Homebirth dramatically increases the risk of a baby’s death and appears to increase the risk of a mother’s death.

When I first started blogging about homebirth deaths back in 2006, homebirth was such a rare and remarkable occurrence that I could keep track of most homebirth deaths. I wrote a post about nearly every death that I heard about.

As homebirth has become more popular, the deaths have been coming fast and furious and I can no longer keep up. If I wrote a post for every death I heard about, the blog were be dominated by deaths and the posts would have a depressing sameness: baby drops nearly dead into clueless midwife’s hands, uterus ruptures at home, massive maternal post partum hemorrhage. “Trusting birth” hasn’t lowered the incidence of these lifethreatening emergencies. “Trusting birth” has simply increased the death rate because they happen far from lifesaving experts and equipment.

“Trusting birth” to prevent a homebirth death is as effective as “trusting pregnancy” is at preventing miscarriages. “Trusting” doesn’t do a damn thing to prevent anything.

In the last few weeks I have learned about:

A baby who died at homebirth in Florida 12 weeks ago, unexpectedly born dead.

A baby who died in Texas 6 weeks ago, unexpectedly born pulseless.

A baby who died in Phoenix last week whose mother, a doula, had a previous HBAC. I have not been able to establish whether the caregiver knew that the baby was dead before birth or was not expecting it.

A baby who died in October after his mother labored at The Farm and was transferred to the hospital for failure to progress. On arrival at the hospital, fetal distress was noted and the mother had an emergency C-section. It was too late. The baby could not be resuscitated.

A mother who died in December in Texas after postpartum transfer from homebirth. The baby was born lifeless but surived after cooling therapy to mitigate brain damage from lack of oxygen at birth. The mother died despite days of heroic efforts to save her life at the hospital.

These are the deaths I could personally confirm. I have been told of others.

Five mothers who trusted birth: 4 dead babies and one dead mother.

Thinking about homebirth? This could be YOU or YOUR BABY. These women were no different from you. Their midwives were no different from yours. Your trust in birth can’t protect you just like it didn’t protect them.

Why do homebirth midwives counsel women to trust birth? It’s marketing ploy to elide the fact that you can’t trust homebirth midwives to save your baby’s life or your life; all you can do it trust (i.e. pretend) that your birth won’t develop life threatening complications. If you pretend wrong, your baby dies or you die, or both.

I have come to realize that it is going to take the death of a celebrity’s baby or her own death to wake people up to the deaths that are occurring all the time at homebirth. That will be the tipping point, in the same way the the Disneyland measles outbreak became the tipping point that definitively discredited the anti-vaccination movement. There had been outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases before; there had been deadlier outbreaks (pertussis); but for some reason, the Disneyland outbreak gripped the public consciousness. It will take something like that for homebirth deaths to grip the public consciousness.

There is a steady stream of preventable homebirth deaths. They happen in every state, with every type of midwife. Most people, including most homebirth advocates aren’t paying any attention, partly because homebirth midwives are lying about the deaths, hiding them, refusing to discipline the midwives involved and publishing deliberately misleading papers that slice and dice the data to obscure hideous death rates.

I BEG any woman contemplating homebirth to consider:

Trusting birth is like trusting the gun at Russian roulette. Sure the odds are high that when you fire the gun, there won’t be a bullet in the chamber and you will survive, but no amount of trusting the gun changes the fact that there is a bullet in one of the chambers and it’s just simple probability whether that bullet will wind up in your head. Similarly, the odds are high that when you have a homebirth, you won’t have a life threatening complication and you and your baby will survive. But no amount of trusting birth changes the fact that life threatening complications will happen and it’s just simple probability whether they will happen to you.

Please, please, please give birth in a hospital. You might not like the experience; the chance of ending up with interventions is high; the chance of ending up with a C-section may even be higher than it should be. But the chance of ending up DEAD (you or your baby) is very, very low.

I am so weary of writing about dead babies who didn’t have to die, reading soul crushing stories of mothers who risked their babies and lost, and contemplating the anguish of small children growing up motherless.

Thinking about homebirth? Think about the fact that what happened to these women could happen to you … and trusting birth won’t do a damn thing to stop it.

The Morecambe Bay report has been published and the scramble to avoid responsibility is on. At least 11 babies and 1 mother died at Furness General Hospital because the midwives cared more about promoting natural birth and preserving their own autonomy than they did about whether babies and mothers lived or died. The midwifery administration refused to discipline the midwives involved, and the hospital was more concerned with its business status than protecting patients. A massive health care system, the National Health Service (NHS) failed in its legal and moral responsibility at every level, bottom to the very top, hiding, eliding and dissembling to protect the wrong doers initially, and eventually to protect themselves. They brought an enormous amount of bureaucratic power to bear, essentially everything they could muster, and yet they lost.

They were defeated by the power of a father’s love.

Joshua Titcombe died when, despite the pleading of his parents for 24 hours, midwives refused to call a pediatrician to care for him when he was obviously ill. They waited until he was nearly dead to call for help and by then it was too late for the help that almost certainly would have cured him had it arrived earlier. The midwives rebuffed his parents, the hospital administration tried to convince them that no one did anything wrong, and the bureaucracy of the NHS insisted that appropriate care had been provided.

But James Titcombe, Joshua’s father, refused to be put off and he refused to be silent. He was treated to stonewalling and abuse on a scale that is difficult to imagine, but he did not give up. Why? Because his love for his son was stronger than even the mighty NHS.

They say that statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off, and that’s certainly true in this case. It is important to deal with the statistics: how many died, how many midwives valued natural childbirth above safety, how many levels charged with oversight ignored their responsibilities in favor of their reputations. It is appropriate that, going forward, attention will be focused on statistics, but we should take a moment to consider the human beings and the floods of tears behind those statistics.

I first wrote about Joshua in November 2011 after being contacted by his father James (Joshua’s easily preventable, tragic hospital birth death).

[He] contacted me to share more details about Joshua’s birth and needless death. He gave me permission to share with you the presentation he created to ensure that Joshua will be remembered and that his death will serve a purpose, focusing attention on the substandard midwifery care that is the result of midwives protecting their “turf” and refusing to refer complicated cases to obstetricians and pediatricians.

James was treated appallingly by those who were supposed to search for the truth.

According to The Independent:

The family were left deeply hurt on two occasions after seeing internal email exchanges between Trust staff. One followed an email from Mr Titcombe in June 2010 saying he would be stepping back from his inquiries after “becoming extremely distressed and anxious” about the investigations progress.

