The Skeptical OB

BFUSA presents breastfeeding as natural yet requiring medical and administrative oversight, mothers as empowered but uniquely vulnerable, and medical staff as responsive to mothers but driven by objective goals and unquestioned medical evidence. BFUSA policies frame mothers as capable of, and entitled to, individual choice but then undermine this “choice” by repeatedly pointing to the […]

Breastfeeding research is a flawed paradigm in which statistically illiterate methods, meaningless “benefits” and ideological censorship dominate the literature. It’s the inevitable result of the fact that lactation professionals made extravagant claims about the benefits of breastfeeding more than a decade before they bothered to check if those claims were true. By now it’s become […]

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 […]