Two days ago I wrote about the extraordinary callousness of a group of unassisted birth advocates who brag about “successful” vaginal births despite the fact that the babies died.

The most recent example occurred earlier this week:

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]A woman’s body is designed to produce a live baby, not a vaginal birth.[/pullquote]

…I wanted to tell you ladies that I went into labor NATURALLY ALL BY MYSELF (well after sex that night..) that in itself was awesome bc I have never had that experience before and was starting to doubt my body especially waiting so long! 42 weeks! BUT IT HAPPENED! I labored all through the night and day and PUSHED HIM OUT all 10lb 9oz and 23.5 inches with a 14.5 inch head …

…VAGINAL BIRTH AFTER CESAREAN IS POSSIBLE! UNMEDICATED BIRTH IS POSSIBLE. HOME BIRTHS ARE POSSIBLE. And most importantly OUR BODIES AREN’T BROKEN, THEY WERE DESIGNED TO DO THIS!!! I KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE! lol

The ultimate irony for women who boast about these “successes” is that they are actually spectacular failures. Why? Because evolutionary success is measured by children who live to reproduce, not by how a baby is born. Evolution works on the principle of “survival of the fittest” and the fittest are those who live.

For people so enamoured of what their bodies “were designed to do,” they appear to have missed the incredibly simple, incredibly basic point: their bodies were designed to produce LIVE babies. The unassisted birth advocates preening over “successful” vaginal births are actually spectacular FAILURES. They are so busy exulting over the fact that their bodies aren’t “broken” that they forgot the most important fact; if you “break” the baby’s body, you lose.

Evolution doesn’t care one whit about the process of survival, it only cares about the outcome. Evolution doesn’t care whether a particular animal has black fur or white fur. It rewards the color that offers the best camouflage for the particular environment in which the animal lives. In our current environment, with easy access to technology, evolution rewards those who use that technology to survive. Women who reject lifesaving technology in order to recapitulate birth in nature aren’t winners; they haven’t achieved anything. If their babies die, they are losers.

Evolution doesn’t care that you had a vaginal birth; it doesn’t care that you gave birth without pain medication; it certainly doesn’t care that you had a vaginal birth after a previous C-section. It cares about one and only one thing: whether the baby survives.

Women who let their babies die for lack of obstetric interventions at homebirth or unassisted birth DIDN’T do what “nature intended”; they did the exact opposite. They aren’t successful; they’re failures.

And they’re not responding to natural instincts; they’re defying them. Nearly every female mammal will defend the lives of her offspring to the death. Everyone knows that there is no more dangerous animal than the mother who feels that her brood is threatened.

The woman who consents to a C-section for fetal distress is acting on that primal instinct. She is willing to let herself be cut open if that gives her baby a better chance of survival. The woman who chooses homebirth specifically to recapitulate birth in nature is acting AGAINST that primal instinct. She is more interested in herself and her bragging rights than in the baby’s life. That’s unnatural.

Meg Heket, Ruth Rodley and the other administrators of groups that encourage, support and cheer women to deadly homebirths aren’t merely vile people; they’re losers. Nature isn’t impressed with them; she’s weeping for the loss of innocent lives.

Remember unassisted birth advocate Meg Heket? Heket, you may recall, is the sister of Janet Fraser (My dead baby was not as traumatic as my birth rape). She is also a co-administrator with Ruth Rodley of a number of homebirth and unassisted birth groups. No doubt you remember Ruth. She’s the one who, in the wake of 7 homebirth deaths in 1 week, referred to the death of a baby as “a little hickup.”

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.[/pullquote]

Heket has an extraordinary amount of blood that is on her hands. I cannot keep track of the many, many babies who are dead because she encouraged their mothers to have unassisted homebirths. I wrote yesterday about another member of her group who is boasting about her unassisted VBAC at home despite the fact that the baby is dead (The unspeakable callousness of a homebirth loss mother). Evidently someone shared the post with Heket is this is her response:

No, so I just make sure to make things really confusing so she’s GUARANTEED to misinterpret it on her blog.