Informing the Trust’s head of midwifery of the email, the Trust’s customer care manager wrote: ‘Good news to pass on re [Mr Titcombe]’, and received the reply: ‘Has [Mr Titcombe] moved to Thailand? What is the good news?’

In another email from August 2009, later seen by Mr Titcombe, a discussion of a midwife’s statement to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) concerning the circumstances of Joshua’s death was subject lined: “NMC shit”.

Despite that, James pressed ahead. In February 2014, he and his wife received an apology for the NHS Ombudsman acknowleding that the hospital had failed to properly investigate Joshua’s death and that the Ombudsman’s office had subsequently refused to investigate at all.

James was quoted at the time of the apology:

Joshua’s death has had an unbearable impact on our family, we miss him every day and continue to be haunted by the trauma of his short life and his horrific preventable death. The last five years have been made so much worse because of the way the trust and other organisations responded to his loss.

The Morecambe Report on Joshua’s death and the deaths of other babies and mothers was published last week and it corroborated everything that James had claimed. The midwives DID have a cult of natural childbirth that took precedence over safety; they DID refuse to call other specialists when they were needed: they DID fail to investigate Joshua’s death and discipline their colleagues; the hospital DID cover up the midwives’ wrong doing; at every level the NHS DID ignore the concerns of the family, fail to properly investigate, and treat James contemptibly.

The Morecambe Bay report is vindication, but it does not bring Joshua back. James was once again quoted in The Independent:

I really recognise now when we talk about missed opportunities in this report, that for me means not having a six-year-old. Even after all these things were going wrong, nothing was done and patients were allowed to die.

It is very hard to forgive the deliberate covering up when it’s had such an impact…

Joshua Titcombe died a preventable death because the people who were supposed to be caring for him put their needs ahead of his needs. A family was shattered and his parents will grieve for the rest of their lives.

But though his life was short, his impact will be profound. His death was not in vain, because the failings that led to his death have been exposed and now can be addressed. His death was not in vain because his father loved him so much that he never stopped fighting for the truth.

The NHS is an extremely powerful organization. But it was no match for the power of a father’s love.

Kudos to bioethicist Anne Drapkin Lyerly for the natural childbirth version of speaking truth to power.

Lyerly is is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Associate Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She writes about social and moral issues in women’s health and reproductive medicine. She has also been a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, published by Lamaze International. She has dared to question the ethics of “normal birth” within the pages of the premier journal of the normal birth industry.

The abstract succinctly summarizes her argument.

The concept of “normal birth” has been promoted as ideal by several international organizations, although debate about its meaning is ongoing. In this article, I examine the concept of normalcy to explore its ethical implications and raise a trio of concerns. First, in its emphasis on nonuse of technology as a goal, the concept of normalcy may marginalize women for whom medical intervention is necessary or beneficial. Second, in its emphasis on birth as a socially meaningful event, the mantra of normalcy may unintentionally avert attention to meaning in medically complicated births. Third, the emphasis on birth as a normal and healthy event may be a contributor to the long-standing tolerance for the dearth of evidence guiding the treatment of illness during pregnancy and the failure to responsibly and productively engage pregnant women in health research. Given these concerns, it is worth debating not just what “normal birth” means, but whether the term as an ideal earns its keep.

Lyerly explains the problem:

… [I]n its emphasis on birth as a physiological but not pathological or “medical” process, the concept of normal birth has served to highlight the harms of unreflective and routine medical intervention, and promote access to low intervention or what some have termed “natural” birth for women who desire it. Second, in its emphasis on birth as a social process, the concept of normal birth has helpfully promoted an understanding of birth as meaning imbued… [E]thically speaking, as an organizing principle for the good, the notion of normalcy raises a trio of concerns.

Specifically:

1. Not all women need or want a “normal” birth, and therefore, it is wrong to suggest that this type of birth is “normal.”

… “normal” indicates something that is normative or morally preferable—a state we ought to strive for. The result is a “fundamental tension” between normal as an “ordinary healthy state” and a “state of perfection toward which communities can strive.” In this way, the “normal” birth becomes (in hearts and minds) the good birth, potentially leaving women who use technology to conclude that they have somehow failed or missed out during their entrée to motherhood.

2. Why should avoiding technology be a goal when many women don’t want to avoid technology?

… [M]edical interventions— pharmacological or epidural analgesia, for example—can improve the experience of birth for women who desire them. In both cases, normalcy as a goal for populations does not track well with normalcy as an ideal for particular women. An unintentional and untoward consequence is that women who use and benefit from technology may nevertheless conclude that their births are somehow less than ideal, at a distance from a notion of the “good” that was either out of reach or inconsistent with their values and preferences.

3. The emphasis on “normal” birth as a socially meaningful experience misses the point:

… [A]re not all births, whatever the degree of intervention, socially meaningful? … Among the approaches {Diony Young, Editor of Birth] lists are respectful care, antenatal education, support in labor, informed choice and consent, supportive environment, evidence-based information and practice, mother baby togetherness, and availability of midwives for
one-to-one care… [N]one is specific to normal birth—that most if not all would be beneficial to a childbearing woman regardless of how medically complicated or involved her delivery.

… [N]ormalcy raises particular problems from the standpoint of justice, to the extent that it fails to attend to the needs of those who are disadvantaged, physiologically or otherwise. Some
prominent theories of justice require attention to, in some cases priority for, the interests of the least well-off. My concern is that the linking of social and psychological meaning and the nonuse of technology under the umbrella of normalcy implies that in complicated pregnancies, the social aspects of birth are somehow less relevant. Of course, they are not; indeed, women who face birth and illness together feel perhaps more pressingly the need for supportive, respectful care.

4. Many women experience pregnancies that are not normal. Natural childbirth advocates simply ignore these women, reinforcing the tendency of researchers to ignore these women.

… [I]n a 2010 Research Forum held at the National Institutes of Health entitled “Issues in Clinical Research: Enrolling Pregnant Women,” the tag-line read “Pregnant Women Get Sick, Sick Women Get Pregnant.” Of course they do—but that it was an extremely effective phrase was a telling reminder of our myopia when it comes to illness and pregnancy.

Lyerly’s critique, while measured and understated, is nonetheless devastating. It’s especially powerful because Lyerly takes NCB advocates at their word that they are acting on behalf of women and demonstrates that it’s fatuous to claim to be acting on behalf of women when you ignore, marginalize and denigrate a substantial proportion of them.

