Allison Dixley, self-proclaimed “alpha parent” offered this charming suggestion on her Facebook page.

Referring to an old newspaper article entitled No excuses for being fat, say Tories, Allison recommends:

Read this article and exchange ‘obesity’ for ‘formula feeding’. No excuses.

I have a better idea. Read the article and exchange ‘fat’ for ‘a sanctimommy.’

Sanctimommies were told today there are “no excuses” for being obnoxious.

Tell sanctimommies that something is “natural” and they are offered the one thing we have to avoid: an excuse for being insufferable.

As it is, women who see more sanctimommies around them may themselves be more likely become sanctimonious. Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour and they are classic excuses.

See, Allison, no excuses for being a sanctimommy!

A few questions for homebirth advocates:

Do you love your baby more than you hate the hospital? Or is avoiding a scary environment worth risking the life of your baby?

Which is more important: whether your baby lives or dies or whether you can brag to your friends about your defiance of medical authority?

Is birth an intimate moment sanctified by sharing it only with friends and not impersonal medical professionals, or is it a narcissism fest yielding professional photos and YouTube videos posted for the perusal of all 7 billion people on the planet?

Do you really want to be attended in labor by a mail order midwife (CPM – certified professional midwife) who likely obtained her “education” from a correspondence course and whose education requirements were recently “strengthened” to mandate a high school diploma?

Do you really think that reading books and websites written by laypeople is “research”?

You tell everyone that you will be quick to transfer to the hospital in an emergency where you trust that the obstetricians can save your babies life, but you don’t trust those same obstetricians to prevent the very emergency that will require their assistance. Does that make any sense?

If homebirth represents less than 1% of all births, but 100% of the income of homebirth midwives, who do you think has a greater financial interest in hiding the truth about homebirth, obstetricians or homebirth midwives?

I’m waiting anxiously for your replies.

Homebirth midwives shed accountability like water off a duck’s back.

Preside over a homebirth death and other midwives will promptly hold a rally for you without ever even bothering to investigate whether you handled the case properly.

Spew utter lies about research that shows an increased risk of death at homebirth and other midwives link to your lies.

Collect data on 28,000+ homebirths and find out that homebirth dramatically increases the risk of perinatal death, and just hide the data. Other homebirth advocates won’t mind.

But this latest technique for avoiding accountability is a new low.

I’m referring to Better Birth of Utah that had this to say in response to a client lawsuit alleging malpractice:

On a couple of occasions, we have discovered too late that a client is mentally ill, and her illness did not allow her to accurately perceive the events of labor…

That’s right. The folks at Better Birth have resurrected the classic sexist trope flung at women for millenia: don’t listen to that woman who is complaining; she’s crazy!

How many women, both poor and deprived or even rich and privileged have been “put away” into asylums because they dared question authority, whether that was the “authority” of their husbands, the Church or the State? Imputing mental illness to women who raise uncomfortable issues or make inconvenient accusations is one of the oldest sexist gambits in the book.

The folks at Better Birth claim that they are committed to accountability:

Our goal is to give every client the very best birth possible. Because we’re human, we don’t always succeed in that goal. When we have fallen short we are incredibly grateful to those clients who have given us the gift of negative feedback. Over the years we have used that precious information to change and improve our practice, our systems, and our facilities. As long as we exist we expect to continue that process and get better and better at serving our clients.

Really? They have a funny way of showing it.

At least they get points for full disclosure. Anyone contemplating choosing Better Birth can’t say they haven’t been warned. If you have a bad outcome or question their care, they will publicly label you as mentally ill.

It’s difficult to imagine anything more immoral or unethical.

I’ve been writing about this topic for years, from Promoting normal birth is killing mothers and babies to, only a few days ago, In the UK babies continue to die on the altar of vaginal birth,

Along the way I’ve written about the preventable death of baby Joshua Titcombe and his father’s heroic efforts to make sure no one else endure the grief he and his wife were forced to endure. And I’ve reported on the strenuous efforts of UK midwives to avoid accountability, In the face of staggering death toll head midwife relentlessly promotes normal birth, and the staggering increase in obstetric liability costs as a result of bad outcomes.

