Thank goodness for geniuses like Carla Hartley of “trust birth” fame. She intuited that putting one of those cute knit hats on a baby to prevent heat loss after birth actually can harm the baby’s health for the rest of its life AND precipitate maternal postpartum hemorrhage.

The sheeple of the homebirth movement (get it? knitting? sheeple?) having been falling all over themselves to embrace this new form of “defiance.”

The nitwits (knitwits?) at Modern Alternative Pregnancy have this to say (Take it Off: Why You Should Drop Your Newborn’s Hat):

Mothers and babies are wired by nature to recognize each other’s smell. Your baby can recognize you on scent alone, and you can recognize your newborn on scent alone. These smells cause the two of you to bond strongly, right away…

The smell of your new baby’s head isn’t just important for bonding, it’s important for your safety and baby’s well-being. The olfactory system expects certain cues right after your baby is born – these cues are supplied by the smell of your baby’s head as you snuggle with him or her after birth (it’s an even stronger cue than breastfeeding).

This trigger to your olfactory system (and limbic system) cues a massive rush of oxytocin, the “mothering hormone.” Oxytocin causes your uterus to contract, which shears the placenta from the wall of the uterus and forces an instant constriction of the blood vessels that were running to the placenta. This means a safe, effective third stage of labor for you (Odent, 2013).

There’s really no limit to the gullibility of these fools, is there?

But wait! I have found a solution for the terrible problem of hatting! The solution is vaginal knitting.

Yes, you heard that right. Vaginal knitting as practiced by this self-styled “craftivist.”

According to the Mirror (Artist shoves ball of wool up her VAGINA to knit with it for a month):

Casey Jenkins from Melbourne, Australia, wanted to do something unusual with her knitting to make women’s private parts appear less “shocking or scary”…

She pulls the thread straight out of her vagina and knits streams of yarn in front of an audience.

This is how you can create the perfect hat for your naturally born baby. Shove a ball of yarn up your vagina immediately after birth (there should be plenty of room, enough for the economy size) and knit a hat imbued with those birth smells that are so important.

It might be a little uncomfortable, but then again, it might be arousing. According to Casey, who continues vaginal knitting during her period:

For starters, when I’m menstruating it makes knitting a hell of a lot harder because the wool is wet so you have to kind of yank at it.

“It’s sort of slightly uncomfortable sometimes, arousing sometimes.

Birth orgasms are so 2013. I predict that vaginal knitting orgasms are the wave of the future.

So there you have it, my solution to the outrageous hospital plot of hatting newborns, designed to destroy bonding and promote postpartum hemorrhage.

Vaginal knitting of newborn hats allows babies to keep their birthy smells and wear them, too.

This picture has been making the rounds on Facebook.

Click here to see it if you dare. It’s very bloody, and, once seen, cannot be unseen.

The image is so obviously staged that I wondered whether it was even real. It is. And it is a piece of performance art by an actual artist.

According to the artist, Ana Alvarez-Errecalde, this is a portrait of her in the aftermath of the birth of her daughter.

With this documental self-portrait (without Photoshop or any kind of image manipulation) of myself giving birth I want to challenge most of maternities in films, advertising and all of art history.

Without image manipulation? Not exactly, since the photo is staged on a photographic background and the mother has at least washed her face and combed her hair.

Interestingly, the artist wanted to show that birth is NOT sacred:

These maternities re-enforce the stereotypes that impart from heterosexual masculine fantasies, in which exist the duality of the mother/whore, making sacred all that has to do with the “mother” (maternity with veil included).

And:

By giving birth I take off my “cultural” veil. My maternity is not virginal, not aseptic.

Well, yes, birth is not virginal.

Had she stopped there, she would have distinguished her art from the “look at me and be impressed” school of birth performance art. But she too wants you to look at her and be impressed.

I am the protagonist. I am a hero.

Umm, no. You are not a hero, any more than you are a hero when you digest your food and absorb oxygen through your lungs.

And if she’s the hero, what is the baby? Nothing apparently, just another prop in the world of birth performance art.

I almost feel sorry for Henci Goer. She has styled herself an advocate of evidence based obstetric practice, but the evidence continues to mount that homebirth, which she supports, increases the risk of perinatal death.

What evidence?