I agree with Lyerly that the promotion of “normal” birth is ethically suspect. However, the reason is simpler than Lyerly supposes. It’s money.

Midwives, doulas and childbirth educators can only make money from births that involve minimal or no technology. Therefore, they have idealized the births that represent their profits. The promotion of “normal” birth is a marketing strategy. Like Mitt Romney and the 47%, Those who promote normal birth believe that it is “not their job to worry about those people” who want services other than those that midwives, can provide.

Lyerly is clearly a less cynical person than I am. That makes her critique all the more powerful. She takes NCB advocates at their word and finds their word to be ethically suspect.

This piece first appeared in November 2012. It is worth revisiting in light of the deaths at Morecambe Bay.

We need a term for the subtle and not so subtle put downs favored by lactivists and natural childbirth advocates to assert their superiority over other mothers.

I suggest ad mominem.

Ad mominems are hateful, hurtful and potential deadly claims made by individual mothers, mommy bloggers and, unfortunately, professionals such as midwives and lactation consultants, as well as the organizations that represent them.

Classic ad mominems wielded by individuals include:

Infant formula is poison.

Epidurals cause babies to be drugged.

Women who have C-sections can’t bond to their babies, and haven’t given birth in any case.

Apparently, the current ad mominem of choice is to give the side-eye to women bottle feeding their babies or, better yet, approach them to evangelize on the benefits of breastfeeding.

Although these are outrageous, and deeply upsetting in the moment, most of us recognize that while they are hateful and hurtful, they reflect the insecurity of the women uttering them. Those who casually drop ad mominems are deeply insecure about their own parenting and make themselves feel better by disparaging others.

What about mommy bloggers?

It takes a special kind of narcissism to imagine that the world is waiting for your advice on parenting, and that you should set up a website where you display your children, violate their privacy, and dispense your special brand of wisdom. Mommy bloggers are virtuosos of the ad mominem.

Consider:

The Feminist Breeder

I am brave (foolish) enough to admit that while I totally and completely support any woman’s right and choice to feed her babies however she needs to, I still, deep down in a place I don’t like to admit, don’t really “get” it when a woman chooses, without any medical or social barrier, not to breastfeed. To me it’s sorta like deciding not to take prenatal vitamins because you just don’t wanna, without recognizing that they do help build a healthier baby. I will NOT be all sanctimonious about it, I’m just saying I’m human and that one’s a head scratcher for me. We have lactating boobs for a reason: to feed the babies we make.

The Alpha Parent

The Feminist Breeder is a rank amateur when compared to The Alpha Parent, master of the graphic ad mominem:

Mamabirth

Blogger Mama Birth is master of my favorite form, the meta ad mominem, where the blogger attempts to blame women for feeling bad after she shames them. A shining example is I Can’t Make You Feel Ashamed of Your Birth (Unless You Really Are Ashamed of It):

Shaming is a hot topic in the birth world though, isn’t it? If you are dumb enough to have an opinion and share it then you are undoubtedly going to be accused of shaming somebody who did otherwise. If you state that formula is a poor substitute for breast-milk or mention that the cesarean section is a perverse form of birth control … or (gasp) talk about how much you loved your natural birth, then stand back. Because what happens next is you will be accused of shaming people.

Many mommy bloggers are bullies and like most bullies, they have extremely fragile egos. That’s why most have to delete and ban anyone who disagrees with their ad mominems and then, in a feat of magic worthy of Houdini, claim that everyone else is bullying them.

But the greatest damage, pain and suffering occurs at the hands of the professionals who casually drop ad mominems to fragile new mothers, and the organizations that represent them, which use ad mominems to market themselves.

Lactation consultants

Emily Wax-Thibodeux, who survived breast cancer and endured a double mastectomy, was subjected to ignorance and cruelty for bottle feeding her newborn son:

“You really should breast-feed,” the hospital’s lactation consultants, a.k.a. “lactivists,” said.

When I simply said, “I’m going to do formula,” they didn’t want to leave it at that.

So holding my day-old newborn on what was one of the most blissful days of my life, I had to tell the aggressive band of well-intentioned strangers my whole cancer saga…

“Just try,” they advised. “Let’s hope you get some milk.”

“It may come out anyway, or through your armpits,” another advised later …

The Royal College of Midwives

The RCM’s Campaign for Normal Birth is unprofessional, unethical and unsafe. It relies on the ultimate ad mominem, that unmedicated vaginal birth is safest for babies (it isn’t). It has given British midwives license to bully women out of effective pain relief, and life saving interventions.

“Most women, in every country across the world, would prefer to give birth as physiologically as possible. For most women and babies, this is also the safest way to give birth, and to be born, wherever the birth setting. If routine interventions are eliminated for healthy women and babies, resources will be freed up for the extra staff, treatments and interventions that are needed when a laboring woman and her baby actually need help. This will ensure optimal outcomes for all women and babies, and sustainable maternity care provision overall.”

No, most women would NOT prefer to give birth without technology interventions. Most MIDWIVES would prefer it, because that allows them to maintain control over patients.
It is NOT the safest way to give birth, as the deaths of 11 babies and one mother on the altar of natural childbirth at Morecambe Bay demonstrate.
Resources are NOT “freed up” for when they are needed; they are DENIED to babies and women when they are needed.
This does NOT ensure optimal outcomes for women and babies. It ensures optimal outcomes for MIDWIVES.

The RCM Campaign for Normal Birth is an abomination. It kills babies; it kills mothers and it has become an all purpose excuse for midwives to bully patients. It should be disavowed immediately.

The Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative

Even its name is not so subtle ad mominem, but if there’s a bigger oxymoron in contemporary health care, I’m not aware of it. This campaign to promote breastfeeding (and, not coincidentally, lactation consultants) is not friendly to babies, and is cruel to mothers. There is nothing baby friendly about efforts to promote breastfeeding to the exclusion of a mother and baby’s actual needs. There is not, and there can never be, anything “baby friendly” about destroying the confidence of new mothers and making them feel guilty about a decision with trivial consequences.

