We’ve long known that vision is more than the light that hits the retina at the back of the eye. The nerve signals generated by the light get transmitted to the visual cortex, located in the occipital lobe of the brain. It is there that the information is processed to create what we see.

Scientists have recently discovered a fundamental biologic defect that goes a long way to explaining otherwise irrational phenomena like anti-vaccine advocacy. Vaccines have been one the greatest public health advances of all time, yet some people don’t see it that way and now we know why.

According to lead investigator Professor Cy N. Tist, anti-vax advocates suffer a specific, previously unrecognized visual processing error. Tist and colleagues have named the distortion conspira-scopic vision.

Prof. Tist explains:

As far as we can determine, conspira-scopic vision results from a processing error that rotates visual signals 45 degrees, leading inevitably to a slippery slope. Whereas the average person sees a preventive health measure, those suffering from conspira-scopic vision mistakenly see an assault.

Look at the following historical image:

Most of us see happy children proudly showing off the fact that they have been vaccinated.

Unfortunately, those with conspira-scopic vision, like “holistic” psychiatrist Kelly Brogan, as well as the folks at StopTheCrime.net who created the image, see the following profoundly distorted image:

Hard to believe that we are looking at the same picture, but we are.

Here’s another example:

Most of us see a woman happily receiving a vaccination.

The folks at the Australian Vaccination Network, all of whom suffer from conspira-scopic vision, see a rape:

Is it any wonder then that anti-vaccine activists have an irrational fear of vaccines that is resistant to any and all scientific evidence?

According to Prof. Tist, anti-vaccine advocates are not the only people who suffer from conspira-scopic vision. He believes that food activists like Vani Hari (The Food Babe), anti-GMO activists, and even homebirth advocates suffer from conspira-scopic vision. Their vision is mistakenly skewed, causing them to see conspiracies everywhere.

There’s only one known cure for conspira-scopic vision, and that is a thorough education in science and statistics. Unfortunately, conspira-scopic vision has recently been developing resistance to both facts and education, which dramatically complicates efforts to treat it.

What you see depends on how you process visual information. Those who have processing defects like conspira-scopic vision deserve our sympathy and support. Obviously we cannot agree with them since they have no idea what they are talking about, but we can acknowledge that it is a processing error that leads to their ignorant and outrageous conclusions, not mere stupidity.

 

This piece is satire.

There are so many women routinely dangling their babies over the abyss of homebirth death that I could create my own blog based reality show called Homebirth Death Watch. Consider the excitement: unedited, outcome unknown, innocent babies exposed to hideous deaths … by their own mothers.

Perhaps I will.

In our first episode Ariel risked the life of her son Gambit (I’m not kidding about the name!) by insisting on attempting a HBA4C, a homebirth after four Cesareans. She never got anywhere near delivering vaginally and waited until her son was nearly dead (heart rate in the 50’s) before agreeing to a C-section, which had to be done under general anesthesia. But at least he’s alive.

In today’s episode, Ingrid is risking the life of her PREMATURE baby; her membranes have been ruptured for more than 72 hours and she does not know if she’s colonized with group B strep (a known killer of newborns to which premature babies are especially vulnerable) since she refused to be tested.

Ok ladies I need some prayers and support/encouragement.

Currently she’s being encouraged in this idiocy by a Greek chorus of buffoons (“get a pedicure!”)  in the Home Birth Support Network.

No, Ingrid, you don’t need support or encouragement (or a pedicure). You need a reality check. Go to the hospital because your baby’s life is in danger!

Once membranes rupture the risk of infection starts to rise and rises precipitously after 24 hours. Premature babies like yours are particularly vulnerable to infection. Your baby could die without you ever feeling a thing.

Refusing group B strep testing was idiotic. Group B strep is the biggest threat to your baby, and, of course, premature babies are especially vulnerable. Why are you douching with Hibiclens; it can’t be because it is natural, right? Your midwife recommended it NOT because it works better than antibiotics but because she can’t keep control of you as a patient if you go to the hospital for antibiotics. Do you really want to let your baby die to improve your midwife’s finances?

 

No, you CAN’T treat GBS with vitamins, probiotics, echinacea or garlic. Are you really so gullible and desperate to have a homebirth that you will fall for the claim that antibiotics can be replaced with stuff you can buy at the grocery store? Are you willing to risk your baby’s life on that nonsense?