The government of the UK has finally taken notice, producing a report that is scathing in its assessment of midwives:

The Health Service Ombudsman examined the supervision of midwives after a series of reports into a scandal at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Foundation trust involving the deaths of 14 babies and two mothers.

It accuses the midwives in failing to carry out even basic monitoring and then attempting to avoid reponsibility for maternal and infant deaths:

The damning report is fiercely critical of subsequent investigations into the deaths by the trust and the local health authority – which it found guilty of “maladministration” for failing to properly probe the deaths.

Under the current NHS system of regulation, local midwives in were asked to investigate their peers following a series of deaths at Furness General Hospital.

Despite clear evidence of serious mistakes made, they found their colleagues did nothing wrong.

There were long delays investigating the deaths, and failures to highlight obvious lapses in care – such as babies not having their heart rates monitored and not being given antibiotics despite being very poorly, the report found.

The report entitled Midwifery supervision and regulation: recommendations for change is restricted to strengthening the weak oversight of UK midwives that allows them to ignore mistakes, fail to learn from them, and avoid accountability.

As if on cue, the Royal College of Midwives promptly moved to avoid accountability and maintain supervision of a system that could not prevent, and has not learned from, multiple maternal and infant death:

RCM chief executive Cathy Warwick said: “Midwifery supervision is a statutory function, is highly-valued by the midwifery profession and, indeed, has been the envy of other professional groups. It is impartial, in that it does not represent the interests of any service provider.”

“In many maternity services, the supervision of midwives can and should make a significant contribution to the protection of women and their babies,” she said. “It is very important that the long-term consequences for high-quality maternity care of further changes are very carefully considered.”

She added: “We must be extremely careful not to lose sight of the benefits of midwifery supervision; we could be in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water.”

Bravo, Cathy Warwick! Thanks for demonstrating the point of the report: midwife regulation and supervision must be changed because midwives are interested in protecting each other and avoiding responsibility and give woefully short shrift to their legal and ethical obligations to mothers and babies. QED.

The purview of the report did not extend to investigating underlying causes that led to the mistakes themselves. I suspect that the underlying causes are an unholy marriage between the midwifery philosophy and the government’s desire to save money by hiring midwives instead of obstetricians. These midwives are well educated and well trained, but they subscribed to a thoroughly unethical (not to mention scientifically unsupported) elevation of process above outcome. No doubt they’ve decreased the rate of interventions and C-sections. As a result, they have inevitably increased the rate of senseless, easily preventable maternal and infant deaths.

The “Campaign for Normal Birth” benefits midwives, and kills innocent women and children. It must stop immediately or more lives will be lost in UK midwives’ relentless attempts to promote and protect themselves.

Obstetricians are inherently humble.

You can’t attend thousands of births and fail to be impressed with the unpredictability of life threatening complications. They can come out of nowhere. Within minutes a perfectly healthy baby can die from a cord prolapse, a shoulder dystocia or a ruptured uterus. Within minutes a perfectly healthy mother can die from a postpartum hemorrhage, an amniotic fluid embolus or a ruptured uterus.

As proud as obstetricians are of their hard won knowledge and skills, all of us respect the life and death power of childbirth. We are not foolish enough to believe that we can accurately predict the future, so we plan for all possibilities. After all, the lives of our patients and their babies depend on us being prepared.

Homebirth midwives, on the other hand, are rather prideful. They actually think that they can predict unexpected complications is advance. They show precious little respect for the awesome life and death power of childbirth, reassuring women (falsely) that there will be plenty of time to transfer to a hospital in case of an emergency, even though there is no transfer fast enough to save the life of a baby in the case of cord prolapse, shoulder dystocia, or the need for an expert resuscitation with intubation.