1. Well, there’s the CDC data on planned homebirth, collected since 2003, that consistently shows homebirth to have a death rate 3-7X higher than comparable risk hospital birth.
2. There’s the data from Colorado that shows that homebirth has a death rate more than 15X higher than expected.
3. There’s the data from Oregon, probably the most definitive American dataset, that shows homebirth has a death rate 9X higher than comparable risk hospital birth.
4. There’s the Birthplace Study from the UK, rigorously controlled for all possible risk factors, which still showed that homebirth increases the risk of adverse outcomes.
5. There’s the Grunebaum study that shows that homebirth increases the risk of 5 minute Apgar score of 0 by nearly 1000%.
6. There’s not a single study of homebirth with a CPM (certified professional midwife) that shows it to be safe; the Johnson and Daviss study is a bait and switch.
7. The Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA), the organization that represents homebirth midwives, has been hiding its own death rates for nearly 5 years, while simultaneously boasting about the low rate of C-sections and interventions in the same group.

But Goer is still out there gamely trying to put on a brave front. This is especially impressive since she tries to have some integrity. Unlike MANA and its executives, who simply issue bald faced lies, and refuse to correct them even when it is pointed out they are lies, Goer tries to stick to the truth.

And now she’s been reduced to this: acknowledging that in practice homebirth increases the risk of death, but wondering what might happen theoretically.

Her latest piece of the Lamaze International blog Science and Sensibility is Safe at Home? New Home Vs. Hospital Birth Study Reviewed by Henci Goer.

The paper Goer reviews is yet another that shows that homebirth increases the risk of death. The paper is Selected perinatal outcomes associated with planned home births in the United States by Cheng, Snowden, King and Caughey. I had the pleasure of participating in a panel with Dr. Caughey at the ACOG conference in Maui and reviewing the dangers of homebirth.

The study looked at 2,081,753 births term singleton live births in 2008 in the United States. Of these, 12,039 births (0.58%) were planned home births. The authors found:

Women who were multiparous,
35 years old, of non-Hispanic white ethnicity/ background, married, and college-level education or higher were more likely to have planned home births. Women who had planned home births had lower rates of obstetric intervention than those who gave birth in hospitals.However, neonates of planned home births were more likely to have critically low 5-minute Apgar scores (<4) and seizure activity, both of which are known prognosticators of neonatal death and poor neurologic outcomes such as cerebral palsy and longterm developmental impairment.

Goer doesn’t really quibble with the fact that the study shows that in practice, homebirth increases the risk of adverse outcomes. Instead, she tries to divert attention away from reality by musing about theory.

Goer claims:

To begin with, the relevant question isn’t the tradeoffs between planned home birth per se and hospital birth. It is: “What are the excess risks for healthy women at low risk of urgent complications who plan home birth with qualified home birth attendants compared with similar women planning hospital birth?”

That’s nothing more than wishful thinking. Goer’s target audience is women considering homebirth. They want to know whether choosing homebirth puts their babies at risk. In other words, they want to know what actually happens. It makes no difference to them whether homebirth might be safe in a theoretical world that doesn’t exist.

Goer is shocked, shocked that women with high risk conditions are giving birth at home:

Not all women planning home birth were low-risk. For one thing, women with prior cesareans were included. For another, the methods section states that the analysis adjusted for medical risk, and the discussion notes that women with prior children in the home birth group were more likely to have babies with low Apgar scores even after removing women with medical risk, which implies that some of them had medical problems.

Yet, I’ve never seen Goer criticize MANA or the many state groups of CPMs who consistently lobby for increasing scope of practice to embrace high risk conditions.

And Goer is shocked, shocked that not all homebirth midwives are actually qualified to represent themselves as midwives:

Not all women in the home birth group had qualified home birth attendants. Outcome data on the overall population came from women recorded as being attended by MDs, DOs, “other midwife,” “others,” and “unknown/not stated” as well as by professional midwives.

But that’s hardly the problem. “Professional” midwives, such as CPMs have hideous homebirth death rates.

Then, as homebirth advocates typically do, she cites studies from foreign countries that have higher standards for midwives, dedicated transport systems, and greater integration into the hospital system. Look, look, see the Netherlands and Canada!!! Well, in the first place, we are not talking about those countries, and in the second place, the Netherlands has nothing to boast about. Low risk births attended by midwives (home or hospital) have HIGHER death rates than high risk births attended by obstetricians.

Goer’s conclusions are rather bizarre, since they aren’t supported by anything she presented:

Women desiring home birth should have access to professional midwifery care, which argues for making CPMs legal in all 50 states.

But legal, licensed CPMs in Colorado and Oregon have extraordinarily high death rates, so that’s obviously not the answer.

Second, less than optimal candidates are birthing at home, and some women may be continuing labor at home who shouldn’t… [H]ospital-based practitioners need to address the behaviors, practices, and policies that drive women away from hospital birth.