And it is literally deadly, as detailed in the paper Deaths and near deaths of healthy newborn infants while bed sharing on maternity wards:

Although bed sharing with infants is well known to be hazardous, deaths and near deaths of newborn infants while bed sharing in hospitals in the United States have received little attention … These events occurred within the first 24 h of birth during ‘skin-to-skin’ contact between mother and infant, a practice promoted by the ‘Baby Friendly’ (BF) initiative … We report 15 deaths and 3 near deaths of healthy infants occurring during skin-to-skin contact or while bed sharing on maternity wards in the United States. Our findings suggest that such incidents are underreported in the United States and are preventable…

Ad mominems are hateful, hurtful and deadly.

It’s time to put an end to them.

I first began wondering if natural childbirth and lactivism are ableist when I saw the image below on The Alpha Parent’s Facebook page, labeled #Truth.

Presumably the quote is from Allison Dixley’s recently published book:

Functioning breasts are no more ‘lucky’ than a functioning pair of legs, yet we don’t incessantly dwell on the luck enjoyed by those of us who can walk.

The commentors quickly schooled Dixley that people who can walk ARE lucky, and when we stop to think about it, we acknowledge this.

That’s what led me to consider whether natural childbirth, with its relentless focus on and praise of functioning uteri, ample pelves, and transit of babies through vaginas, and lactivism, with its relentless focus on and praise of lactating breasts, are part of a subset of discrimination known as ableism.

What is ableism?

According to Stop Ableism.org:

Ableism – a set of practices and beliefs that assign inferior value (worth) to people who have developmental, emotional, physical or psychiatric disabilities…

An ableist society is said to be one that treats non-disabled individuals as the standard of ‘normal living’…

Natural childbirth is a set of practices and beliefs that assigns inferior value to women who do not have unmedicated, vaginal births.

Lactivism is a set of practices and beliefs that assigns inferior value to women who do not use their breasts to feed their babies.

Dixley’s original claim that “we don’t incessantly dwell on the luck enjoyed by those of us who can walk” is also ableist. To paraphrase Stop Ableism.org, the failure to appreciate that not everyone can walk results in public and private places and services, education, and social work that are built to serve those who can walk, thereby inherently excluding those who cannot. That is discrimination. It is wrong and fortunately we are working to overcome that by making venues accessible to all.

Although it is discrimination, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would go so far as to write blog posts and books accusing those who cannot walk of not trying hard enough. That would be cruel as well as discriminatory. Yet natural childbirth advocates and lactivists write incessant blog posts and books accusing women who have had C-sections of not trying hard enough, and accusing women who can’t exclusively breastfeed of not trying hard enough.

Indeed both natural childbirth advocacy and lactivism have created ideals of childbirth and infant feeding that don’t merely exalt perfect body function, they insist that all but a vanishingly small few are capable of perfect body function. It is but a short hop then, if other women’s uteri, pelves, or breasts didn’t work perfectly, to blame them for their “failures.”

Natural childbirth advocates and lactivists view body function almost in terms of Calvinist predestination. Those who have unmedicated vaginal births and breastfeed exclusively are the Mothering Elect. Everyone else is destined for everlasting Mothering Hell. That explains in part why women are willing to risk their babies’ lives by attempting vaginal birth in high risk situations, ignoring medical complications, and laboring for days in an effort to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are part of the Mothering Elect. It explains why they are “traumatized” by not having a vaginal birth. Natural childbirth advocates have convinced them that their worth is located in their vaginas.

It explains why some women are willing to starve their newborns nearly to death with their insistence on exclusive breastfeeding even though they are not producing enough milk in an effort to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are part of the Mothering Elect. It explains why they are willing to feed their babies almost anything (goat’s milk, self-made formula) rather than commercially prepared formula, which is the lactivist equivalent of the mark of Satan.

Simply put, natural childbirth advocates are prejudiced against women who don’t have unmedicated vaginal births. Lactivists are prejudiced against women who don’t breastfeed. Their ableism is all the more remarkable when we consider the very high natural failure rate of human (and animal) reproduction. The natural miscarriage rate for established pregnancies is 20%; the natural rate of neonatal mortality is in the range of 7%; the natural rate of maternal mortality is 1%. It is estimated that 5% of women don’t make enough breastmilk to fully nourish a child. When you consider that most women would (in the absence of birth control) experience 8 or 10 or more pregnancies across a reproductive lifespan that’s a lot of miscarriages, dead babies and dead mothers.

Despite the stark reality of death as a prominent part of human reproduction, natural childbirth advocates aggressively pretend otherwise. Despite the stark reality of lactation failure as a natural part of human reproduction, lactivists aggressively pretend that it is so rare as to be unworthy of consideration.

Veneration of perfect body function, and discrimination against those who don’t have perfect body function (not to mention blaming them for their imperfect body function!) is  pure ableism. By that definition, natural childbirth advocacates and lactivists are ableist. They assign inferior worth to women who don’t have unmedicated vaginal births and who don’t exclusively breastfeed.

That is prejudice, it’s wrong, and women should speak out in one voice against it.

Despite my misgivings about midwife-led care, I would not have predicted this.

The Dutch experience with midwife-led care kills babies (and possibly mothers). The Netherlands has one of the worst perinatal mortality rates in Western Europe, and, remarkably, Dutch midwives caring for low risk women (home or hospital) have a HIGHER perinatal mortality rate than Dutch obstetricians caring for high risk patients.

Dutch midwives have acknowledged this hideous reality [link no longer active]:

In 2011 Dutch midwifery is under a microscope. Maternity care in general in The Netherlands has come under scrutiny by governments, media, the public and care providers themselves after two consecutive European Perinatal Statistical Reports ranked The Netherlands among those with the highest rates of perinatal and neonatal mortality compared to other members of the European Union (and Norway)…

… We have learned that infants born to women of low risk whose labour started in primary care with midwives had higher rates of perinatal death associated with delivery compared to those beginning labour in secondary care…

Yesterday’s publication of the Morecambe Bay report on a Cumbrian midwife-led hospital unit shows that midwife-led care has been a deadly failure in the United Kingdom as well. The report identifies 16 perinatal deaths and 3 maternal deaths that had taken place in the unit as potentially preventable, and concluded that the deaths of 11 babies and 1 mother almost certainly could have been prevented and the other deaths might have been averted.

My objection to midwife-led care came from my belief that care should be led by the most knowledgeable, most skilled members of the team. In this case that would be obstetricians and pediatricians. But the National Health Service (NHS) made a proverbial deal with the devil in order to save money. Midwives appear to be less expensive because their salaries are lower. Dutch authorities made the same deal for the same reasons.

I would have predicted a slight decline in the quality of care. Even I’m shocked that midwives have placed their needs and desires ahead of patient care, with the inevitable deadly consequences.