I HATE ALL CAESAREANS! NO CAESAREAN WAS EVER NECESSARY AND IT’S BETTER TO DIE THAN HAVE MEDICAL INTERVENTION IN LABOR. Excuse me, I need to go and eat babies now.

PS. I haven’t seen the blog post because I go out of my way to avoid anything and everything she and her cult ever say. It works brilliantly

Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!

But the worst thing about Meg’s inanity is not that she’s dancing on yet another baby’s grave, although that is despicable. The worst thing is that she and her unassisted birth buddies never learn … anything. Despite the astronomical perinatal death toll in her group she has been completely unable to make the connection between the dead babies and their unassisted births. She and her compatriots repeatedly counsel women that they should “trust” birth even though birth lets them down time and time again.

As Albert Einstein explained, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Over and over again Heket encourages high risk women to give birth unassisted at home and over again babies die. She seems to have a serious problem with the concept of cause and effect.

Heket is hardly alone.

“Jackie” addressed herself to me in the comment section of the post about the mother’s callous response to the baby’s death:

…You are disgusting and pathetic to use this mothers tragedy for your douchebaggery blog post! Having lost my father a few weeks ago, I’ve seen first hand how everyone around me copes with death and EVERY SINGLE PERSON handles it differently …

Indeed, they do; there’s a very broad range of normal responses to grief. But boasting about your role in another person’s death is outside the realm of normal, particularly if the dead person is a close family member.

“Wow! Did you see how I was handling driving 90 mph before I hit a tree and killed my daughter?” is not a normal response.

“You’ve got to admit I’m a great arsonist!” is not a normal response to the accidental death of a your toddler in the house fire that you set.

“Look at me! I pushed a baby out of my vagina and killed him in the process!” is not a normal response to your baby’s death.

It’s the response of a cult member and Meg Heket’s unassisted birth group is a cult. The most important rule in a cult is to keep believing in the wisdom of the cult leader regardless of how often he or she is demonstrably wrong. Meg Heket is like the leader of a millennial cult who is constantly specifying the day that the world will end, and constantly being proven wrong. Mentally healthy people would learn from that experience and stop believing a person who is wrong over and over again, but not cult members. They keep believing the predictions and hoping that this time is going to be different.

I write about the deaths of these babies for a reason. I don’t want them to be buried twice, first in a tiny coffin in the ground and then in the minds of the people who were responsible for their deaths. I am not hoping to change the minds of those who made the irresponsible choice; it’s too late for that. I’m hoping to change the minds of the other cult members and, especially, of people thinking about joining the cult of unassisted birth. If I can prevent the death of even one baby, I’ve accomplished the job I set out to do.

Thinking about unassisted homebirth? Then think about how these women sacrificed their babies and think again.

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The baby died two days ago at an unassisted home VBAC. The mother wrote on her Facebook page:

Dearest family and friends, baby Isaac was born 2-29-16 weighing 10 lbs 9oz and 23.5 inches long. With so much pain in our hearts and not knowing how to even say this but Isaac did not survive his birth. We are completely devastated. At this time we’re just asking for prayers of strength and peace during the most difficult time of our lives.

Today Isaac’s mother posted this:

…I wanted to tell you ladies that I went into labor NATURALLY ALL BY MYSELF (well after sex that night..) that in itself was awesome bc I have never had that experience before and was starting to doubt my body especially waiting so long! 42 weeks! BUT IT HAPPENED! I labored all through the night and day and PUSHED HIM OUT all 10lb 9oz and 23.5 inches with a 14.5 inch head …

…VAGINAL BIRTH AFTER CESAREAN IS POSSIBLE! UNMEDICATED BIRTH IS POSSIBLE. HOME BIRTHS ARE POSSIBLE. And most importantly OUR BODIES AREN’T BROKEN, THEY WERE DESIGNED TO DO THIS!!! I KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE! lol

LOL?

She goes on to say:

TRUST YOURSELF, TRUST YOUR GUT, TRUST YOUR INTUITION AND BACK IT UP NO MATTER WHAT! …

Because all that trusting worked out so well for her. While she was busily trusting herself, her baby was dying because her intuition is worse than useless.