Obstetricians are humble enough to recognize that “normal childbirth” is a retrospective diagnosis. Homebirth midwives, on the other hand, presume to make that diagnosis in advance. Indeed, they presume to make that diagnosis even when a pregnancy is known in advance to be high risk. In their ignorance and hubris, they simply reclassify high risk situations, like breech, twins and VBAC, as “variations of normal.”

Moreover, they impute bizarre, impossible skills to themselves such as preventing and curing pre-eclampsia with diet, turning breech babies by shining lights at the vagina, or stopping postpartum hemorrhage by shoving a piece of placenta under the mother’s tongue.

Is it really surprising, then, that homebirth midwives have hideous perinatal death rates, so hideous that the Midwives Alliance of North America has spent nearly 5 years trying to hide their own death rates? Hardly.

Any woman contemplating homebirth needs to understand that when homebirth midwives say “trust birth,” what they really mean is “trust me; I can predict unpredictable complications in advance, and assure you before the fact that nothing will go wrong.” What they really mean is “don’t show respect to birth; show respect to me and my awesome ability to see the future.”

There’s an old saying, “pride goeth before the fall.” The extraordinarily high rate of preventable death at homebirth reflects the outsize pride of homebirth midwives.

Unfortunately, it is babies and mothers who take the fall.

Woohoo! The Facebook page of Elder Midwives is a comedy goldmine!

Indeed, I am beginning to wonder if it is real or a parody, since it’s difficult to imagine anyone as thoroughly clueless as these supposedly experienced “midwives” are.

Consider this gem:

I want all your opinions! I have a new client who wants to birth at home so bad it breaks my heart. She may go US. She was in a car accident 2years ago and had surgery on her saccrum, where they placed a rod with screws. After the surgery she had an embolism in right lung. She was on Coumadin til she got pregnant, then was placed on Lovenox, and will be put Heparin at 36 weeks til birth. She feels none of these things put her at risk. I have not said I will attend, told her I have never faced these things, and would have to do some research before I commit. Have any of you faced either of these conditions? I’m off to look up these drugs.

Ii suppose that we should be grateful that this “midwife” hesitated, but the fact that she is even considering attending this birth is pretty horrifying. She has no idea what any of this means, but even she ought to know that this is not a low risk birth. Doesn’t that mean she is obligated to counsel that she is an inappropriate patient for homebirth under any circumstances, since homebirth midwives are only trained in “normal birth”? Apparently not.

Her colleagues are no less ignorant and irresponsible as she:

Has she done her research?

And:

I wouldn’t be overly concerned about the sacrum. Can you do a VE and see if there is any movement, but I would think even if there isn’t the pelvis and baby will adjust for it, just might mean more pushing.

And this astounding bit of blatant ignorance:

the goal of these meds is to make women who are hyperclotters into normal clotters — so theoretically — they should hve normal bleeding response if the levels are correct.

Wrong. These drugs are dosed to give the patient an abnormally prolonged clotting time.

Bur my personal favorite response comes from a patient:

i was on coumadin before my last pregnancy, then was on clexane during, due to previous postpartum cardiomyopathy and stroke at a later date. I had a moderate PPH after that pregnancy (my 4th) where as I had no previous history of bleeding… I chose to free birth again – mostly because I coudn’t get an attendant of any description. I am 25 weeks pregnant again at the moment, and this time I have decided to treat my tendency to coagulate naturally via lumbrokinase, nattokinase, and earthing…

So let’s see if I get this straight. A history of cardiomyopathy, stroke and postpartum hemorrhage. Just another variation of normal, amirite?

No artificial medications for her. She’s “treating” her increased risk of thrombo-embolism, not with evil heparin, naturally occurring in and harvested from mammals, but lumbrokinase obtained from earthworms and nattokinase from soybeans. Because, really, what could be closer to human anti-clotting compounds than those from earthworms?

I hear you asking: what’s earthing? No, silly, it’s not putting dirt on yourself. That would be ridiculous. It’s “an important health discovery!”

The practice of using the earth’s energy is called “earthing” and entails “grounding” a person to the earth much as an electrical current is grounded.

See, doesn’t that make sense?