No, Henci, that conclusion is unfair to the women choosing homebirth in high risk situations. They are not deliberately choosing unsafe birth. They’ve “educated themselves” to believe that homebirth in high risk situations IS safe, in part by reading pieces such as the one you have just written, and by listening to the counsel of CPMs.

The correct conclusion is precisely the opposite: Homebirth proponents like Goer need to address their own rhetoric to determine why women are reaching the erroneous conclusion that homebirth is a responsible choice even in high risk situations.

Personally, I would have written a shorter, crisper analysis of this study:

1. It is yet another study that shows that planned homebirth in the US increases the risk of death.
2. It is very valuable because it represents the real world risk that women should contemplate when choosing homebirth.
3. It doesn’t matter whether homebirth is safe in some other country or in some theoretical world that doesn’t exist.
4. We need to have much higher standards for midwives; the CPM is grossly inadequate.
5. Homebirth midwives and advocates need to do a great deal of soul searching to determine where women are getting the idea that homebirth is safe in high risk conditions.

I feel for Goer. She’s staked out a position that homebirth in the US is safe, and it clearly is not. Unlike MANA and other homebirth advocates, she appears to have some integrity. Therefore, she should start telling women the truth. Homebirth in the US increases the risk of death compared to hospital birth. Unless and until she does that, Goer is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess I should be flattered that Judy Slome Cohain, CNM has noted the success of my video The truth about homebirth midwives, seen by nearly 10,000, and decided to make an imitation touting the “safety” of homebirth.

You may remember Judy. She’s the clown who declared that intravaginal cloves of garlic are an appropriate treatment for maternal GBS colonization. She has blood on her hands because babies, including Wren, have died as a result.

Apparently she hasn’t been responsible for enough preventable perinatal deaths, so she’s made a video!

The video is an outstanding example of what passes for “logic” and “education” among homebirth advocates.

Let’s start with Judy’s title, Why home birth is 1000 times safer than hospital birth for low risk women. Now you might think that means that Judy is going to show us research that demonstrates that hospital birth has death rate that is 1000 times higher that the death rate of homebirth. Don’t be silly! How would she do that when we already know, from numerous studies and datasets (including Oregon, Colorado and CDC data), that homebirth has mortality rate up to 10 times higher than comparable risk hospital birth? Maybe it’s just rhetorical, kind of like claiming that homebirth is wicked safer than hospital birth (even though it is not).

Do watch the video. It provides loads of laughs especially since it is designed for medical practitioners who will listen to the first 30 seconds, and conclude that Judy is a dolt.

She starts with the idiotic and then moves on from there.

Judy explains that some people think homebirth might be unsafe because of the risk of emergencies, but dismisses this because, in her mind, an “emergency” is a cord around the neck, which isn’t particularly dangerous at all. How about fetal distress? Judy doesn’t say. Breech with a trapped head? Judy doesn’t say. Abruption, Judy doesn’t say. Presumbably, in those situations, your baby will simply die, but how could that compare with the utter devastation of having a C-section.

Judy does talk about shoulder dystocia and what she says (and what she neglects to say) make her conclusion ludicrous.

According to Judy:

Shoulder dystocia … are [sic] easier to manage at home

That sounds extremely unlikely, but Judy actually provides a reference to a website, shoulderdystociainfo.com.

I happened to have worked with Dr. Lerner, the creator of shoulderdystociainfo.com, and it’s hard for me to imagine that he would have written that shoulder dystocia is easier to manage at home, since correct management of shoulder dystocia involves a team approach including a nurse, an anesthesiologist and a neonatologist. And what do you know? When I reviewed the website I found that homebirth ISN’T EVEN MENTIONED, let alone described as safe for shoulder dystocia.

But, hey, when you have no regard for the truth, and you just make stuff up as you go along, it only makes sense that you would site as a reference a source that doesn’t even mention your claim, let alone endorse it.

Apparently, Judy “knows” that shoulder dystocia is easier to manage at home and she provides us with the reasons.

You have to give Judy credit. How many other people could cram so much stupidity into one slide?

Shoulder dystocia is safer to manage at home because “suprapubic pressure easy on mattress on the floor.”

Is this woman for real? How many homebirths occur on mattresses on the floor? Probably zero. They are much more likely to occur in a kiddie pool of fecally contaminated water and there’s no way to apply suprapubic pressure there, not to mention no one available to apply it.