Of course, the mother now insists that the baby would have died anyway, although she doesn’t bother to explain why that should be so.

I can’t help but think of the story of the judgment of King Solomon. According to Wikipedia:

Two young women who lived in the same house and who both had an infant son came to Solomon for a judgment. One of the women claimed that the other, after accidentally smothering her own son while sleeping, had exchanged the two children to make it appear that the living child was hers. The other woman denied this and so both women claimed to be the mother of the living son and said that the dead boy belonged to the other.

After some deliberation, King Solomon called for a sword to be brought before him. He declared that there was only one fair solution: the live son must be split in two, each woman receiving half of the child. Upon hearing this terrible verdict, the boy’s true mother cried out, “Oh Lord, give the baby to her, just don’t kill him!” The liar, in her bitter jealousy, exclaimed, “It shall be neither mine nor yours—divide it!”

The king declared the first mother as the true mother, as a true, loving mother would rather surrender her baby to another than hurt him, and gave her the baby…

I guess King Solomon had never met a homebirth mother like this one. She was perfectly willing to let her baby die to have the birth she wanted … and then boast about it.

Hideous!

I’ve been musing about what would happen if anti-vax pediatrician invented a smoke alarm. I imagine it would look something like this:

And it would be just as effective at keeping kids safe as Dr. Bob’s anti-vax advice.

It’s all about the vagina, folks!

At least that’s what natural childbirth advocates appear to think. The sine qua non of the contemporary natural childbirth movement is its “vagmentalism,” the privileging of vaginal transit over everything else, including the health of babies and mothers.

It didn’t have to be this way. The natural childbirth movement arose as a response to the pain of childbirth. Grantly Dick-Read claimed that “primitive” women didn’t experience pain in labor because they understood and accepted that their purpose in life was to have children. In contrast, white women of the “better” classes had been socialized to think they deserved political and economic rights and, as a result, their ovaries shriveled, they developed the disease of nervous hysteria (hyster is Latin for uterus), and their labors became painful.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#0102DA” class=”” size=””]Vaginal birth is portrayed as an achievement and C-section is portrayed as a failure.[/pullquote]

Lamaze was developed in the USSR in the years after World War II. Soviet doctors faced a problem. Whereas women in the West had access to pain relief in labor, the USSR lacked the money to purchase modern anesthetics. There wasn’t enough for surgery let alone childbirth. They hit upon the idea of using Pavlovian conditioning to abolish or reduce the pain of labor. It was presented as far superior to anesthetics because it was free and available to the proletariat while anesthetics were expensive and available only to the bourgeoisie.

The natural childbirth movement became popular in the US in the 1960’s as a response to the paternalism of American obstetrics and the sedating effects of contemporary anesthetic techniques. Women wanted to be awake and aware for their births, wanted to be accompanied by their partners and wanted to be spared the indignity of enemas and perineal shaving. The vagina had nothing to do with it.

In the 1970’s obstetrics was revolutionized by the introduction of regional anesthesia (spinals and epidurals). Women could now experience the births of their babies (even C-sections) awake, aware and pain free! Women were happy; doctors were happy; but the natural childbirth movement was not happy. Having achieved everything they set out to do by the early 1980’s, natural childbirth advocates could have declared victory and gone home. Instead they moved the goalposts and became rigidly vagmental.

Why? Vagmentalism reflects the contemporaneous (1980’s) resurgence of midwifery. Midwifery had all but disappeared in the US as a result of the improved safety and comfort of hospital birth. Natural childbirth, which gave primacy to the experience of childbirth, gave increasing relevance to midwives who strove to produce a specific birth experience. Indeed, midwifery grew from 275 CNMs in 1963 to more than 4,000 in 1995 to over 11,000 today. Midwives, not surprisingly, began to promote what they could do and to denigrate the things that only doctors could do, like epidurals and C-sections. Organizations like Lamaze reinvented themselves accordingly.