As I say, the Elder Midwives are comedy gold … unless, of course, you stop to consider that the lives of mothers and babies are routinely put at risk by these fools. But what’s more important, really? Whether midwives can find enough paying clients or whether mothers and babies live or die?

Obviously, a midwife’s opportunity to get a birth junkie high is far more important that trivial matters like life and death.

I came across this comic on Facebook. It originated with NAMI of Oregon, an organization devoted to helping people with mental illness, and it was designed to satirize the way that people often chide those with mental illness, as if the illness were a choice or as if simply changing outlook would cure it. It asks us to think about the way we would react if physical illness were brushed off the way that mental illness often is.

The comic was being shared because someone thought that the memes were strikingly similar to those of natural childbirth advocacy.

That got me thinking:

In the world of natural childbirth, women’s needs ARE brushed off as if they are irrelevant or if their pain or illness or complications were there fault and could easily be treated with a better attitude and trust in birth.

The original comic is also being shared on the Facebook page of a prominent homebirth advocate who complains that she has heard these memes used to denigrate those with psychiatric issues. She fails to see that she (and other natural childbirth advocates), use exactly the same memes — the same blame, dismissiveness and insistence that the very real pain and suffering of laboring women could be easily controlled if they simply thought the right thoughts — to belittle women who choose pain relief in labor, experience pregnancy complications, or accept (or even request!) interventions in childbirth.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Anti-vaccinationists have a perfect record. In the 200+ years since vaccine rejection came into being (shortly after vaccines came into being) they have been wrong about 100% of their claims.

Pretty impressive, no? Yet, there are still vaccine rejectionists despite the fact that their all time batting average is zero.

That got me thinking. Have advocates of alternative health ever been right about anything?

I’m not referring to whether individuals believe that a particular method of alternative health, like homeopathy or chiropractic cured their cancer. I’m looking for examples where alternative health advocates proposed a new treatment for a specific disease or disability and scientific evidence ultimately vindicated their claims. Or they offered specific claims of harm for a specific vaccine or medication and scientific evidence was found that substantiates it.

I can think of one minor example. Natural childbirth advocates oppose pretty much all obstetric interventions on the grounds that they are ineffective or harmful. It turns out that they were right about episiotomies, a procedure designed to prevent vaginal tears that may actually increase them.

But there must be other examples somewhere, right?

Help me out. If you can think of any alternative health “treatment” that has ever been demonstrated to actually work, please let me know.

Maria Kang is shocked, shocked that anyone could have misinterpreted her “playful” suggestion as hate speech.

Kang has sparked internet discussion with this image, posted on her Facebook page:

And like other vicious women taken to task for making women feel bad, she thinks SHE is the one who is being discriminated against:

Will a “real woman” please stand up? In the age of Photoshop, plastic surgery and celebrity idolatry, it seems women are constantly debating what is considered a “real” woman. And, as I found out recently when I posted a picture of myself looking fit and healthy in workout clothes with my three sons (playfully asking the question “What’s your excuse?”), apparently I don’t count. My voice as an apparently nonreal woman counts so little, in fact, that Facebook recently banned me temporarily from the site — shutting down my account for almost three days for supposedly violating the site’s terms of service — after a number of users flagged a post of mine venting about the damaging culture of fat acceptance. After my post had garnered thousands of likes, comments and shares, these users apparently reported what I wrote as “hate speech.”

Maria is right. Her image is not hate speech. It is hateFUL speech. And it is depressingly familiar. Yet another Western, white, relatively well off woman promotes the notion that women should be judged by the functions of her body, not the power of her mind or the accomplishments she has achieved or the people she has aided.

And like natural childbirth advocates who think women’s virtue is located in her vagina, or lactivists who believe that women’s virtue is embodied in lactating breasts, Maria thinks women’s virtue is determined by how closely they approximate the Western, white ideal of the thin and toned body.

Not suprisingly, King justifies her viciousness by appeals to “science.”

