastic overuse of major abdominal surgery (cesarean section).

Made fun of women?
Stupid enough to believe they might have a better birth experience without an epidural?
Bells and whistles?
Callous obstetricians?
Thoughtless overuse?

In other words, instead of giving some thought to the idea that privileged, white women swallowed wholesale the fake news and propaganda of the natural childbirth industry, Freidenfelds decides to double down by repeating it all and insisting it’s true.

Curiously, Freidenfelds doesn’t deign to provide any scientific evidence to rebut my scientific claims. She seems to find truthiness of natural childbirth propaganda more persuasive than the truth of historical and scientific evidence.

Instead she offers an intellectually lazy compromise: a highly romanticized view of nurse midwives as a middle way:

In fact, there is someone ready and willing to escort birthing women along that middle path: the nurse-midwife. Calm and sensible, evidence-based and gentle, she is too easily effaced by the competing romantic dreams of natural bliss and technological perfection. We need to notice that she’s there, and we need to figure out how to connect her services to more women.

Seriously, Professor Freidenfelds? Calm? Gentle?

Freidenfeld then proceeds to regurgitate the fake history of midwifery as turf war in which evil obstetricians sought to steal the livelihood of “calm, gentle” midwives.

Sadly, Freidenfelds doesn’t bother to address the questions I raise in PUSH BACK regarding the racist, sexist origins of the philosophy of natural childbirth, the implicit biological essentialism and the remarkable elitism of the movement.

Specifically:

What distinguishes midwifery from obstetrics? Is it truly a difference in outlook or merely midwives clawing for market share

In the paper What is gender? Feminist theory and the sociology of human reproduction sociologists Annandale and Clark criticize contemporary midwifery:

…[T]he lived experience of midwifery … is revealed only as the largely unresearched antithesis of obstetrics. An alternative is called into existence in powerful and convincing terms, while at the same time its central precepts (such as ‘women controlled’, ‘natural birth’) are vaguely drawn and in practical terms carry little meaning.

Should women be reduced to their reproductive organs and does reproduction mean the same thing to every woman?

Annandale and Clark explain that much of contemporary midwifery imagines that:

… reproduction is still centred for women and put on the agenda as if it were central to all women’s lives. This may serve to lock women into reproductive roles which may be politically problematic since the centrality of reproduction, contraception and childbirth to biomedicine is transferred to women’s experiences. This may be the reality of their experience, but equally importantly, it may not…

Are midwives with all women or just privileged white women?

Apparently the only women who count in Freidenfeld’s world view are privileged white women. Natural childbirth advocates are overwhelmingly Western, white, and well off. Certified nurse midwives are overwhelmingly Western, white and well off. I find it quite shocking that in a country that struggles with high black perinatal mortality and high black maternal mortality, Freidenfelds doesn’t even bother to give lip service to the many women of color, women of other nationalities, and women with pre-existing medical conditions and pregnancy complications whose have no interest in and cannot be helped in any way by the philosophy of natural childbirth.

Instead of addressing these fundamental issues of gender, race and class Freidenfelds expresses her surprise that despite my support for nurse midwives (the most highly trained, best midwives in the world), I don’t see them as the solution to all obstetric problems:

If Amy Tuteur and I can agree on the value of nurse-midwives’ practice, why aren’t we both looking to nurse-midwives as model practitioners? In her book and in our conversation, Tuteur insisted that the high false positive rate from obstetricians’ use of continuous fetal monitoring, which leads to a high c-section rate, is unavoidable if we want to save babies. I suggested that it is, in fact, avoidable: all she and her obstetrician colleagues have to do is walk down the hall and ask the nurse-midwives to teach them how to use intermittent monitoring effectively. Tuteur chose to ignore me, and simply insisted that obstetricians know best. She was not about to give ground in public to anyone called a “midwife,” even someone she privately recognizes is fully competent.

Why aren’t nurse midwives model practitioners?

Because not everyone who needs care is a healthy, privileged white woman. Indeed nurse midwives can’t “be with” and can’t care for the many women who are most in need — women with serious medical issues.

Because most women consider a healthy baby more important than avoiding a C-section or treating birth as a piece of performance art.

Because while Freidenfelds may blithely ignore the risks of childbirth, childbirth is inherently dangerous.

Because it is laughably easy to tell obstetricians what they should and should not do when you bear no responsibility for dead babies and dead mothers.

It seems obvious to me that not every woman is a member of the white elite. It seems obvious to me that the white elite should not assume that their needs and desires are the model that all other women seek to emulate. It seems obvious to me that a movement based on biological essentialism is deeply anti-feminist. And as a physician it seems obvious to me that the steep declines in perinatal and maternal mortality is due to the liberal use of obstetric interventions not midwifery, which had existed for millennia before the advent of obstetrics and presided over astronomical rates of perinatal and maternal mortality.

Freidenfelds piece is profoundly disappointing because when challenged on her personal beliefs she responded as a partisan, not as a person interested in the truth.

There’s an eye opening thread on allnurses.com entitled Home births gone wrong.