De Vries and De Vries writing in the Lamaze Journal of Perinatal Education explain:

Although there was a period when Lamaze . . . was accused of having sold out (the “Lamaze method” was charged by some with being a male invention meant to replace another male invention of obstetric anesthesia), in the early 1990s, the organization reinvented itself as the champion of normal birth.

In contrast to Grantly Dick-Read and the founders of Lamaze who promised painless birth, or at least comfortable birth, midwives and natural childbirth organizations began promoting physiological birth: vaginal birth. Hence the profound vagmentalism of contemporary natural childbirth advocacy.

This vagmentalism is reflected in a nearly pathological hatred of C-sections. It would be difficult to find a medical procedure that has saved more lives than C-sections have saved. It would be difficult to find a medical procedure that CONTINUES to save more lives each year than C-sections do. No matter, the profound vagmentalism of the natural childbirth movement leads them to insist that C-section rates in the industrialized world are a “crisis,” that C-sections harm mother-infant bonding (there’s no evidence for that), that C-sections lead to long term health problems in babies (they don’t), and, most recently, that C-sections harm the neonatal gut microbiome and change infant DNA (there’s no evidence for that, either).

The effect of this profound vagmentalism on new mothers is pernicious. Vaginal birth is deliberately portrayed as an achievement and C-section is deliberately depicted as a failure. For some women this leads to soul crushing guilt. The desperation of these women to have a vaginal birth leads them to risk their babies lives by refusing indicated interventions. It leads them to risk their babies and their own lives at home VBACs after 2 or 3 or 4 previous C-sections.

Even worse, midwives in the UK have become so committed to vaginal birth as an end in itself that they have let babies and mothers die by refusing to call in obstetricians. Doctors don’t share the midwives’ vagmentalism and consider that whether the baby lives or dies more important than vaginal birth; therefore, midwives want to exclude them.

Pregnant women and new mothers should understand that vaginal birth is not better, safer, healthier or superior in any way for than birth with pain relief or C-section birth. Midwives and natural childbirth advocates are profoundly vagmental because vaginal birth is better for midwives and natural childbirth advocates. Midwives and natural childbirth advocates encourage guilt about pain relief and C-sections so they can monetize that guilt.

The truth is that any woman can attempt an unmedicated vaginal birth; it’s not an achievement since most women who have ever lived have already done it. The achievement is to have a live baby and survive. In other words, the achievement is the outcome, not the process.

Vagmentalism is to midwifery what fashion judgmentalism is to the women’s clothing industry. It’s a way to move product. Vagmentalism is to natural childbirth advocates what race judgmentalism (racism) is bigots, a way to boost their fragile self esteem. It is ugly; it is unhealthy; and it should be rejected.

Lactivists are constantly waxing poetic about the lifesaving benefits of breastmilk. The truth is rather different. If infant formula disappeared tomorrow from the United States, tens of thousands of babies would die; if breastmilk disappeared tomorrow, not a single term baby would die from properly prepared infant formula.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#88BD4B” class=”” size=””]Infant formula saves far more lives in the US than breastmilk ever could.[/pullquote]

How can that be?

Let’s break it down:

1. Despite lactivist claims, there is no evidence that even a single term infant has ever died for lack of breastmilk.

Sure, breastmilk has benefits even in countries with clean water supplies. (It is the contaminated water used to prepared formula in developing countries that kills babies, not the formula itself.) But the benefits of breastmilk are restricted to approximately 8% fewer colds and episodes of diarrheal illness across the entire population of infants. The other purported benefits touted by lactivists are based on evidence that is weak, conflicting and riddled with confounders.

2. Despite lactivist claims, there’s no evidence that breastmilk is the “perfect food.”

True, breastmilk is the food that evolved to feed human infants, but evolution does not do perfection. Evolution is based on the survival of the fittest, NOT the survival of everyone. If every single baby were breastfed, many would die.