You lose “2 critical minutes” untangling BP cuff, IV, monitor, epidural and lowering the bed? Why would they be tangled in the first place? In addition, the beds are electric, they can be lowered in seconds. And (here’s the clincher), in the hospital, the staff ARE PREPARED for shoulder dystocia. Many hospitals drill their staff on shoulder dystocia treatment, so the requisite maneuvers proceed quickly and smoothly.

But of course, Judy just made up these claims (and lied about the source), just like she made up her claim that intravaginal cloves of garlic are an appropriate treatment for maternal group B strep colonization.

I left a comment on the video and I didn’t mince words:

Judy, you should be ashamed of yourself for the blood you have on your hands. You are the clown who made up the idea of intravaginal garlic to treat GBS and babies have died as a result of listening to your nonsense. This is just more garbage.

I don’t even understand most of the gibberish that Judy spewed in response, but I do understand this:

And contrary to Amy’s post, not a single baby has ever died because her mother put some garlic in her vagina or mouth during pregnancy.

Really? How about this baby, Wren Jones?

http://hurtbyhomebirth.blogspot.com/2011/03/wrens-story-on-1st-anniversary-of-his.html

Judy ends her video with more of her trademark mendacity.

Oh, look, Judy isn’t claiming that homebirth has a lower death rate, since it doesn’t. She’s claiming that homebirth is safer because it has a lower intervention rate. Yes, your baby has a greater chance of living if you give birth in a hospital, but what does that matter if you ended up with an intervention?

Earth to Judy:

There is no evidence that the lower intervention rate at homebirth makes it safer and copious evidence that the lower intervention rate makes it more dangerous. Of course that assumes that you care whether your baby lives or dies, which most mothers do, even if you do not.

I don’t need no stinkin’ education!

My autonomy is more important than whether your baby lives or dies!

Don’t you dare hold me accountable!

That seems to sum up the prevailing views on the Facebook page of Elder Midwives Babyslaughterers. The “philosophical musings” of these buffoons could be dismissed as ludicrous, except for the fact that they have left the tiny bodies of dead babies in their wake. Indeed, the Facebook page is a veritable rogues’ gallery of babyslaughterers.

What’s a babyslaughterer? A babyslaughterer is a midwife who ignores the growing pile of tiny bodies, babies who died preventable deaths as a result of her direct or indirect professional actions. My view of involuntary babyslaughter is that a newborn death resulting from taking of an unreasonable and high degree of risk should be considered criminally negligent babyslaughter. It’s the homebirth version of involuntary manslaughter.

A perfect example of what passes for logic among these clowns can be found in this thread discussing the fact that uncredentialed self-proclaimed midwives are not eligible to travel on medical missions. You can read the full thread of nonsense for yourselves (and I’ve already screen-capped it in case of deletion). These clowns have worked themselves in a frenzy of indignation that anyone dares to have standards of any kinds for homebirth midwives.

I’ll just share a few highlights.

Lorri Carr Licensed Midwife: I despise that kind of exclusionary attitude. I was asked once to participate in the volunteer maternity care efforts for wives of deployed soldiers, then when they found out I was not a CNM they retracted the request. Hmph. Then they whined because they had no providers … imagine that.

Imagine that. They didn’t want to third world women to be cared for by lay people masquerading as midwives.

Carol Gautschi don’t need no stinkin’ education, either.

Midwife Carol Gautschi: Lol! No degree makes a midwife! Only GOD makes a midwife! Good thing we KNOW that!

LOL?

Babyslaughterer Gloria Lemay seems to think this thread, like everything else, is about her and how she feels.

Gloria Lemay: so many of my dumb transfers when I started could have been prevented if I had had a “safe”, more experienced midwife to call. Unfortunately, the midwives that I called would gossip about me not knowing something and that made it unsafe for me to call…

Just in case you thought these self-proclaimed “midwives” were something other than buffoons, Shannon Mitchell can disabuse you of that bit of wishful thinking.

Shannon Mitchell: VBAC is not high risk because there is no true definition of high risk. It’s imaginary. Created. She may be at a higher risk than some other mothers or she may not. The point being that a normal birth is EXPECTED, which makes her NOT high risk.

Someone asks about the proposal that all US midwives should meet the international standards promulgated by the International Confederation of Midwives:

Lorri Carr Licensed Midwife: I took a peek at them, and they do seem vague enough to allow for some autonomy.☺

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge!

But the best illustration of these “midwives” ignorance, self absorption and refusal to take accountability comes from this thread, discussing a homebirth death at a birth center.