Overweight women are now standing up (often half-naked) in defiance, exclaiming: “I have a beautiful ‘curvy’ body” and “This is what a real woman looks like.” These campaigns send a message that being overweight is normal…

Constant campaigns promoting self-acceptance and embracing one’s curves are placing the psychological need for a positive body image ahead of health. When you normalize a problem you create complacency. After all, you can’t fix a problem if you don’t see a problem…

Sound familiar? It should. Consider the lactiviciousness of Allison Dixley, the self-proclaimed “Alpha Parent”. She posted this gem:

Wow, what a coincidence! This picture also depicts a Western, white woman who is thin and toned.

And she also attempts to justify a hateful meme.

Aside from the important supply-related issues, there is also the fact that combination feeding dilutes much of the protection afforded by breastfeeding the way nature intended … To use the marriage analogy: a marriage can still exist when cheating has occurred; likewise breastfeeding can still exist when supplementation has occurred, but it will not ‘work’ as nature intended. Both mother and baby will not reap the normal physiological advantages.

Yet another startling coincidence! Both women justify their viciousness by appeals to “the science”; King appeals to “the science” about obesity and Dixley to “the science” about breastfeeding.

Charlotte Faircloth, a sociologist of parenting, has written about the abuse of science by lactivists (‘What Science Says is Best’: Parenting Practices, Scientific Authority and Maternal Identity) and her words have relevance for Kang’s abuse of “the science” of obesity.

When ‘science’ says something is healthiest for infants, it has the effect, for [lactivists], of shutting down debate; that is, it dictates what parents should do…

… [U]nder the assumption that science contains ‘no emotional content’, a wealth of agencies with an interest in parenting – from policy makers and ‘experts’ to groups of parents themselves – now have a language by which to make what might better be termed moral judgements about appropriate childcare practices. [But] ‘Science’ is not a straightforward rationale in the regulation of behaviour, rather, it is one that requires rigorous sociological questioning and debate in delimiting the parameters of this ‘is’ and the ‘ought’.

Kang, who judges women by their weight, justifies it with a similar appeal: it’s okay to be vicious to overweight women because being thin is “healthier.” Leave aside for the moment the fact that the scientific evidence actually shows that being slightly overweight is healthiest. The point is that both Dixley and Kang are exponents of health moralism, the practice of moralizing personal choices by appeals to “health.”

This is just an new gloss on an old phenomenon, the locating of women’s value and worth in the function or appearance of their bodies.

It is long past time for us to take a stand against viciousness masquerading as concern about health. Do we want our daughters to believe that their worth resides exclusively between in their breasts, across their flat, toned abdomens and in their vagina? Or do we want our daughters (and our sons!) to recognize that their worth is in the content of their character, the way they use their natural gifts, and how they treat others, including others who differ from themselves?

Here’s the meme I’d like to see:

I’m not holding my breath, though. Images that question privilege are not nearly as popular as those that further entrench it.

*Someone pointed out to me that Kang is Asian-American. Nonetheless, she promotes the Western, white, well off ideal of the female body.

It’s inevitable, really. When you elevate the process of birth over the outcome, you have to expect that babies are going to die preventable deaths.

That’s precisely what has been happening in the United Kingdom. Driven in part by the immoral, self-serving UK midwifery obsession with vaginal birth, babies who could have easily been saved by C-section are dying at vaginal birth. Driven by the desire to save money in the short term by reducing the C-section rate, the National Health Service has experienced an appalling explosion in liability costs for dead and brain injured babies.

I’ve written in the past about this deadly obsession with vaginal birth:

Promoting normal birth is killing babies and mothers
Midwife : UK deaths result of failing to meet the needs of … midwives?
New document on British maternity services is fundamentally unethical

Not surprisingly, the amount of money paid for bad outcomes and the cost of insurance coverage have skyrocketed (A fifth of maternity funding spent on insurance):

Public Accounts Committee chairwoman Margaret Hodge said it was “absolutely scandalous” that £482m was spent on clinical negligence cover last year.

The MP’s comments came as a National Audit Office report shows that the NHS in England forks out the equivalent of £700 per birth on such cover.