American women thinking about homebirth should read it. You can’t give informed consent unless you understand the very real risks of your baby dying at homebirth.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Then there was baby that the midwife dropped on the bathroom floor and fractured the baby’s skull but didn’t bring him in until he started seizing.[/pullquote]

It starts off with this question from a NICU nurse:

Do you see this often in your facility? In 2.5 years we have had 2 babies die and 2 be severely disabled from home birth… Recently we had a mom who was told she needed a C section by two different physicians at two different facilities for a breech baby and low fluid and she refused, signed out AMA and attempted a home birth with midwives. The baby of course became stuck with the body born and required a 13 minute code. We cooled her immediately for 72 hours and she spent two weeks on a vent. She just now is extubated but will require a trach because she can’t cough or swallow or gag so secretions just build up. She is more or less vegetative and on a slew of anti seizure meds. This stuff just really makes it hard for me to sleep! I feel like these poor innocent babies end up paying for their parents risky stupid decisions…

Other nurses respond:

Yes! There is a group of midwives in my area that deliver at home and at their birthing center that we see come in with their patients quite often. One of their patients was a similar story to yours. The baby was known to be frank breech a couple days before delivery but the midwives allowed mom to labor at home. Baby got stuck, was coded and died anyway (the baby was essentially dead when mom arrived at the hospital). Beautiful perfect baby who I’m convinced would still be alive if mom got a C-section. Overheard the midwife tell the parents that the baby obviously wasn’t meant to live.

We also had another baby that they removed from the birthing pool too slowly and the kid was an aspiration pneumonia/PPHN/whole body cooling.

Then there was baby that the midwife dropped on the bathroom floor and fractured the baby’s skull but didn’t bring him in until he started seizing.

And this:

We had one mom that was GBS positive and the local birthing center in town told her to shove a garlic clove up her hooha to kill the bacteria and the kid went into RDS about 4 hours after birth. The midwife told them just to drive the kid to the ER and when they got there the baby was sating in the 40’s and HR about 90. Totally blue and limp. GBS sepsis. When we were down in the ER trying to resuscitate the kid the mom asked me “when can I put him to breast again?”. I wanted to slap her. Then we went to get an emergency line into place and the parents tried to decline antibiotics because their midwife told them antibiotics were terrible for babies and not necessary. He ended up on HFOV maxed out on dopamine and dobutamine within an inch of death. Thankfully he lived…

And a maternal death:

Just during my short time in the OR we had 3 failed home births that ended catastrophically. One was a mom with placenta accreta who pushed against a 10lb baby for hours. We sectioned her in the main OR; She bled out right in front of us with her husband standing by her side. Hands down the worst case I’ve ever participated in. Baby made it…

Another maternal death:

I swear, the time has come to write a book to blow the lid off this “natural health” movement. I remember in clinical practice a mother who came in with HELLP and was stable, but due to the influence of her -non nurse- “all natural” midwife would not let us push IV fluids or magnesium. We lost her and the baby in a totally preventable seizure. Someone needs to write a book about all the ways the “natural health” community spews pseudoscience that at best helps nothing and in the worst cases, delays treatment till it’s too late.

And this:

It is hard not to get angry when parents who choose to forgo a hospital birth because of the big, bad medical establishment suddenly want us to do “everything medically possible to save my baby” regardless of how detrimental it is to the infant and in some cases completely futile. The hospital is spending millions of dollars to put their baby on ECMO and body cooling for a baby that is, without a doubt, going to be dinged (a NICU term) and possibly unsaveable when perhaps a few quiet conversations and some different choices could have resulted in a 2-3 day hospital stay and a healthy infant.

And this:

Almost 50% of our unit’s cooling babies were patients of these midwives and we have seen some absolutely clear cut negligence from them, yet they keep on practicing and consistently producing poor outcomes.

And this:

In my area we have a lay midwife that has lost creditably with the nursing staff long ago. When her patients come in they are train wrecks. Pushing for 5 hours against a 8 cm cervix, push with a FHR in the 90s…turns out that was the moms HR….baby had no heart rate when she come in by rescue for “exhaustion”, and a PP pt that was allowed to slowly bleed out for 6 hours before being brought in because she was “dizzy & couldn’t hold the baby to breastfeed”. They only gave her apple juice thinking it was her blood sugar. Turns out she had a cervical tear and retained placenta. These are just a few examples….and each time it happens, we have to wait for charting, prenatals and other information because she “has to gather my thoughts”.

And a baby with what sounds like an internal decapitation:

I’ve seen terrible things roll into triage when homebirth goes wrong. We had a woman come in who reported her water broke over a week ago but her midwife told her it was fine and to stay home. She was so infected you could barely stand in her room because of the foul odor. And baby was long dead. We had another mom roll in with her homebirth midwife who had been pushing for 12 hours and upon exam was found to have a closed cervix and the fetal heart tones were in the 50s. One more horror story, we had a home birth midwife attempt a delivery that ended with a severe shoulder dystocia which she attempted to resolved herself for nearly 30 minutes before coming to the hospital, at which time baby was long gone and the spinal column was detached from the aggressiveness the midwife had used to attempt to deliver the baby…

There’s plenty more in the following pages.

Thinking about homebirth? Think again.