What might be happening to your baby right now?

Here’s what a commentor who is a pathologist wrote in regard to the baby who died after his mother stayed home with ruptured membranes for 5 days:

When I do an autopsy on a stillbirth I always take a section of stomach to look at microscopically. I can physically see the pus in the stomach, clusters of neutrophils, white blood cells that have collected in the fluid and that the baby has subsequently swallowed. I can physically see the pus in the lungs where the baby has aspirated pus cells, because babies practice breathing in utero , and so suck all this pus into their lungs. And you know what? The pus is mixed with squames, skin cells that the baby has shed, and in its last desperate frantic panic it starts to gasp and draws these deep into its lungs.

These babies are literally swimming in a bag full of pus, in a giant bacterial laden boil. They are swimming in it, swallowing it, breathing it, and I see the end result. And you know what else? It makes me despair that there are midwives out there who write this off as normal. Membranes ruptured for 5 days? Not a problem….

And when the baby is born dead, not sleeping, and covered in meconium, and he stinks of bacterial poisons, and I see the pus, I want whoever delivered that baby in front of me, so that they can see this is not a game. This is not a game of ‘ooh, doctors are horrible, they just want to cut you, so let’s pretend there’s nothing wrong’.

Your baby is at even greater risk than a term baby.

Is that what you want? Is a homebirth so important to you that you would let your baby marinate in pus for days?

Sure your baby could still be born fine and not succumb to infection, just like your baby could survive if you drove drunk with him in the backseat, but is it worth the risk?

You’re in the spotlight now, Ingrid. Think carefully about what you are willing to risk. We’re watching and hoping you make the right decision and head to the hospital NOW!

You cannot make this stuff up!

Yesterday I promised that I would update you on the mother who was attempting an HBA4C (homebirth after 4 previous C-sections) and had been laboring for the previous 36 hours. She had ruptured membranes and noticed meconium. She went to the hospital, but left when they advised her to have a C-section.

This is what happened:

…I did not get my vba4c. I’m OK with it though because the reason for the CS was an actual emergency. I had gone in [again] because my contractions were about 3 minutes apart. Plus the meconium was really thick and dark now. Only made it to 2.5, 90%, -1. He had begun having a lot of decels that were taking 4-5 minutes to recover from. At one point they lost his heart beat and when they found it, it didn’t get above 57. So I was rushed to the OR and put to sleep for an emergency CS… [B]oth baby and I are doing great…. We named him Gambit …

What does the word “gambit” mean?

A gambit is a chess move where the player sacrifices a relatively unimportant piece in order to win.

Fitting, no? Perhaps she decided “Afterthought” was too long for a name.

What did this mother accomplish by risking her baby’s life attempting a homebirth after 4 C-sections? As far as I can tell, her only “accomplishment” was waiting until her baby was almost dead in order to convince herself that the C-section was necessary. She put her son through hours of pointless labor that never made any progress, allowed him to become so oxygen deprived that he expelled copious meconium and his heart rate dropped deeply, repeatedly and finally entered a death spiral.

Instead of having a C-section under regional anesthesia (much safer for her), she had one under general. Instead of being awake for her baby’s birth, she missed it. Instead of protecting her baby’s brain function, she risked it.

The comments on her post were inane as would be expected for a group that encourages women to risk their babies’ lives:

You made great decisions during your birth! Sorry it wasn’t as planned, love his name!
Like · 2 · More · 16 minutes ago

He is adorable! Congratulations!!! Good job listening to your body & baby, mama!
Like · 2 · More · 16 minutes ago

Sorry you didn’t get your dream birth but congratulations! Love his name!
Like · 1 · More · 15 minutes ago

Congrats on your baby! Sorry to hear it didn’t go as planned

Actually, she made hideously bad decisions. She did not listen to her body; had she listened she would have had an elective repeat C-section as her body and the baby’s body tried to tell her for hours upon hours. Instead, she came pretty close to killing her baby.

Way to go, Mama!

Gambit indeed.

You really have to feel sorry for the women who run Facebook groups that support homebirth and other risky birth choices.

They face a terrible dilemma. If the group is private, it can’t proselytize to others that homebirth is wonderful and that they are warrior mamas. On the other hand, if the group is public, then everyone will see the endless stream of homebirth deaths and that won’t be good publicity.