Why? In order for breastmilk to be perfect, it would always be present in the perfect amounts, and all babies would be perfectly capable of extracting it from the breast. However, we know that 5% (1 in 20) women don’t make enough breastmilk to fully nourish a baby, and some babies have issues like low muscle tone that make it impossible for them to successfully breastfeed. When these circumstances occur in nature, babies simply die. In contrast, when infant formula is available, no baby will succumb to dehydration, malnutrition or failure to thrive.

Babies who can’t tolerate lactose or are affected by inborn errors of metabolism can survive on formula because there are a variety of types of infant formula that can meet their needs. If they were restricted to breastmilk, they wouldn’t survive at all.

Even using conservative estimate of 5% if babies who don’t thrive on exclusive breastfeeding, we can calculate that if formula disappeared tomorrow, 200,000 infants EACH YEAR would be at serious risk for malnutrition, stunting of growth and intellectual development, and even death. If breastmilk disappeared, no one would die or have stunted growth or intellectual development as a result.

3. Formula improves the lives of other family members.

Despite lactivist claims, breastmilk is not free. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing, and since most women work, their time is worth quite a bit.

A woman who is exclusively breastfeeding is a woman whose ability to work may be severely compromised. That’s not a problem if she has a spouse with a high paying job, but it’s definitely a problem for women whose families depend upon their income for food, clothing, rent, heat and medical care. Yes, formula costs money, but most working women can earn enough to pay for formula and have money left over to feed, clothe, house and provide medical care for other children as well.

4. Formula improves the lives of women.

The birth control pill, safe C-sections and infant formula have made feminism possible. Without them, women are at the mercy of biology. When women can easily control their own reproduction, easily survive childbearing, and aren’t forced to choose between children and education/employment, the quality and length of their lives rise dramatically.

Breastfeeding is still an excellent source of nutrition for infants, but it is beneficial ONLY for women who can successfully breastfeed and want to breastfeed. Formula is an excellent source of infant nutrition that has several additional benefits. Formula can save the lives of babies who might starve to death on breastmilk; it improves the lives of women; and it often improves the lives of other children in the family as well.

Despite the incessant gabbling about the benefits of breastfeeding, infant formula saves far more lives in the US than breastmilk ever could.

If breastfeeding disappeared tomorrow, no one’s life would change appreciably. If formula disappeared tomorrow, tens of thousands of American babies would die each and every year.

Ironic, isn’t it?

We told them this would happen.

We told them that it was only a matter of time before a childhood disease that had nearly been eliminated from the US would come roaring back if they failed to vaccinate their children. And that’s precisely what has happened. Measles has come roaring back, but not simply because a child incubating measles visited Disneyland.

Twenty years ago, if the same child had visited Disneyland, the measles would have stopped with him or her. Everyone else was protected — not because everyone was vaccinated — but because of herd immunity. When a high enough proportion of the population is vaccinated, the disease simply can’t spread because the odds of one unvaccinated person coming in contact with another are very low.

Of course, we told them that. We patiently explained herd immunity, debunked claims of an association between vaccines and autism, demolished accusations of “toxins” in vaccines, but they didn’t listen. Why? Because we thought the problem was that anti-vax parents didn’t understand science. That’s undoubtedly true, but the anti-vax movement is NOT about science and never was.

The anti-vax movement has never been about children, and it hasn’t really been about vaccines. It’s about privileged parents and how they wish to view themselves.

1. Privilege

Nothing screams “privilege” louder than ostentatiously refusing something that those less privileged wish to have.

Each and every anti-vax parent is privileged in having easy and inexpensive access to life saving vaccines. It is the sine qua non of the anti-vax movement. In a world where the underprivileged may trudge miles to the nearest clinic, desperate to save their babies from infectious scourges, nothing communicates the unbelievable wealth, ease and selfishness of modern American life like refusing the very same vaccines.

2. Unreflective defiance of authority

There are countless societal ills that stem from the fact that previous generations were raised to unreflective acceptance of authority. It’s not hard to argue that unreflective acceptance of authority, whether that authority is the government or industry, is a bad thing. BUT that doesn’t make the converse true. Unreflective defiance is really no different from unreflective acceptance. Oftentimes, the government, or industry, is right about a particular set of claims.