The most common reasons for maternity claims are mistakes in the management of labour or Caesarean sections and errors resulting in cerebral palsy, the NAO report states.

In other words, the obsession with vaginal birth and the concomitant obsession with lowering the C-section rate have led to an appalling number of infant injuries and deaths.

Those are the stark facts, but sometimes it takes a story to really drive the point home. Beatrix Campbell has lived such a story and today she tells it in the Mail Online, ‘I begged for a Caesarean – but the midwife refused and my baby girl died: As minister holds maternity summit, a mother’s angry open letter. The letter is published in response to a government sponsored maternity being held today.

I wish I could reprint the entire piece because it is both brilliant and appalling, but I can only offer quotes.

My daughter Alexandra suffered a barbaric death at just three days old as a result of appallingly substandard care in 2009.
So I hope today’s seminar will be a soul-searching event. Top of the agenda should be last month’s horrifying finding by the National Audit Office that the number of lawsuits involving ‘obstetric damage’ is rising – as well as ‘significant and unexplained variations in rates of obstetric complications and interventions’.

Behind the jargon there are the stories of babies left with a lifetime of brain damage or, worse, stillborn or dying soon after birth. Stories of babies like Alexandra.

Why does this happen?

What is going wrong? One of the major problems is the conveyor belt mentality that pervades some maternity units.

This is based on the extraordinary idea that there’s a right and wrong way to give birth – natural childbirth is ‘good’, while women who have problems during labour are failing or are even making trouble.

What happened to Alexandra? Her mother was admitted to the hospital for a postdates induction at 42 weeks of pregnancy:

So, 30 hours after the induction had started, with the birth canal still barely dilated, I begged the midwife to organise a Caesarean. I was shocked that the request was brusquely refused as unnecessary. From then on, I was a silly girl making a fuss.

When I requested a second opinion and asked to see the consultant obstetrician, with my husband Craig repeating the request, we were ignored.

If the team had followed national guidance, based on the evidence on what makes for safe obstetric care, I would have had surgery at that point.

Indeed, in its internal inquiry into the death of Alexandra, the hospital acknowledged that our daughter could have, and most likely would have, lived had she been delivered by Caesarean at that point.

Why was Beatrix denied the C-section that she both needed and requested?

At the time of her birth, the World Health Organisation had quotas in place to decide how babies should be born: a hospital should allow no more than 15 per cent of all births to be Caesarean – Britain’s current rate is 25 per cent. That was being ignored as unscientific in many units. After all, how could a decision on safe birth be decided by quota?

Indeed, the quota was withdrawn in 2010 amid a scientific scandal over evidence that it had been drawn up virtually at random.

So Beatrix was forced, without her consent, into a mid-forceps rotation and delivery with Kielland forceps.

Without explanation, I was transferred to an operating theatre where an untrained and unsupervised junior doctor turned Alexandra’s head without moving her body, injuring her brain and spinal cord so badly she was unable to breathe on her own. She was left so severely brain damaged she was on a ventilator for three days before she died in my arms.

What has the health service done in the wake of Alexandra’s death?

Yet four years after Alexandra died we have not received a proper apology from the hospital and we know there has been no disciplinary action against the junior doctor who effectively killed our daughter or the senior doctors who failed in their responsibility to do no harm.

Edinburgh Royal Infirmary carried out an inquiry of sorts conducted by the senior doctor and midwife most closely implicated in Alexandra’s death.

At a meeting with us, they added insult to the terrible injury we’ve suffered by informing us we were ‘just unlucky, very unlucky’.

I was told by a senior midwife that I must keep quiet about Alexandra’s death because the incident might frighten future patients…

In other words, nothing has been done.

So more babies will continue to die on the altar of vaginal birth, and the payouts for obstetric disasters will continue to rise. That’s the price for focusing on process instead of outcome.

Apparently British health authorities are willing to pay extraordinary amounts of money to increase the vaginal birth rate and decrease the C-section rate. And British babies are forced to pay the price with their lives.