Meg Heket and co-administrators face that problem with their private Facebook group. These women are well aware that homebirth kills babies who didn’t have to die. Heket herself lost a baby at homebirth, and Heket’s sister Janet “dead baby not as traumatic as birth rape” Fraser was personally excoriated by the coroner for her role in her baby’s death.

Supposedly, groups like Heket’s are private so that only words of support will be heard. But the urge to preen and proselytize is so strong that administrators find it hard to resist allowing in new recruits. After all, it’s very hard to make new converts when you only preach to the choir.

Of course if you let in new recruits who aren’t already committed to the group’s ideology that dead babies are just collateral damage, there will be some who will share the group’s private posts.

Ostensibly that shouldn’t be a problem. If homebirth and home VBAC and unassisted birth are truly safe, the group should be a endless stream of happy outcomes, with women defying their doctors and boasting about their births. But apparently it is a problem since whenever an outsider is discovered, the group institutes mass bans and tries to preserve privacy by becoming more exclusive.

The fact that administrators wrestle with dilemmas like these demonstrates that even true believers know that their choices kill their babies and may very well kill other women’s babies in the future.

The fact that they feel the deaths are something that must be hidden is consciousness of guilt. If they truly believed that these deaths “would have happened anyway,” there would be no reason to hide them.

Which raises the question: if these women know that homebirth kills babies, are they morally culpable when they encourage another mother to risk her baby’s life on the altar of vaginal birth?

Another month, another sad round up of homebirth deaths.

It’s only the 23rd of the month, but I’ve already been informed of 2 separate homebirth deaths.

One took place in Michigan. It was the “standard” homebirth death: 42 weeks gestation, careless monitoring, followed by inability to locate the fetal heart rate, followed by the frantic trip to the hospital, followed by ultrasound confirmation of the death of the baby. The mother gave birth shortly thereafter, but the baby was already dead.

Almost certainly this baby would be alive today if the mother had chosen hospital birth instead of a homebirth midwife.

The second death took place after a labor followed avidly in the a HBAC support administered by Meg Heket who runs the website Whole Woman, among others.

In June 2011, Heket described herself thus:

I am an Australian woman who had an hba2c and a stillbirth, 10 months ago. I read a lot about what’s happening in the US and think it’s important for women and midwives there to realise that THIS IS A WORLD WIDE ISSUE. It’s not just women and midwives in the US that are being hounded.

At present my own private midwife is being investigated on the most absurd of charges. I won’t detail them here due to privacy issues, but believe me when I say they’re completely inane. From what I gather, many of the complaints against midwives stem from transferring to a hospital. This upsets me a great deal because what I see is that when a woman and her midwife decide that it is appropriate to use medical technology, and transfer in a timely fashion, the midwife is reported FOR DOING HER JOB WELL.

We must stand together, around the world, to bring about real and lasting change. Change that benefits, women, babies, midwives, and society as a whole. Heal birth, heal the earth.

Apparently having let her own baby die at homebirth, she wants to encourage other women to do create their own tragedies.

The mother in question was attempting a UBA3C (unassisted homebirth after 3 C-sections).

It’s not as though she didn’t understand that babies can die. She had already lost 1 infant to SIDS and had multiple miscarriages. Several years ago she posted this video on YouTube to raise awareness of infant and pregnancy loss.

What happened?

Birth Story of Garlen **Trigger warning: Loss, trauma**

I went into labor late Wednesday (4/1/15) night… Thursday my water broke, and I had a small leak, not the huge gush. I stayed hydrated to help replenish fluids. Contractions continued, and we monitored movement and when baby wasn’t moving much, we’d use the doppler to find baby’s heartbeat.

She labored on and off with rupture membranes for FIVE DAYS!

Around 5 am on Tuesday, I had been in and out of sleep from hard contractions, and I realized I hadn’t felt the baby move for a few hours. I got the doppler…and we couldn’t find their heartbeat. We came into the hospital. They confirmed with an ultrasound baby had passed… The attending said he would let me attempt a vaginal birth…

…They called another ultrasound, and found he was breech and the new attending doctor was not comfortable with me continuing …

They couldn’t give me any pain relief, so they started prepping me for a c-section under general. While the doctor was out, she came up with an idea of attempting vaginal delivery under the general and if it didn’t work, then they would go ahead with the c-section. Before the gases knocked me out, they were still trying to have me push in the OR.