Experts in a particular topic, such as vaccines, really are experts. They really know things that the lay public does not. Moreover, it is not common to get a tremendous consensus among experts from different fields. Experts in immunology, pediatrics, public health and just about everything else you can think of have weighed in on the side of vaccines. Experts in immunology, pediatrics and public health give vaccines to their OWN children, rendering claims that they are engaged in a conspiracy to hide the dangers of vaccines to be nothing short of ludicrous.

Unfortunately, most anti-vax parents consider defiance of authority to be a source of pride, whether that defiance is objectively beneficial or not.

3. The need to feel “empowered”

This is what is comes down to for most anti-vax parents: it’s a source of self-esteem for them. In their minds, they have “educated” themselves. How do they know they are “educated”? Because they’ve chosen to disregard experts (who appear to them as authority figures) in favor of quacks and charlatans, whom they admire for their own defiance of authority. The combination of self-education and defiance of authority is viewed by anti-vax parents as an empowering form of rugged individualism, marking out their own superiority from those pathetic “sheeple” who aren’t self-educated and who follow authority.

Where does that leave us?

First, it explains why efforts to educate anti-vax parents about the science of immunology has been such a spectacular failure. It is not, and has never been, about the science.

Second, it suggests how we must change our approach. Simply put, we have to hit anti-vax parents where they live: in their unmerited sense of superiority.

How? By pointing out to them, and critiquing, their own motivations.

Anti-vax parents are anxious to see themselves in a positive light. They would almost certainly be horrified to find that others regard them as so incredibly privileged that they can’t even see their own privilege.

We need to highlight the fact that unreflective defiance is just the flip side of unreflective acceptance. There’s nothing praiseworthy about it. Only teenagers think that refusing to do what authority figures recommend marks them as independent. Adults know that doing the exact opposite of what authority figures recommend is a sign of immaturity, not deliberation, and certainly not education.

Finally, we need to emphasize to parents that parenting is not about them and their feelings. It’s about their children and THEIR health and well being. It’s one thing to decline to follow a medical recommendation. Most of us do that all the time. It’s another thing entirely to join groups defined by defiance, buy their products, and preach to others about your superiority in defying medical recommendations. That’s a sign of the need to bolster their own self-esteem, not their “education.”

We have to confront anti-vax parents where they live — in their egos. When refusing to vaccinate your children is widely viewed as selfish, irresponsible, and the hallmark of being UNeducated, anti-vax advocacy will lose its appeal.

 

This piece first appeared in January 2015.

See? Now he has natural immunity, just like nature intended!

The above is a picture of an infant with smallpox. I searched high and low for a picture that would convey the severity of the disease without being too distressing to view. You can imagine the impact of this infection on the baby’s face and the subsequent scarring he endured … if he survived. It’s that image, the image of his hideously scarred face that illustrates one of the central conceits of the anti-vax movement.

The conceit is that “nature intended” for people to survive vaccine preventable illnesses and to survive them unscathed.

Listen to this Australian anti-vaxxer justify her decision to let her son get measles:

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Bacteria and viruses are predators and children are prey.[/pullquote]

The woman, an administrator of the closed Facebook group Anti-Vaccination Australia, said her son was sick for five days with a fever and a rash, but: “it’s not deadly”.

Fellow anti-vaccination activists agreed it was nothing to be worried about.

“And now that he’s had measles he’s getting a stronger immune system. The way nature intended,” one woman wrote.

But measles IS deadly. It is a leading killer of children, though not children in industrialized countries like Australia. Why? Not because “nature intended” that children should survive measles, but because of vaccination.

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.

Bacteria and viruses are predators and human beings are prey. It’s just that simple. Refusing vaccination is like petting a tiger. You might survive the experience but you might not. Human beings learned very early on not to pet tigers. The people who petted tigers died at a much higher rate than those who avoided them, placing an evolutionary premium on wariness of prey animals. Human beings who weren’t afraid of tigers died out while those who avoided tigers survived.