Gail Hart re>>>Does accountability need to be taken, did wrongful deaths occur, is it a witch hunt, how would this be looked at the same thing happened to a medical professional in the hospital, should that medical professional have to take more responsibility by law as wel [sic]>>>>

Let’s take it in easy bites.

RE<>>

“Accointability [sic] is a slippery word: for most people the word equals “revenge’ . And in that meaning, I aswer [sic] “No”.
If you mean should an explanation be found? I anser [sic] “Yes”.

RE>>>>> did wrongful deaths occur,>>>>>

Wrongful — as in “preventable” – yes these should be discoered [sic].

RE>>>> is it a witch hunt,>>>>>>
YES

RE>>> how would this be looked at the same thing happened to a medical professional in the hospital,>>>>

Doctors are generally protected, and excused even when the death was preventable or caused by actionns [sic]…

Accountability equals revenge? Accountability is a witch hunt? Doctors are protected and excused in the wake of perinatal deaths?

Are these women for real?

Unfortunately they are, and the sooner they are restricted from “practicing,” by the imposition of large fines and jail sentences, the safer the rest of us will be.

There seems to be a big problem with telling the truth in the homebirth/natural childbirth universe.

Yesterday I wrote about the lactation consultant who lies to her patients about her vaccination status, assuring them she has had a pertussis booster when she has not.

I’ve written in the past about the homebirth midwifery guide that advises lying to your patients about what procedures and medications you use.

Wendy Gordon, CPM, a member of the MANA Division of Research (and placenta encapsulation specialist!) included a bald faced lie in her effort to discredit the study that showed that homebirth increases the risk of a 5 minute Apgar score of zero by nearly 1000%.

Now Improvingbirth.org seems to be having trouble with the truth. Their latest infographic appears to include yet another bald faced lie. The graphic states very plainly that “the most births per day in the U.S. occur on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.” There’s just one itty bitty problem. It’s not true and it isn’t even close to being true.

A data table compiled by a Harvard economist reveals that the most popular birthday of the year is actually September 16, and that the entire month of November includes no days that are among the most common.

Matt Stiles, data journalist at NPR, turned the table into a fabulous chart, seen below:

The most common birthdays are dark and the least common are light. It is easy to see that the Tuesday before Thanksgiving isn’t even close to being the most common birthday. I can’t imagine where they got that faux “statistic.” Perhaps they simply made it up.

According to the Improvingbirth.org website, their mission is:

To bring evidence-based care and humanity to childbirth.

Really? They might consider the fact that statements that are flat out false are not “evidence-based” at all.

If you cannot trust homebirth and natural childbirth websites like Improvingbirth.org to tell the truth about even the most basic, easily checked statistics, how can you trust them to tell the truth about anything?

Addendum: Improvingbirth.org is not the only natural childbirth organization to make this claim, so I wondered where it originated. I suspect it came from here, Births by Day of the Year. It’s a critique of the heatmap I posted above. There, the data is posted by day of the week superimposed on day of the year. Take a look at the last graph with represents the year 2000.

What’s immediately obvious is that numbers of births per day follows a pattern that cycles each week. Tuesday has the greatest number of births and Saturday and Sunday have by far the least. This has been known for some time and appears to be driven by scheduled C-sections. Simply put, the most common day of the week to schedule a C-section is Tuesday, presumably because the mother will be discharged from the hospital by the weekend when there will be many family members and friends available to help her. No C-sections are scheduled on the weekend. No inductions are scheduled on the weekend, either, making those the days with the least births each week.

There is also an observable pattern around holidays. Holidays which result in days off for the staff also have no elective C-sections or inductions, lowering the number of births for those days. Where did the rest of the births go? They were switched to the days before or the days after. So there’s no evidence that the overall number of C-sections or inductions has changed because of the holidays, only the days on which they are scheduled have changed.

In the year 2000, the day with the highest number of births is indeed, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, but in other years, it is the Tuesday before or the Tuesday after Christmas or New Year’s Day. So there is no question that the Tuesday before major holidays and the Tuesday after have the highest number of births, BUT that’s NOT because of medically unindicated inductions. It merely reflects the holiday trend superimposed on the weekly trend. There are no scheduled C-sections or inductions on major holidays. Any delivery that was going to be scheduled ANYWAY is moved to a day that is not the holiday.

So, the Improvingbirth.org statistic is misleading because in most years it is factually untrue, and because it does NOT reflect additional inductions as implied by Improvingbirth.org, merely inductions moved earlier or later by a few days.