Midwife-led care kills babies and mothers because in the early 21st Century, midwife-led is ideology-led care.

The ideology is the philosophy of natural childbirth and the belief that unmedicated vaginal birth is healthier, safer and better than childbirth with interventions.

That ideology is utterly, spectacularly, fatally wrong. Interventions don’t kill babies and mothers; LACK of interventions is what kills them.

Childbirth is inherently dangerous. Obstetrics is preventive medicine, and the liberal use of childbirth interventions saves lives. Neither Dutch nor British midwives believe that, but both have unwittingly proven it yet again. The Dutch and British experience with midwife-led care merely confirms the fundamental truth of these historical facts.

Why do Dutch and British midwives place ideology over the health and lives of the patients they are ethically mandated to protect? Because the ideology of natural childbirth dovetails neatly with the self-interest of midwives. “Normal birth” is the holy grail of contemporary midwifery. Normal birth is distinguished from non-normal birth by a bright line; if it is under the purview of a midwife, she calls it normal and pronounces it “good”; if only an obstetrician can do it, she derides it an unnatural, dangerous and traumatic.

Midwives have an economic incentive to keep births for themselves. Normal birth provides the ideological justification for failure to acknowledge high risk situations, failure to acknowledge when low risk changes to high risk, and failure to acknowledge that greater expertise (of obstetricians and pediatricians) is needed. Babies and mothers die because it is more important to the midwife to keep the patient for herself than to provide the care that the mother and her baby need.

I would argue, though, that at some level, both British and Dutch midwives understand that they are providing substandard care. This recognition reinforces the midwives’ antipathy to calling for assistance when it is needed. By the time they urgently need to call for help they know that they have discounted risk factors, mischaracterized high risk patients as low risk, and ignored glaring warning signs. Paradoxically, the bigger the disaster they create, the less likely they are to call for help, because a laundry list of their errors will be revealed.

Many midwives want to practice in a way that violates safety standards, hence the relentless calls for autonomy. Within The Netherlands homebirth is promoted aggressively; in the UK, midwives are relentless in their promotion of homebirth as well as midwife-led units such as that in Morecambe Bay. They want to avoid any oversight.

Consider President of the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) Cathy Warwick’s tone deaf response to the horrors that occurred in Morecambe Bay.

The Morecambe Bay report stated:

…Whilst natural childbirth is a beneficial and worthwhile objective in women at low risk of obstetric complications, we heard that midwives took over the risk assessment process without in many cases discussing intended care with obstetricians, and we found repeated instances of women inappropriately classified as being at low risk and managed incorrectly. We also heard distressing accounts of middle-grade obstetricians being strongly discouraged from intervening (or even assessing patients) when it was clear that problems had developed in labour that required obstetric care. We heard that some midwives would “keep other people away, ‘well, we don’t need to tell the doctors, we don’t need to tell our colleagues, we don’t need to tell anybody else that this woman is in the unit, because she’s normal’” …

In her response, Warwick IGNORES the central role of midwives in the deaths of babies and mothers. Warwick does not use the word “midwife” even once!

What does she claim that the report showed?

The report recommends that there should be a national review of the provision of maternity care and paediatrics in challenging circumstances, including areas that are rural, difficult to recruit to, or isolated…

The report states that the educational opportunities afforded by smaller units, particularly in delivering a broad range of care with a high personal level of responsibility, have been insufficiently recognised and exploited…

Finally, the report expresses concern about the ad hoc nature and variable quality of the numerous external reviews of services that were carried out at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust…

Warwick’s response is an affront to those who lost loved ones at the hands of RCM midwives and it is an insult to our intelligence. Not only does it fail to acknowledge the problem, it IS the problem. Warwick puts the interests of midwives ahead of patients’ health and lives.

The very first step in improving midwifery care in the UK would be to fire Cathy Warwick and reorganize the RCM; she has led the way in demonstrating utter contempt for the health and lives of British babies and mothers. It is under her watch that the reprehensible RCM “Campaign for Normal Birth” was created and promoted.

Midwife-led care kills babies and mothers. It has been in a failure in The Netherlands and it has been a failure in The UK. It’s time to call an end to this deadly practice before even more babies and mothers die on the altar of “normal birth.”

Ideas have consequences.

Bad ideas have deadly consequences.

Today’s report on the deaths more than a dozen babies and mothers at a UK hospital is a catalog of horrors.

According to The Guardian:

Frontline staff were responsible for “inappropriate and unsafe care” and the response to potentially fatal incidents by the trust hierarchy was “grossly deficient, with repeated failure to investigate properly and learn lessons”.

Kirkup [the author of the report] said this “lethal mix” of factors had led to 20 instances of significant or major failures of care at Furness general hospital, associated with three maternal deaths and the deaths of 16 babies at or shortly after birth.

“Different clinical care in these cases would have been expected to prevent the outcome in one maternal death and the deaths of 11 babies.

In 2008 alone there were 5 deaths:

A baby was damaged due to a shortage of oxygen during labour, while another died from an unrecognised infection.

“All showed evidence of the same problems of poor clinical competence, insufficient recognition of risk, inappropriate pursuit of normal childbirth and failures of team-working,” Kirkup said. (my emphasis)

And most damning of all:

The midwives at Furness general were so cavalier they became known as “the musketeers”.

Those midwives are directly responsible for the deaths and should be held responsible to the full extent of the law. But the individual midwives are just the proximate cause. The real cause is radicalization of midwifery that values process above outcome, and midwife autonomy above all else.

Outcome, whether mothers and babies live or die, is the MOST important goal in obstetrics. It’s not the only goal, of course; safe care can and should be accompanied by compassionate, comfortable care. But is the sine qua non of all maternity care.

Midwives have forgotten that. Instead they have elevated process, specifically process that is good for them, above the health and even the lives of mothers and babies.

The goal of many midwives has become unmedicated vaginal birth, and professional autonomy.

The deadly results are not restricted to Morecambe Bay. The relentless promotion of “normal birth” has led to bad outcomes and soaring liability costs, now accounting for 20% of total obstetric spending.

I’ve written about these issues relentlessly and repeatedly over the years:

Promoting normal birth is killing babies and mothers
Midwife: UK deaths result of failing to meet the needs of … midwives?
New document on British maternity services is fundamentally unethical
In the UK, babies continue to die on the altar of vaginal birth
Government report: UK midwives put the lives of mothers and babies at risk
#FightFear: the hateful truth at the heart of UK midwifery
When UK midwives put the lives of mothers and babies at risk, the solution is not more homebirths

Who radicalized midwifery?