Human beings learned very early on to avoid people with communicable diseases although their understanding of both disease and communicability was imperfect. Yes, they had immune systems, but just like people can’t always outrun tigers, their immune systems can’t always outrun bacteria and viruses.

Humans searched desperately for substances in their environment (herbs, foods, bizarre concoctions involving animal parts and urine among other things) that might ameliorate and prevent disease. Ultimately we found antibiotics, substances created by plants and molds to protect themselves against biological attack that we could use to protect ourselves against similar biological attacks.

Nature didn’t “intend” for antibiotics to help us battle disease. We used technology to coax plants and molds to make the antibiotics that protect them and then took their protection for ourselves.

Ultimately, we created vaccination, harnessing the body’s innate immune system to hold off an attack by bacteria and viruses instead of waiting until we had been attacked to start fighting back. It isn’t any more of a subversion of nature than using antibiotics or using the herbs that contain them. It’s technology allowing us to protect ourselves from the fact that nature doesn’t care who wins the battle, the human beings or the microorganisms.

Anti-vaxxers live in a fantasy world made possible by vaccines. They grew up without being infected by vaccine preventable pathogens and imagined that nature “intended” infectious disease to be mild, self-limited, easily vanquished and gifted us with natural immunity after the battle. That’s like growing up in a world without tiger attacks and heading to the zoo to pet the tigers because nature intended tigers to be gentle. It’s foolish … and deadly.

Only the conceited believe that nature pays particular attention to them and their wellbeing. Nature did not “intend” for the baby above to get smallpox and it didn’t care a whit whether the baby lived, died or survived with hideous scarring. The smallpox virus attacked the baby and engaged it in a mortal struggle. Smallpox has now been eradicated, not because nature “intended” that it disappear but because we created a vaccine to prevent it from spreading and reproducing.

Infectious diseases are predators and we are prey. The only question for anti-vaxxers is whether they think it is better to protect themselves from predators or try to save their children and themselves after the pathogens have taken the first bite.

The latest trend in the world of natural childbirth is vaginal “seeding,” swabbing babies’ mouths with mothers’ vaginal secretions.

The theory is that C-section birth “deprives” babies of prolonged contact with the bacteria in women’s vaginas and that putting that bacteria in babies’ mouths “restores” the normal bacteria.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The recommendations of the natural childbirth industry are based on what they believe will increase market share, not on scientific evidence.[/pullquote]

There’s two major problems with that claim:

1. There’s no evidence that babies benefit from exposure to mother’s vaginal bacteria.

2. There’s considerable evidence that babies can face serious illness and death from bacteria and viruses that live in the mother’s vagina.

That’s the warning encompassed in an new editorial in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), “Vaginal seeding” of infants born by caesarean section. The authors Aubrey J Cunnington, clinical senior lecturer, Kathleen Sim, clinical research fellow, Aniko Deier, consultant Neonatologist, J Simon Kroll, professor of paediatrics and molecular infectious diseases1, Eimear Brannigan, consultant in infectious diseases and infection prevention and control, Jonathan Darby, infectious diseases physician, know whereof they speak.

Evidence is accumulating that the human microbiota can also be manipulated to benefit health, but not (yet) that vaginal seeding is beneficial to the infant. Indeed, such evidence will be difficult to gather, requiring large clinical trials with many years of follow-up. It might seem reasonable to perform this simple and cheap procedure, even without clear evidence of benefit, but only if we can be sure that it is safe.

We lack that certainty at present. Newborns may develop severe infections from exposure to vaginal commensals and pathogens, which the mother may carry asymptomatically. These include group B streptococcus (the most common cause of neonatal sepsis), herpes simplex virus, Chlamydia trachomatis, and Neisseria gonorrhoeae (the last two, causes of ophthalmia neonatorum). These pathogens would probably also be transferred on a vaginal swab, potentially abrogating the protection from infection afforded by elective caesarean section.

In other words, there’s no evidence that vaginal seeding is beneficial and considerable evidence that it can be harmful and even deadly. Indeed, vaginal bacteria are the leading cause of infectious death of newborns.