Finally, it is extremely misleading because the statistic that counts is mortality, not the number of babies born on any given day. Improvingbirth.org has provided no evidence of any kind that ANY babies or mothers are harmed by these schedule changes and there is no reason to believe that there would be any impact on mortality by scheduling changes of a few days.

The ultimate irony is that natural childbirth advocates are forever wailing that obstetricians “play the dead baby card” by warning of bad outcomes as a result of refusing interventions. Not only is Improvingbirth.org use the very tactic that they claim to despise (“Don’t be a Thanksgiving statistic!”) hypocritical, it is actually worse. In contrast the obstetricians’ warning, which is actually true, Improvingbirth.org’s warning is factual false. There is no evidence that more babies are born on Tuesdays before and after major holidays has any impact on mortality or morbidity.

Imagine doing everything in your power to protect your vulnerable newborn, then having your baby die by contracting pertussis from your lactation consult or postpartum doula.

Some mothers can imagine it and they are acting to prevent it. Lactation consultants and doulas are feeling it where it matters most: in their wallet. And, as a result, some have taken to lying to their clients.

From Mothering.com:

… I am a postpartum doula and just lost a client after her dr. told her it was imperative that everyone who comes into contact with her babies be up to date with the flu shot and the TDaP. I told her that I don’t vax (I actually have had some very adverse reactions to vaccines in my past) and that was a deal breaker. I’m just feeling disheartened that the pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment have successfully convinced so many people that this is necessary…

Yup, there’s that massive world wide conspiracy involving tens of millions of people, including nearly every doctor in the known world, plus Big Pharma, plus the governments of nearly all countries. You’d have to be a gullible fool to believe something so ridiculous, but apparently many lactation consults and postpartum doulas are gullible fools.

That’s not the truly shocking part, though. This response from another lactation consultant is downright horrifying:

I’m a post partum doula and lactation consultant. I work for an agency. I’ve never had a flu shot that I can remember, never gotten a TDaP booster, not had Hep vax or anything…

I’m rarely asked, but I say “I’m up to date with all necessary vaccinations.” I don’t think TDaP, Flu or Hep are necessary vaccines, but I keep THAT PART to myself… (emphasis in the original)

… Most clients never ask me, so I’m wondering if this was just a mom who had been brainwashed by her doctor. My advice is to never bring it up on your own and smile and offer that you’ve had “necessary vaccines” if asked, then change the subject. You are NOT going to give someone diphtheria or pertussis, it’s ridiculous for people to think that’s going to happen.

So let’s see if I get this straight. This lactation consultant/postpartum doula thinks it is okay to LIE to her clients, thereby robbing them of the opportunity to make an informed decision about the care of their own babies. And why is it okay to lie? For no better reason than to preserve her income. Apparently money is more important to this vile human being than whether her clients’ babies live or die.

These women should be ashamed of themselves, but that requires both a modicum of education and a sense of morality. Both appear to be lacking here.

Apparently it is not enough for lactivists that breastfeeding promotion is the official policy of the land. It is critical to purify the world by shaming women who choose to bottlefeed anyway.

But bottle feeders have begun a stealth campaign to escape detection and opprobrium. If confronted while bottlefeeding, they’ve taken to lying about the contents of the bottle. They actually dare to claim that the bottle is filled with breastmilk. Don’t worry, though; the Breastapo is on the case!

Like every fascist organization, militant lactivists feel the need for a secret police force, hence the Breastapo. The Kommandant of the Breastapo is Allison Dixley of The Alpha Parent. Dixley has helpfully created an educational poster designed to allow the average lactivist to sniff out — literally — those bottlefeeders who are lying to save themselves.

As Dixley warned when introducing the poster:

Formula feeding in public? Don’t bother trying to pretend it’s breast milk.

The poster is loaded with tips for informants on how to discern the difference between breastmilk and formula even when it is in a bottle. For example, breastmilk may look thin and watery, but formula is of uniform color. And breastmilk may have a layer fat on the top, while formula is of uniform density.

You don’t have to simply trust your eyes, though. Once you grab the bottle away from the mother and baby, be sure to smell it. Formula has a “cheesy” odor.

On her Facebook page, Dixley notes:

I’m not sure if the internet is ready for this. Oh well, some things have just gotta be said.

But unlike Dixley, some lactivists are too mealy mouthed to recognize the need of the Breastapo to recruit informers from among general public.

