A new piece on NPR suggests that it’s okay to risk a baby’s death in order to bed share. The piece asks Is Sleeping With Your Baby As Dangerous As Doctors Say? and answers by suggesting that the “right” kind of parents can bed share while the “wrong” kind of parents cannot. Parents who drink […]
Another day, another piece demonizing C-sections. How the C-Section Went From Last Resort to Overused was written by Rebecca Onion and appears on Slate. We don’t even get to the body of the piece before the first falsehood appears. The subtitle is: The history of the surgery is rife with horror, but today, 1 in 3 […]
Kavin Senapathy, writing in Self reports Giving Birth Made Me Question the Informed Consent Process During Childbirth. The issue: should we obtain informed consent for vaginal birth? After all vaginal birth is natural, not a medical procedure. I would pose the question a bit differently. Are doctors ethically required to counsel women about the risks […]
It is often said that randomized controlled studies (RCTs) are the gold standard in healthcare. As David Shaywitz explains in a piece in Forbes Will Real World Performance Replace RCTs As Healthcare’s Most Important Standard?: The value of RCTs lies in the random, generally blinded, allocation of patients to treatment or control group, an approach […]
A new paper published this month in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Mode of delivery after a previous cesarean birth, and associated maternal and neonatal morbidity, shows that attempted vaginal birth after C-section (VBAC) significantly increases the risk of poor maternal and neonatal outcome. Absolute rates of severe maternal morbidity and mortality were low but […]
I was very fortunate in my OB-GYN training. I did my internship and residency at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, a Harvard hospital. I prize that training, but over the past 35 years I’ve discovered that some of things I was taught were wrong. Three of the principles of obstetrics and gynecology that were accepted as […]
You’re a good mother; your children show you that you are. Your baby greets you with a thousand watt smile when you pick her up from her nap. She loves to be in your arms when she feels happy and she needs to be in your arms when she feels ill. Your toddler can’t get […]
Warning! This story is not for the faint of heart. According to a story in The Independent: A doctor caused an unborn baby to be accidentally decapitated inside her mother’s womb while performing a delivery, a medical tribunal has heard… The obstetrician at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee is accused of wrongly going ahead with a […]
It’s the ur-myth of lactivism, the belief that we came from Breastopia and we should return to Breastopia. There’s just one problem: Breastopia never existed and frantic efforts to “reclaim” it are harming babies and mothers. To understand why it helps to compare Breastopia to the natural world. That’s why I created the handy chart […]
In a world of vicious clashes over ideas and even over facts themselves, there is one thing on which everyone can agree. Thought leaders on the left and the right, among every possible ethnic and religious group, among scientists and lay people are united in their insistence that breastfeeding has major benefits for babies. Too […]
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
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