So where did the recommendation come? From the natural childbirth community through … the movie Microbirth.

The issue of vaginal seeding can serve as a paradigm of much of what passes for “evidence” in the world of natural childbirth. Natural childbirth, a philosophy that unmedicated vaginal birth is superior to any other form of birth, is largely the “unresearched antithesis of obstetrics.” That’s how gender scholars Annandale and Clark describe contemporary midwifery, which is essentially the whole hearted embrace of natural childbirth philosophy.

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.

Simply put, much of contemporary midwifery is merely unreflective defiance of obstetricians. Whatever obstetricians recommend, midwives recommend the opposite. In contemporary natural childbirth advocacy, every day is Opposite Day.

Obstetricians medicalized childbirth to make it safer; natural childbirth advocates pretend that childbirth was safe before obstetricians got involved.

Obstetricians offer pain relief; natural childbirth advocates insist that feeling the pain improves the experience, tests one’s mettle and make childbirth safer.

Obstetricians whisk babies off to pediatricians to make sure that they were healthy; natural childbirth advocates claim that skin to skin contact between mother and infant in the first moments after birth is crucial to creating a lifelong bond.

Obstetricians can perform C-sections; natural childbirth advocates demonize C-sections in every way they can think of insisting that C-section rates are too high, C-sections cause [insert your favorite illness: allergy, asthma, diabetes, hypertension, etc.], and C-sections damage both the infant gut and infant DNA.

Not a single one of the claims of natural childbirth advocates is true. So why do they make them? To retain market share. Obstetricians are the chief economic competition of midwives and natural childbirth advocates and midwives and natural childbirth advocates are determined to increase market share.

Vaginal seeding was popularized by natural childbirth advocates in the movie Microbirth. Its thesis?

…We believe “seeding of the baby’s microbiome” should be on every birth plan – for even if vaginal birth isn’t possible, immediate skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding can still help to provide bacteria crucial to the development of the baby’s immune system. In the scientists’ view, if we can get the seeding of the baby’s microbiome right at birth, this could make a massive difference to the baby’s health for the rest of its life. Consequently, we believe that “Microbirth” is of extreme importance for global health and potentially, for the future of mankind!

Who do is the “we” when the producers of Microbirth announce “we believe”? It wasn’t microbiologists since there is no scientific consensus on the composition of the neonatal microbiome, let alone what it ought to be. It wasn’t neonatalogists and pediatricians since they aren’t going to “believe” anything about the microbiome that isn’t established by microbiologists. That goes for obstetricians, too.

So the “we” in “we believe” is natural childbirth advocates who promote the largely unresearched antithesis of obstetrics. Natural childbirth advocates recommend vaginal seeding for no better reason than defiance. The fact that there was never any evidence to promote vaginal seeding, and considerable evidence that it could be dangerous or deadly was never even considered. That’s what you would expect from a marketing tactic completely divorced from the scientific literature.

As the authors of the BMJ editorial note:

In the absence of evidence of benefit, or of guidelines to ensure the procedure is safe, how should health professionals engage with the increasing demand for vaginal seeding? We have advised staff at our hospitals not to perform vaginal seeding because we believe the small risk of harm cannot be justified without evidence of benefit. However, the simplicity of vaginal seeding means that mothers can easily do it themselves. Under these circumstances we should respect their autonomy but ensure that they are fully informed about the theoretical risks.

Parents should be advised to mention that they performed vaginal seeding if their baby becomes unwell because this may influence a clinician’s assessment of the risk of serious infection. Health professionals should be aware that vaginal seeding is increasingly common and ask about it when assessing neonates who may have an infection…

I would add an additional caveat:

Parents need to remember that natural childbirth is an industry, and an unregulated industry at that. Just like any unregulated  industry, the recommendations of the natural childbirth industry are based on what they believe will increase their market share, not on scientific evidence.

Parents should treat the natural childbirth industry with the same level of skepticism that they would treat any industry. You wouldn’t get your advice on solar power from the oil industry, and you shouldn’t get your advice on microbiology from the natural childbirth industry.