One commentor states:

Lady, you are so full of hate and issues….please do not kid yourself for one minute that you are anything like Dr Jack Newman or anyone else who promotes breastfeeding. You are a troll, pure and simple, and all you achieve is to cause upset and hurt. Do not kid yourself for one minute that you are a breastfeeding advocate. You do more harm than good and I really, really wish you would stop and do something positive to promote breastfeeding.

Someone else offered the ultimate compliment/insult:

Because she is the Dr Amy of breastfeeding…loud rude & obnoxious…but does get her point across!

Well, we may sound the same, but we have very different points to put across. My point is to alert women to the dangerous misinformation espoused by homebirth advocates, lactivists and vaccine rejectionists, and I occasionally invoke shame to do it. I’ve gotten my point across when women question misinformation and learn about the real risks of their options. It’s a victory for me when a baby’s life is saved, an incompetent midwife is exposed, a child is fully vaccinated or a mother feels happy with her own choice for pain relief in labor or bottlefeeding.

Allison’s point is to shame, period. No woman who is currently bottlefeeding could return to breastfeeding even if she wanted to, so there is no benefit to babies. There’s no benefit to anyone except lactivists themselves, who enjoy a frisson of satisfaction when hurting other women. Allison wins if another woman cries.

The post Allison created is to designed to spread the hurt to places where Allison herself cannot go. I doubt she should trust other women to shame as effectively as she can, though. Instead of trying to recruit new members of the Breastapo, Allison should make it easier on herself and propose the obvious: All bottlefeeding mothers should be branded on the forehead with the letter “B.” That way only minimal effort is required to identify bottlefeeders for shaming purposes.

Then it will be impossible to hide from the Breastapo!

…They tell themselves that they’re the ones who see the lies, and the rest of us are sheep. But believing that everybody’s lying is just another kind of gullibility.

Slate writer William Saletan is talking about JFK assassination conspiracists, but he could just as easily be talking about homebirth advocates. They, too, are absolutely sure that there is giant conspiracy, in this case Big Pharma and Big Medicine pushing drugs and procedures on pregnant women even though they are unneeded except in “rare” emergencies. Ironically, instead of being the only people who see Big Pharma’s lies, they are the “sheeple” that they rail against.

No conspiracy theory is too idiotic to find adherents among homebirth advocates. Consider the recent deaths and injuries from hemorrhagic disease of the newborn (HDN) of babies whose parents refused prophylactic vitamin K shots after birth.

From The Tennesean:

Since February, four babies with no signs of injury or abuse have been sent to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University in Nashville with either brain hemorrhages or bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract. Robert Sidonio, a hematologist, diagnosed them with vitamin K deficiency bleeding.

After discovering that all four had not received the preventive treatment that doctors have been giving to newborns since the 1960s, he started making inquiries. Pediatricians told him parents are increasingly refusing consent because of concerns based on misinformation or the goal of having natural childbirths.

“Fortunately all of the infants survived,” said Dr. Lauren Marcewicz with CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. “It is important for health professionals to educate parents about the health benefits of vitamin K at birth.”

However, the three babies who suffered brain bleeds face developmental challenges.

The shots have been given as standard practice since 1961 to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding, a disorder that can cause hemorrhaging in the brain and intestinal tract. The risk for developing the disorder has been estimated at 81 times greater among infants who did not receive a vitamin K injection at birth than in infants who do receive it.

Why are parents refusing the lifesaving vitamin K shot. Because they are “sheeple” who believe any conspiracy theory dreamed up by other idiots.

Consider this “advice” from the moron who blogs at The Healthy Home Economist:

Let’s start with the vitamin K used in the shot itself. Is it a natural form of vitamin K such as would be found in leafy greens (K1) or butter (K2)? No, it is a synthetic vitamin K – generic name phytonadione. Synthetic vitamins should be avoided as they can cause imbalances in the body and have unintended consequences. For example, synthetic vitamin A actually causes the type of birth defects that natural vitamin A prevents!

But there is no difference between “natural” vitamin K and synthetic vitamin K. Moreover, natural vitamin A causes the exact same birth defects as synthetic vitamin A.

But wait! There’s more:

If that isn’t enough to scare you, Midwifery Digest, Vol 2 #3, September 1992 estimated that the chance of your child developing leukemia from the vitamin K shot is about one in 500! This means that the risk of developing leukemia from the vitamin K shot is much higher than the risk of bleeding on the brain which the vitamin K shot is supposed to prevent!

So why would anyone believe a clown like The Healthy Home Economist? Because they’re gullible.