Biological essentialists.

They are fond of catch phrases like “trust birth,” “pregnancy is not a disease,” and #FightFear They insist that obstetrics has “pathologized” childbirth and they can display a shocking and callous fatalism by dismissing deaths with the dictum that “some babies are not meant to live.” Such views lead inevitable to the “poor clinical competence, insufficient recognition of risk, inappropriate pursuit of normal childbirth” highlighted in the report.

Feminist anti-rationalists

They dismiss science as a male form of “authoritative knowledge” on the understanding that there are “other ways of knowing” like “intuition.” Many are post modernists who believe that reality is radically subjective, that rationality is unnecessary and that “including the non-rational is sensible midwifery.”

Midwifery theorists

Consider Normal Childbirth: Evidence and Debate by Professor Soo Downe who dismisses the importance of scientific evidence in guiding clinical care:

The implication of the new subatomic physics was that certainty was replaced by probability, or the notion of tendencies rather than absolutes: ‘we can never predict an atomic event with certainty; we can only predict the likelihood of its happening’… This directly contradicts the mechanistic model we explored above, and it implies that a subject such as normal birth needs to be looked at as a whole rather than its parts…”

When we turn to the implications of this paradigm shift for our understanding of health, it becomes clear that the benefit or harm of an intervention for an individual can only be established with reasonable certainty by identifying and taking into account all the relevant “noise”. This includes environment, carer, attitudes, skills and beliefs, and the expectation of the woman and her family. Similarly, the appraisal of research and evidence needs to consider the concept of attitudes and roles of researchers and how these may have framed or influenced the process of generating evidence…

Not only is this NOT a justification for ignoring scientific evidence; it is utter nonsense that betrays a fundamental ignorance of physics.

The philosophy of “normal birth”

The definition of normal birth is simple and straightforward: If a midwife can do it, she calls it normal. If she lacks the skill to provide the needed care, she insists that the birth is not normal even if it results in a healthy mother and a healthy baby. “Normal birth” and “midwives” are interchangeable. In other words, “normal birth” is nothing more than a marketing term designed to promote full employment for midwives.

Midwifery leaders

Cathy Warwick, leader of the Royal College of Midwives, has not yet met a major problem that can’t be fixed by promoting increased midwife autonomy through homebirth and free standing midwife led units. Too bad for babies and mothers that Cathy Warwick believes the central problem in contemporary maternity care is meeting the needs of midwives, mothers and babies be damned.

The deaths at Morecambe Bay, and the subsequent coverup, are the inevitable consequences of a maternity system whose gatekeepers are biological essentialists, feminist anti-rationalists, believers in nonsensical theories, promoters of process over outcome, who appear to think that their primary responsibility is to themselves and not their patients.

The UK National Health System made a Faustian bargain with midwives to install them as gatekeepers in exchange for the promise of saving money; midwives are less expensive than obstetricians. It turns out that dead and injured babies cost a lot of money, though, not to mention the fact that allowing preventable perinatal and maternal deaths is fundamentally unethical.

The NHS needs to reorganize midwifery care to place obstetricians in control of patient care and midwives as their assistants. The radicalization of midwives, which provides the theoretical justification for placing their needs ahead of patient needs, means they can no longer be trusted to act independently.

The result is babies and mothers who didn’t have to die, shattered families, grieving parents and massive liability payments.

Horror, indeed.

 

Addendum

A direct quote from the report:

[M]idwifery care in the unit became strongly influenced by a small number of dominant individuals whose over-zealous pursuit of the natural childbirth approach led at times to inappropriate and unsafe care. One interviewee told us that “there were a group of midwives who thought that normal childbirth was the… be all and end all… at any cost… yeah, it does sound awful, but I think it’s true – you have a normal delivery at any cost”.2 Another interviewee “… was aware that there were certain midwives that would push past boundaries”.3 A third told us that there were “… a couple of senior people who believed that in all sincerity they were processing the agenda as dictated at the time… to uphold normality… there’ve been one or two influential figures who’ve perpetrated that… sort of approach and… there’s nobody challenging…”.4 Whilst natural childbirth is a beneficial and worthwhile objective in women at low risk of obstetric complications, we heard that midwives took over the risk assessment process without in many cases discussing intended care with obstetricians, and we found repeated instances of women inappropriately classified as being at low risk and managed incorrectly. We also heard distressing accounts of middle-grade obstetricians being strongly discouraged from intervening (or even assessing patients) when it was clear that problems had developed in labour that required obstetric care. We heard that some midwives would “keep other people away, ‘well, we don’t need to tell the doctors, we don’t need to tell our colleagues, we don’t need to tell anybody else that this woman is in the unit, because she’s normal’”.5 Over time, we believe that these incorrect and damaging practices spread to other midwives in the unit, probably quite widely. Obstetricians working in the unit were well-placed to observe these lapses from proper standards, and it is clear that they did, but seemingly lacked the determination to challenge these practices. This in turn represents a failure to maintain professional standards on their part.

By now every sentient being with access to the internet has seen #TheDress.

#TheDress is an optical illusion that relies on varying perceptions of different observers.

The fact that the brain is constantly constructing a model of what the world really looks like is also true for color vision. The fundamental challenge in the perception of color is to identify an object despite changing illumination conditions—how bright or dim the ambient lighting is. The mixture of wavelengths that reaches our eye will be interpreted by the brain as color, but which part is due to the reflectance of the object and which part is due to its surrounding illumination?

In other words, an individual’s perception of the color of the dress is influenced by his or her perception of the ambient light in the photograph. Those who see the dress as blue & black interpret the photo as overexposed, and their brains adjust the colors accordingly. Those who see the dress as white and gold, interpret the ambient light as natural light, and no color adjustment is made.

What can the dress teach us about pseudoscience in general and anti-vaccine advocacy in particular? Quite a bit as it turns out.

1. Context is critically important

Different people look at the same image and see different things, because they perceive the context differently. Those who assume the context is an overexposed photo conclude that the colors in the photo (white and gold) are washed out and adjust them accordingly; the white becomes blue and the gold becomes black. Those who see the context as a normally exposed photo conclude that the colors in the photo are true and no adjustment is made; the white remains white and the gold remains gold.

Context is important in vaccine safety, too.