She had labored on and off with ruptured membranes and a breech baby for FIVE DAYS!

I was in recovery when I woke up and they told me I had avoided the c-section. I had mostly superficial tearing. Nothing seemed terribly amiss until I got back to my room. They noticed a lot more blood than they expected. They started looking for bleeding tears, but none seemed to be enough to cause such significant bleeding. They soon realized it was coming from my uterus. Although my placenta had detached and they’d done a curettage after he was born, I had four small pieces of retained placenta. They had to perform another curettage without my having pain meds, otherwise they were going to have to perform a hysterectomy. Luckily they got the retained placental pieces out, and the bleeding resolved.

After they monitored me a little longer, I got to meet my son. (We hadn’t done any ultrasounds, so we were team green.) Garlen … was born sleeping at 3:43 pm on April 7, 2015. He was 9 lbs 3 oz and 21 inches long. He has a full head of black hair and daddy’s olive complexion.

Initially the mother insisted that the homebirth had nothing to do with the baby’s death; she believed that it was related to a blood clotting issue that she learned about at the hospital. However, the pathology report showed the baby had died of infection, not surprising considering that she had ruptured membranes for 5 days.

Almost certainly this baby would be alive today if the mother had chosen hospital birth. Instead she was so desperate to have a baby transit her vagina that she put his life on the line and lost it.

That’s two entirely preventable homebirth deaths this month SO FAR.

There is another potential tragedy unfolding in the HBAC support group. A woman attempting an HBA4C (yet, 4 previous C-sections!) has been laboring for the past 36 hours. She has ruptured membranes and noticed meconium. She went to the hospital, but left when they advised her to have a C-section.

Hopefully, she will ultimately go back to the hospital and everything will be fine.

I’ll keep you posted.

Every few months we read a terrible story about a child or adult mauled by a wild animal that someone thought to keep as a pet. The owners never intended for anyone to get hurt. They simply thought that with enough love and nurturing, they could tame the animal. Indeed, right up until the moment of the mauling, many thought they had tamed a wild animal.

Unfortunately, the owners failed to respect the essence of the animal; wild animals cannot be domesticated and it is foolish and dangerous to pretend otherwise.

Midwives and natural childbirth advocates often approach birth in the same way. Birth is a lioness, but if you read the nonsense that many midwives and natural childbirth advocates write about it, you’d come away with the impression that its a fluffy kitten. And if you reached your hand out to pet it, that hand might get bitten off.

UK midwives and natural childbirth advocates in particular have a tendency to blither nonsense illustrated with hearts and flowers (although they are hardly alone). Consider The Positive Birth Movement. It’s hard to imagine anything more inane and nonsensical:

We are a grass roots movement, spreading positivity about childbirth via a global network of free Positive Birth groups, linked up by social media.

We aim to challenge the current epidemic of negativity around childbirth by bringing women together …

Wait! It gets worse:

Get Positive: One Day Workshops from the Positive Birth Movement!

…This is a completely new kind of birth preparation – not a plastic pelvis in sight. At the PBM we think that your body already knows how to give birth but your mind needs a little attention. We want to help you take everything you thought you knew about birth and replace it with some really gorgeous stuff that will make your eyes sparkle with anticipation.

These one day workshops are run by our experienced PBM Facilitators, and are designed specifically to help pregnant women:

Challenge any existing negative expectations of birth
Fill up with excitement and positivity about the big day
Build a toolkit to maximise chances of the best birth possible
Leave feeling strong, confident, and inspired.

The website is filled with “positive” birth stories, but:

Many people believe that the Positive Birth Movement is all about sharing good birth stories, and that those who have had ‘less than positive’ experiences are not a part of what we do.

This is not the case.

We exist because, at a global level, many women are not currently having a positive birth.

Often these women feel without a voice. They want to speak up, but are told consistently: “all that matters is a healthy baby”

In other words, lets all get together and pretend that there’s no need to be afraid of birth because its a fluffy kitty. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to warn you that in reality, birth is a lioness and wouldn’t hesitate to kill you by sinking its teeth in your neck.

The organizers are so privileged that they actually imagine that a less than positive birth means that someone’s feelings were hurt; it never crosses their mind that a negative birth experience can mean a dead baby or a dead mother or both.

It amazes me how the organizers disrespect both women’s intelligence and birth.