They are so sure that there’s a conspiracy (Big Pharma!) that they don’t even recognize the nonsense of their own claims. We’re supposed to believe that Big Pharma, aided and abetted by all obstetricians, pediatricians and hematologists IN THE WHOLE WORLD, plus the CDC and the US government, is pushing a “drug” that has no legitimate purpose and exists only to increase the rate of childhood leukemia. Does that make any sense at all? It doesn’t if you are capable of thinking for yourself, but if you’re among the sheeple who believe that everything you don’t understand is a conspiracy on the part of someone else, it makes perfect sense.

Saletan asks:

How can this be? How can so many people … promote so many absurdities?

The answer is that people who suspect conspiracies … [are] selective doubters. They favor a worldview, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of elites.

He explains:

The strongest predictor of general belief in conspiracies … was “lack of trust.”

… “People low in trust of others are likely to believe that others are colluding against them,” the authors proposed. This sort of distrust, in other words, favors a certain kind of belief. It makes you more susceptible, not less, to claims of conspiracy…

The common thread between distrust and cynicism, as defined in these experiments, is a perception of bad character. More broadly, it’s a tendency to focus on intention and agency, rather than randomness or causal complexity. In extreme form, it can become paranoia. In mild form, it’s a common weakness known as the fundamental attribution error—ascribing others’ behavior to personality traits and objectives, forgetting the importance of situational factors and chance.

The more you see the world this way—full of malice and planning instead of circumstance and coincidence—the more likely you are to accept conspiracy theories of all kinds. Once you buy into the first theory, with its premises of coordination, efficacy, and secrecy, the next seems that much more plausible.

It’s hard to imagine anything more malicious than a giant conspiracy involving every major drug company, aided and abetted by all obstetricians, pediatricians and hematologists IN THE WHOLE WORLD, plus the CDC and the US government, pushing a useless “drug” on innocent infants in order to make money and give them leukemia in the process.

Why do homebirth advocates believe such nonsense?

The appeal of these theories—the simplification of complex events to human agency and evil—overrides not just their cumulative implausibility … but also, in many cases, their incompatibility.

We can see this quite clearly with vaccine rejectionists. The rise in cases of autism is a complex, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon. But it is easier and more comforting for vaccine rejectionists to believe that it is deliberately being caused by Big Pharma: It’s thimerosol! No, it’s aluminum! Maybe it’s pitocin! Or ultrasound! Or all of the above! Anything, in other words, besides acknowledging that it is random and there isn’t anything they can do to prevent it.

Homebirth advocates, like vaccine rejectionists, have a reflexive fear of elites, and for them, anyone who has an advanced science education is an elite. They feel small and powerless in the world of doctors and hospitals and to manage that fear, they have concluded that elites are plotting against them. They tell themselves that they’re the ones who understand, and the rest of us are sheeple. But believing that everything they don’t understand is a plot by Big Pharma to harm them is just another kind of gullibility.

O tempora! O mores!

Homebirth midwife Sarah Biermeier, CPM bewails the sad state of modern civilization:

To some, at the root of the hospital-vs.-home-birth debate is how labor and birth are viewed.

Biermeier says birth is no longer seen as its own event – it’s seen as “the way to get the baby.”

Thank you, Sarah, for confirming my oft stated criticism of homebirth advocacy. For homebirth advocates (and many natural childbirth advocates), birth is a piece of performance art and the baby is nothing but a prop.

It explains so much about the otherwise unfathomable selfishness and self-absorption of homebirth advocates.

Consider:

Just because your baby died at a homebirth doesn’t mean you had a bad experience. Since birth is a piece of performance art, whether the baby lives or dies is secondary to your satisfaction with your own efforts.

Just because your baby died at homebirth doesn’t mean that your midwife was anything other than awesome. After all, her role was not to save the baby’s life, it was to insure the integrity of your performance.

And that explains why women who have C-sections are such losers. Instead of worrying about the integrity of their experience, all they want to do is have a healthy baby.

The same thing applies to the losers who have pain relief in labor. The point of labor is to avoid the pain medication, stupid, not the pain. Duh.

According to Sarah:

“The doctors seem to think that it’s their birth, their baby and their placenta,” she says.

Now that’s funny. The majority of obstetricians are women and (clearly this is going to come as news to Sarah), we have had our own babies and births, and have no interest in owning yours.

The difference between obstetricians and homebirth midwives has nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with the way we view labor and birth.

We view it much more prosaically as “the way to get the baby.” And therefore, whether the baby survives the experience intact is our highest priority.

If you value process over outcome, then homebirth makes perfect sense.

For the other 99+% of women, hospital birth is the safer, better choice.