For example, back in 2011, the pseudoscience blog Age of Autism breathlessly announced that there had been more miscarriage events associated with the HPV vaccine Gardasil than other vaccines. The folks at AofA concluded that Gardasil causes miscarriages and is therefore dangerous.

It’s hardly surprising that Gardasil, the ONLY vaccine given exclusively to women of reproductive age has more miscarriage EVENTS than other vaccines. Was anyone expecting that vaccines given to prepubertal children were going to be associated with miscarriages?

Moreover, the number of miscarriages in meaningless. The only meaningful measurement is the miscarriage RATE (the number of miscarriages divided by the number of pregnant women who received the Gardasil vaccine). And since the natural miscarriage rate is 20%, that number would need to be substantially higher than 20% to merit any concern that Gardasil leads to miscarriage. But of course the AofA article does not bother to calculate the miscarriage rate or to compare it to the natural miscarriage rate.

Anti-vax activists drew a false conclusion because they didn’t understand the context. A vaccine given to small children is never going to be followed by a miscarriage because small children don’t get pregnant. And a miscarriage that occurs after receiving a vaccine tells us nothing about whether the vaccine caused the miscarriage because 20% of women in early pregnancy routinely miscarry.

2. When important pieces of information are missing, the brain will attempt to fill in, sometimes with disastrous results.

The reason that different people see #TheDress as different colors is because the context cannot be determined from the photo itself. There is nothing else in the photo that can help us determine if it is properly exposed or over exposed. In contrast, if there were a zebra in the background of the picture and its colors appeared to be gold and white, we would know that the photo was dramatically over exposed and everyone’s brains would adjust the colors of the dress to blue and black. Because we can’t determine the context, some people’s brains make the erroneous assumption that the light in the photo is natural light and that dramatically affects their perceptions of the colors they see.

In the absence of knowledge of immunology, chemistry and statistics, many anti-vax advocates fill in the missing knowledge with erroneous assumptions. For example, when they heard that mercury was originally in vaccines, they assumed that mercury compounds are exactly the same as elemental mercury; since elemental mercury is dangerous, they assumed that mercury compounds in vaccines were dangerous, too. Had they known more basic chemistry, they would have recognized that elemental sodium is also dangerous (it can explode if it comes in contact with water), but is perfectly safe in the compound sodium chloride, table salt.

Moreover, most anti-vax advocates don’t understand that just because B follows A in time does NOT mean that B is caused by A. The fact that many children were diagnosed with autism in the months after receiving the MMR vaccine led anti-vax advocates to conclude that the MMR causes autism. But autism diagnoses are almost always made after a child learns to walk and that does not mean that walking causes autism.

The human brain likes stories with simple cause and effect and may create those stories when reality is far more complicated.

3. Reality exists independent of what you believe.

#TheDress is blue & black. It may look different to some observers when viewed in an over exposed photo, but the dress itself is still blue & black. Just because it seems to some parents that vaccines injured their children does not mean that any vaccine injury was sustained. Reality exists regardless of whether you perceive it correctly.

4. You can’t always rely on what you see.

This is the most important take away from the photo of #TheDress. You can’t accurately judge the color of the dress unless you know the context and if you don’t know the context, you should be wary of making assumptions about the context. Similarly you cannot judge the safety of vaccines unless you have a solid understanding of basic immunology, chemistry and statistics. You can make assumptions in the absence of that knowledge, but you are more likely to be wrong than to be correct.

Vaccines are one of the greatest public health advances of all time. They have saved tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of lives. They have hurt some children in the process, but the risk of being harmed by the disease is 1000X greater than the risk of being harmed by the vaccine designed to prevent the disease. It doesn’t matter if you perceive vaccines as dangerous. If you lack knowledge of basic immunology, chemistry and statistics, you lack the context to draw accurate conclusions about vaccine safety and your intuition is worthless. After looking at the photo, many people intuit #TheDress as white and gold, but they’re wrong. It’s blue and black; it was always blue and black; and it will always be blue and black no matter that some people cannot perceive the colors correctly.

Vaccines are safe; they were always safe; and they will continue to be safe no matter that some people cannot perceive their safety accurately.

The internet is the oxygen of contemporary pseudoscience movements.

Pseudoscience movements like anti-vaccine advocacy existed prior to the internet, of course but they were stunted, enfeebled shadows of what they later became. Why? Because prior to the internet, it was easy to tell the difference between science, which appeared in textbooks, journals and at professional conferences, and pseudoscience, which was transmitted by mimeographed newsletters shared among the true believers.

The internet allowed purveyors of pseudoscience, as well as charlatans and con men, to inexpensively create an image identical to that of actual science. Just about any internet tool that is available to those attempting to teach laypeople about science is equally available to those attempting to profit from pseudoscience. A layperson is hard pressed to tell the difference between the two. Moreover, widely available web services like Facebook allow for easy communication of pseudoscience between the true believers and the uninitiated. A shared post on Facebook looks the same to a layperson whether it came from a legitimate source or a pseudoscience clown.

That’s why Modern Alternative Mama’s announcement that she is fleeing from Facebook is a victory for science. Of course, just as Katie Tietje has spewed nonsense about vaccines, childbirth and anything else you can think of, she’s spewing nonsense about why she’s leaving Facebook. She claims it’s about privacy, in a post disingenuously titled If Privacy Matters to You, It’s Time to Leave Facebook but it’s really about the inability to hide from dissent on Facebook.

We all know that what we say on there in groups and on pages could be shared. Sure. We know if our profiles are public, then friends or even employers could look us up and see what we do with our time. It’s the internet, and it’s forever.

But.

Did you know that even if you are posting in a private or secret group, Facebook can read and even use that information? They can (and do) share it with marketing partners. And if you post a picture of your kids and set it to show to “close friends” only, Facebook owns that image and could use it in advertising. Without letting you know first — because you agreed to it when you signed up.

If anyone believes that’s why Katie is leaving Facebook, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’d like to sell you.

The real reason is this:

Discussing any controversial topic, especially vaccines (which I tend to do often) is fraught with landmines — namely, trolls, who like to bully and harass people who don’t believe what they believe. I try to avoid talking about them, because the general line of thought goes that if you ignore them they’ll go away. Here’s the thing: they won’t. It’s not about attention, it’s not even about me. It’s about their mental instability and need to bully those who aren’t like them, and no strategy (ignoring, retaliating, etc.) will ever make them stop.