Pregnant women are not empty headed ninnies who need to be protected from the reality of birth. They are not little girls and they should not be offered fairy tales with “happily ever after” endings in place of science.

Fear and negativity don’t harm women in labor. Fear and negativity harm natural childbirth advocates’ fantasies and midwives’ employment prospects, but that has no impact on most women.

Positivity harms women by setting unrealistic expectations around labor and birth, leading to disappointment, feelings of failure, and self loathing for not being “positive” enough.

The Positive Birth Movement unwittingly highlights the central difference between many midwives and obstetricians. Midwives pretend that birth is tame, while obstetricians know that it is dangerous.

Midwives and natural childbirth advocates figuratively reach out with “positivity” to pet birth … and babies and mothers die as a result.

Obstetricians respect birth for what it is, wild, dangerous and untameable … and that’s how they save lives.

Dr. Oz, the cardio-thoracic surgeon who has trademarked his moniker “America’s Doctor” is under fire for promoting quackery.

According to the NY Times:

The celebrity talk show host Dr. Mehmet Oz plans to respond aggressively on Thursday to doctors who have criticized his medical advice and questioned his faculty position at Columbia University, a spokesman for the show said on Monday.

In a strongly worded email sent last week to the university, 10 physicians wrote that Dr. Oz, the vice chairman of Columbia’s surgery department, had shown “an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.” In particular, the doctors attacked Dr. Oz’s “baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops.”

Apparently Oz plans to attack the credibility of his critics:

Dr. Oz will question the credibility of the letter’s authors, several of whom have ties to the American Council on Science and Health, a pro-industry advocacy group that has supported genetically modified foods, the spokesman said.

Oz may have a point. Some of the letter’s authors may have their own conflicts of interest. However, when you have to devote a segment of your nationally syndicated TV show to declare, “I am not a charlatan!” you may win the battle, but you are perilously close to losing the war.

The letter’s authors intended to use the national media to highlight Dr. Oz’s ethically dubious practice of promoting products that he knows (or ought to know) are quackery. They have been spectacularly successful in achieving that goal.

No, Dr. Oz is not going to lose his faculty appointment at Columbia, but that was never really in the cards. Academic freedom, the right of educators to hold and transmit controversial views, is precious. I don’t agree with much of what Dr. Oz has to say, but I defend his right to say it.

Nonetheless Dr. Oz is a medical doctor and doctors have ethical obligations. In my judgment, the most pressing question about Dr. Oz is whether he has violated those obligations.

Dr. Oz isn’t a charlatan; he just plays one on TV.

Hippocrates never worried about this kind of ethics problem. He conceived of the doctor-patient relationship as one on one, and wrote his Hippocratic Oath under the assumption that a physician has specific ethical obligations governing the medical advice he offers to his own patients. He never considered whether physicians have ethical obligations to the public at large.

By all accounts, Dr. Oz is an outstanding clinician. Moreover, no one has ever accused him of offering his own patients “quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.” That would be a clear violation of his ethical obligations. But he has incontrovertibly offered quack treatments on his TV show, almost certainly in the interest of personal gain.

His influence is so pervasive that the British Medical Journal published a paper on the unreliability of his TV recommendations and those of a competing television show. Their conclusion:

Recommendations made on medical talk shows often lack adequate information on specific benefits or the magnitude of the effects of these benefits. Approximately half of the recommendations have either no evidence or are contradicted by the best available evidence. Potential conflicts of interest are rarely addressed. The public should be skeptical about recommendations made on medical talk shows.

I suspect that this did not come as a shock to Dr. Oz.

But Oz’s show is not a private medical consultation; it is med-utainment, a television show that incorporates the many disciplines of medical science (or pseudoscience) to provide entertainment to viewers.

Yet even as an entertainer, Dr. Oz is still bound by medical ethics. Academic freedom gives him the right to promote medical treatments that he knows don’t work. That doesn’t change the fact that it is a violation of medical ethics to do so.

Although Dr. Oz is not engaged in a traditional doctor-patient relationship with the members of his audience, he is speaking from a position of medical authority (including touting his faculty appointment at Columbia) and he is still offering medical advice to others. He is trading on his medical credentials and therefore his actions are bound by the same ethical constraints.