I know plenty of you are fed up with that, too. You just want a safe space, like it used to be, to ask questions about natural living and connect with like-minded parents. (emphasis in the original).

Ever notice how pseudoscience cranks like Katie, and others (Gina Crossly-Corcoran immediately springs to mind) behave like men’s rights activists who scream “discrimination” whenever they are called to account on their abusive tactics, or racists who scream “racism against white people” whenever they are called to account about their prejudice, Katie, and her ilk scream “trolls, bullies” whenever any dares to point out that their nonsense is contradicted by science.

As in politics, so it is in science: sunlight is the best disinfectant. Katie Tietje’s beliefs are like ice cubes; they can’t withstand the glare of the truth. So Katie needs to find someplace dark and private, and most importantly, needs to be able to ban any hint of actual scientific evidence, because otherwise her nonsense will be eviscerated.

Poor Katie just wanted a “safe space” where she could transmit her nonsense free from anyone’s attempt to interject actual science.

Now, there is such a place.

It’s called MeWe, and it’s a new social media site. They take privacy seriously — you own all your content, not them. They also don’t allow bullying, trolling, or harassment. They won’t allow people to target pages or groups and be nasty to them. They won’t allow them to start hate groups. And every group can choose their privacy settings, so that they have to approve all new members before they join (which keeps trolls out, if you screen members carefully). Plus, if someone is nasty, you can ban them — and they actually stay banned.

This creates a safe space for like-minded people who just want to have a real discussion about all things natural living. One of the main guys over at MeWe is actually a “natural dad” himself, and I’ve spoken to him about some of this — it’s for real. It’s not going to end up like Facebook. (emphasis in the original)

Right, it’s not going to end up like Facebook; it’s going to end up bankrupt.

Because of Facebook’s blatant violation of privacy and obvious censorship of natural communities, I’m moving my operations over to MeWe.

It’s going to take a few weeks to actually get the word out to everyone, and help everyone get set up over at MeWe. We are screening members because we want a solid, positive community. But after awhile, I’ll delete my presence on Facebook. I just can’t be a part of that business anymore. I disagree too strongly with what they are doing.

Awesome! Katie can slink off under a virtual rock where only the faithful who affirmatively choose to subject themselves to her nonsense will be able to hear her.

But if you think she’s permanently retiring from Facebook, think again. She’ll be back because she wants to proselytize; that’s why she joined Facebook in the first place. Over at MeWe she might as well not exist. Only the choir will follow her there and what fun is that?

I’m not the only blogger to do this. Many of my natural-living colleagues are jumping ship and heading over to MeWe, too. See, they care as much about privacy as I do, and the ability to reach their fans without censorship.

Way to go, Katie! Take all the other “natural living clowns” who “care about privacy” with you when you go, and the internet will be a better place.

Careful, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Outdoor homebirth is about to get a reality TV show. It’s a marriage made in heaven!

Homebirth advocates are narcissists and reality TV is made for narcissists who are so desperate for attention that they are willing to be ridiculed and/or humiliated on TV.

The only surprise is that it took this long.

Homebirth advocates like to pretend to themselves and others that this is how birth happens in nature (no, across all times, places and culture, birth was not outdoors and not attended by men), that birth is so deeply personal and “sexual” that a couple must experience it alone (really, then why are you broadcasting it for all the world to see?) and that it is safe. The entire practice would be nothing more than a punch line were it not for the fact that homebirth kills babies, increasing the risk of death anywhere from 3-9X higher than comparable risk hospital birth.

Homebirth is an affectation of the privileged and is also, in its own self-absorbed, narcissistic way, startlingly racist and classist. Homebirth advocates like to imagine that women in nature, particularly women of color, did not fear childbirth, simply squatted down by the Congo River to give birth, and immediately returned to their fabulously healthy paleo lifestyle.

It is an affectation of the privileged because you have to have easy access to hospital birth in order to give meaning to refusing it.

It is racist and classist because the producers of Born in the Wild could have gone to a myriad of destinations including parts of Africa and South East Asia to see what birth in the wild REALLY looks like. But those women are black and brown, and fear childbirth because they die in agony and in droves. Instead they filmed privileged white women in the faux “wild” complete with a medical team stage left, as well as a detailed transfer plan and hospitals on notice.

According to the World Bank, the life time risk of maternal death is the probability that a 15-year-old female will die eventually from a pregnancy related cause. In the US where modern obstetrics is available the risk of death due to pregnancy and childbirth over a lifetime is 1 in 1800. In contrast, a teenager in Cameroon has a 1 in 34 chance of dying of a pregnancy related cause over her lifetime and women in Chad have a 1 in 15 chance of dying.

You can bet that those women aren’t crowing about the virtues of birth in the wild.

Consider this rural Indian woman who braved a raging river in her 9th month of pregnancy in order to give birth in a hospital:

Yellavva used dried pumpkins and gourds as bouyancy aids to swim nearly a kilometre from her river island village to safety in southern Karnataka state.

She … wanted her baby born safely – there is no medical centre in her village and she did not want to give birth at home…

When Yellavva crossed the river last Wednesday, she says its swirling waters were rising 12 to 14 feet and even experienced swimmers would have hesitated to get into the water at the time.

“I was scared. But it was for my child that I got the determination to get over all my fear and cross the rising river waters,” she told BBC Hindi.

Yellavva was helped by her father, brother and cousins who swam with her.

“My brother went in front. I was next. My brother and cousins had tied dried hollowed pumpkin and bottle gourds around me so I was afloat,” she said.

Her brother Lakshman, who held on to the rope tied to the gourds and pumpkins, said: “My father was right behind her. Normally, the distance is a little more than half a kilometre. But, it took us about an hour to get her across. As we reached mid-point, the current was very very strong.”

The heavy current pushed them far downstream, making the distance they swam nearly one kilometre.

Birth in the wild (the real wild, not the made up fantasy of the TV show) is so deadly to babies that this desperate women risked her life, and her family risked their lives to give one baby the best chance of survival.

In contrast, Born in the Wild tells the stories of privileged, well off narcissists who RISK their babies’ lives for bragging rights and a chance to appear on TV. Born in the Wild is a racist, classist slap in the face, to the millions of women who have no choice but to give birth in the wild, and face the astronomical neonatal and maternal mortality that entails.

Born in the Wild is nothing more than an ugly and dangerous stunt.

Perfect for reality TV!

 

Parts of this piece first appeared in June 2014.