He has a tremendous conflict of interest and he ought to explicitly inform his viewers of that fact. His medical “advice” is determined by considerations other than what is supported by scientific evidence. These considerations include ratings, and advertising revenue. Higher ratings = more advertising revenue = more money for Dr. Oz. He’s like any doctor who prescribes a medication or treatment based on how it profits him, not on what is best for the patient. We recognize that it is unethical for doctors to take kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies for prescribing their medications. It is equally unethical for Dr. Oz to profit from promoting quackery. If he’s not offering the same medical advice to his patients as he’s offering to his TV audience, he’s violating the primary tenets of medical ethics: beneficence (benefiting the patient) and non-maleficence (not harming the patient).

There are doctors out there who offer quack treatments because they believe that they work. Their recommendations are wrong, but they’re not unethical. Dr. Oz almost certainly knows better, which means that his efforts and renumeration as a med-utainer conflict with the obligations of medical ethics.

Dr. Oz is not a charlatan; he just plays one on TV.

And that’s unethical.

Last week I wrote about a Buzzfeed article on homebirth that included pictures of a footling breech birth at home.

Not surprisingly, many natural childbirth advocates greeted the photos rhapsodically, with midwives, doulas and childbirth educators crowing that the photo spread “normalizes” birth. The truth is rather different.

Like much of what comes from the natural childbirth movement, the photo spread doesn’t normalize birth; it idealizes it … and thereby sets women up for disappointment when their own births fail to measure up.

Natural childbirth advocates love to photograph themselves and post pictures and YouTube videos for all the world to see. What many observers do not notice is that these photos and videos are often carefully edited. For example, many homebirth photos depicting the baby’s first moments are converted from color to black and white to better hide the fact that the baby is an ugly purple color indicative of oxygen deprivation at the end of labor.

A photo spread of “normal” birth should show dead babies, dead mothers, and devastated fathers and young children. Those photos should show hours upon hours of intense maternal suffering during labor with some women begging for death. They should show a woman with her eyes rolled back in her head having an eclamptic seizure, and a waxy-white dead mother with liters of her blood on the floor. They should show little white coffins and cemeteries with row upon row of tiny tombstones for the babies who died during labor.

Why? Because that’s what normal birth really looks like.

I’m not the only one who has noticed that natural childbirth advocates have idealized childbirth.

Selling the Ideal Birth: Rationalization and Re-enchantment in the Marketing of Maternity Care by Markella Rutherford and Selina Gallo-Cruz details the process. The authors explain:

In many ways, the contemporary scene of childbirth services can be characterized as one of cyclical rationalization, re-enchantment, and rationalization. In the first half of the 20th century, childbirth was subject to intense rationalization and birth was culturally transformed from a potentially risky even to a pathogen-like state to be medically managed and controlled.

In other words, the technocratic model of birth gained ascendancy. Neonatal and maternal mortality dropped dramatically as a result. But:

As is often the case, rationalization came with dehumanizing consequences … The birth experience was stripped of many of its subjective qualities… Scientific rationalization … meant that the birth experience was “disenchanted.”

That’s certainly the way that natural childbirth and homebirth advocates see it.

However, the natural birth movement attempts to re-enchant birth by allowing nature — unpredictable and uncontrollable — to have free reign and by recapturing the subjective experience of birth with its sensuality and mystery. This is most clearly seen in the emphasis by homebirth advocates on the spiritual and/or symbolic meaning of birth.

This is what natural childbirth advocates mean by “normalizing” birth BUT with a critical caveat. Natural childbirth advocates present as “normal” ONLY the subset of births without complications and with good outcomes, and deliberately exclude the wide swath of births that have complications, as well as the significant subset of births that “normally” end with the death of the baby or mother or both.

Natural childbirth advocates “normalize” birth in the same way that the fashion industry “normalizes” underweight women with a specific body type: large breasts, thin waists, and moderate hips. The natural childbirth view of “normal” birth bears as much resemblance to the broad range of actual births as fashion industry’s view of the “normal” female body bears to the broad range of actual female body types. In others words, it bears no relationship at all.

Both industries sell the fantasy that “ideal” and “normal” are the same when they very, very far apart.

It is hardly surprising then that some women are disappointed by their birth experiences.

The solution to this disappointment is NOT to sacrifice safety and sanity to by attempting to recapitulate an idealized tableau of birth that women can proudly post on Facebook and YouTube. The solution is to attack the idealization of birth in the same way that many are attacking the idealization of female bodies … as unrepresentative of, and unfair to, real women.

Natural childbirth advocates don’t “normalize” birth, they idealize it and normal women who have normal, non-ideal birth experiences suffer as a result.

Is breast still best when it leads to the murder-suicide of a baby and mother?

According to The Telegraph:

A mother who was found dead on a cliff face after wandering out of hospital with her newborn baby had been advised by doctors to stop taking an anti-psychotic medication so she could breastfeed.

Charlotte Bevan, 30, vanished from a Bristol maternity hospital with no coat or shoes, and with her four-day-old baby Zaani wrapped in a blanket in December 2014.

It is believed that she had suffered from schizophrenia and depression, and had been taking the drug risperidone.

The litany of failures in this case nearly defies belief, up to an including the fact that a shoeless woman was allowed to leave the hospital holding a newborn, and, of course, the inevitable stalling by the hospital representative who showed up to yesterday’s inquest into Bevan’s death without having taken statements from caregivers that he or she was supposed to present.

When it comes to caregivers, there is an enormous amount of blame to go around. Who tells a schizophrenic to go off her anti-psychotic meds to breastfeed? Use of risperidone, the medication that Bevan was taking, is compatible with both pregnancy and breastfeeding if the mother needs the medication. Who lets a schizophrenic go off her anti-psychotic medications without intensive monitoring? Who hands a baby to an unmedicated schizophrenic without continuous supervision to be sure that she does not harm her baby?

When it comes to philosophy, however, there is only one philosophy to blame: the philosophy of natural parenting that views women as nothing more than baby containers and feeders whose health, physical and mental, is irrelevant.

For most of human history, women have been reduced to three body parts: uterus, vagina and breasts. Their intellect was irrelevant; their talents were irrelevant; their wants and needs were irrelevant. For a while it appeared that we had moved beyond this deeply sexist and retrograde view of women, but now it’s back in a new guise: natural parenting, specifically natural childbirth, lactivism and attachment parenting. These movements place the (purported) needs of babies front and center. They ignore the needs of women.

In the case of breastfeeding, an industry has grown up around the assertion that “breast is best.” Best for whom? Best for babies, of course.

The benefits of breastfeeding have been grossly exaggerated, with lactivists referring to breast milk as “liquid gold.” The non-existent “risks” of bottle feeding are blared far and wide. In short, infant feeding has been thoroughly moralized into just another way to police women’s bodies and judge mothers as “good” or “bad.”

Is it best for mothers? Often it isn’t, but their needs — the need to sleep, the need to work, the need to share care giving with others, the need to own their own bodies —  are irrelevant.

Charlotte Bevan had schizophrenia. It’s an illness every bit as real as diabetes. Untreated it leads to severe compromise and even death.

Charlotte Bevan NEEDED risperidone. Why wasn’t she getting the medication that she needed, the medication that made the difference between her life and her death?

Why wasn’t Bevan encouraged to stay on her anti-psychotic medication? Because quite a few people believed that the purity of her breast milk was more important than her right to live without the torment of the voices she heard in her head.

How did we get to the point where women’s needs are viewed as irrelevant? How did we get to the point where health care providers (!!), weighed breast milk against Charlotte Bevan’s sanity and breast milk won?

We got here by way of a philosophy that renders women’s needs, even their need to be sane, invisible, routinely subordinated to fabricated “needs” of babies for parenting that recapitulates women’s subservient status in nature.

The death of Charlotte Bevan and her baby Zaani should be a wake up call to all of us, health care providers, feminists and anyone who cares about women, that women’s needs MATTER.

Women are people entitled to the best care we can provide for them, not baby containers and not milk machines. Moralizing infant feeding is wrong, not merely because the benefits of breastfeeding in industrialized countries are trivial. It is wrong because by pitting mothers against babies, everyone loses.

I don’t get it.

And, of course, the folks at ImprovingBirth.org won’t explain it or even respond to my tweets.

I’ve written before about the shameless way that both ImprovingBirth.org and Human Rights in Childbirth have relentlessly exploited “Kelly” (her real name appears to be posted with the YouTube video, but IB and HRiC have chosen to give her an Anglo pseudonym).

Why is Human Rights in Childbirth protecting the doctor in the so-called “Forced Episiotomy” video?

What has Improving Birth done for the woman in the “forced episiotomy” video besides exploit her?

and there most recent pointless stunt, ImprovingBirth.org boasts about latest effort to exploit the woman in the “forced episiotomy” video.

As I wrote then:

Apparently, the folks at ImprovingBirth.org are extending their exploitation of Kelly from tragedy to farce. Birth advocates should take note. It costs money to provide real help to Kelly, and the money they raise goes to enhancing THEIR public visibility. It costs nothing to drag Kelly to the police station, have her share an intimate video with strangers who aren’t going to be able to help her, while garnering free publicity of ImprovingBirth.org…

Too bad that Kelly is being used yet again.

Not surprisingly that accomplished nothing besides promoting ImprovingBirth.org.

Today ImprovingBirth.org began raising money for the latest pointless stunt, “Kelly,” Who Had a Forced Episiotomy, Goes to Court.

Let’s review how we got to this point:

Based on a video taken by family members, “Kelly” was treated abysmally and disrespectfully by her doctor. Though there was no evidence of an emergency, her doctor cut an episiotomy over her objections. It didn’t look like any episiotomy I’ve ever seen; he cut her multiple times and it’s difficult to imagine how that could be justified.

Her doctor does need to be held to account. There are multiple ways to do so, some more likely to produce results than others.

“Kelly” spoke with the hospital administration but was not satisfied by their response. It’s hard to evaluate their response since no one at IB or HRiC has clearly articulated what Kelly wants.

She could report the doctor to the Medical Board of California. It is unclear whether this has been done or how they responded.

She filed an entirely pointless claim at the local police station which accomplished nothing for her, but generated lots of publicity for ImprovingBirth.org.

She has tried to find a lawyer to file a lawsuit, but according to IB, she has been unable to do so. That’s almost certainly because she can’t pay a lawyer and wants someone to take the case on contingency (where the lawyer gets 1/3 of any money won, but nothing if the case is lost). And that’s almost certainly because she can’t fulfill one of the most important criteria for a successful malpractice suit, permanent injury or damage.

The lawyers at IB or HRiC could represent her, or pay someone to represent her, but they don’t want to do that. Instead, they’ve encouraged her to represent herself (pro se).

We must raise at least $1,500 in the next 10 days to cover the filing fees, process server fees, lost wages for Kelly to take off work, and travel expenses from where Kelly now lives, several hours away from where she had her baby.

Why?

It can’t be that she has a high chance of winning or obtaining a substantial amount in damages; lawyers have already told her that she DOESN’T have a substantial chance of winning, and it will cost a great deal of time and money.

According to IB:

She is being supported every step of the way by a team that includes the president and vice president of Improving Birth and representatives (including lawyers) from Human Rights in Childbirth and the Birth Rights Bar Association, who have volunteered thousands of dollars worth of time and resources.

If they’ve spent thousands of dollars in time and resources, they KNOW that Kelly’s chances of getting her case into court, prosecuting it, winning it, and obtaining damages or vindication from it, are close to nil.

According to IB:

Please help Kelly meet this deadline and get her lawsuit filed. This initial $1,500 is a fraction of the estimated cost to litigate her case (up to $100,000), but it’s a necessary step if she will ever be able to seek justice in a court of law.

But she’s already been told that she’s very unlikely to find justice in a court of law.

Why should “Kelly” put herself through this if it is not going to bring the resolution she wants?

Indeed, the only people I can see benefiting from this are the folks at ImprovingBirth.org who are using “Kelly” to generate publicity.

Kelly Rios, if you are reading this, feel free to contact me through my email address on the sidebar. I will try to connect you with people who can explain your options and won’t exploit you for publicity purposes in the process.

A lawsuit is not a trivial matter, as I have reason to know. You should never embark on a lawsuit unless there is a reasonable expectation that you will achieve your aim. You’ve already been told by lawyers that you won’t, so think very carefully before you go down this road. It will cost you time, money, anxiety, and probably grief.

I don’t doubt for a moment that the folks at IB and HRiC have been genuinely supportive. Anyone who cares about human rights should be upset by the video and help you seek redress, and they truly care about women’s rights. But that doesn’t mean that representing yourself in a lawsuit is going to help you.

Don’t do anything that won’t benefit you directly, and it sounds like representing yourself pro se is not going to achieve your aim, whatever it might be.