Not one, but two maternal deaths at homebirth have occurred in the past several months.

Yesterday, Mother’s Day, from Baby Center:

My husbands cousin passed away today while giving birth. She was 24, beautiful, had just graduated with her masters in engineering, and was getting married. She was due may 15th. She went into labor today. She had a home birth and midwife. She bled to death on the way to the hospital that was 8 minutes away. Her daughter is alive…

But wait! That’s not all.

A St. Louis area doula reports on the death last fall of both mother AND baby. The piece originally appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of the Missouri Friends of Midwives newsletter. Although the doula does not specifically mention that this was a homebirth transfer, she does say that it caused her to question her own decision to have a homebirth (which, having learned nothing, she ultimately did anyway).

Addendum 5-16-13: The doula added the following to her post, “this was a PLANNED HOSPITAL BIRTH. It was not a homebirth or a homebirth transfer. This mother was attended by an obstetrician, not a midwife. This update isn’t meant to invite further dialogue …” Surprising, considering that the doula is an aspiring homebirth midwife, treasurer of her local chapter of Missouri Friends of Midwives, and wrote about it in the Missouri Friends of Midwives. I apologize for the error.

Why do mothers die at homebirth? Because homebirth midwives and doulas replace knowledge of childbirth with “faith” in birth:

… I have been “brought up” in the midwifery and homebirth community. As a result, my heart and mind have been continually washed with faith in the birthing woman’s abilities and the newborn babe’s resilience. Trust birth. Birth works. I’ve heard it all many times over. I believed it like a religion…

Why do mothers die at homebirth? Because homebirth midwives don’t understand that low risk does not mean no risk.

I recently attended a birth as a doula in which the mother died. And making things even more horrific, the baby died as well. They had both been perfectly healthy the entire pregnancy and labor…until they weren’t…

Why do mothers die at homebirth? Because the hospital is never “close enough.”

… When my client and her baby died, I was in the room. I was tapping her arm and feeling for her pulse and calling out her name…and then I looked in her eyes and knew she was no longer inside looking back at me. I was a foot away when the doctor caught her baby girl, as purple as an eggplant in the face and white everywhere else. I was clutching the father’s arm when he was told the impossible news some 45 minutes later that neither mother nor baby could be saved.

Why do mothers die at homebirth? Because homebirth midwives obsesses about the process and take the outcome for granted:

I have not been able to talk to this beautiful mother – who I came to care about deeply –about the amazing job she did in labor and birth, and I will never be able to have that conversation with her…

Did the doula learned anything from this hideous tragedy? Of course not.

… Got mad at God. Felt helpless. Questioned whether or not I still wanted to have a homebirth. Wondered about everything over and over again – if my client had been sufficiently informed of the risks vs. benefits of various interventions, if the presumed cause of death was accurate, if I was a horrible doula/if I would be a horrible midwife, if I could regain trust in my baby and my body, and if that would be enough …

What is the matter with homebirth midwives are homebirth advocates. A mother and baby are dead. They are DEAD!! You can’t get a better, more brutal confirmation of the fact that trusting birth is NEVER enough, yet these fools prattle on about regaining her trust in a process that has just been shown to be entirely untrustworthy.

The doula titled the post, When Birth and Death Meet. A more appropriate titled might be When Ignorant Homebirth Midwives Meet Birth, Mothers and Babies Die. Trust that, not birth.

Techdirt’s article on my lawsuit mentions a key issue:

…. [Gina’s brief] then says that the move away from the second host, DaringHost, was because the site was getting too much traffic, and the owner of DaringHost, supplied a deposition stating that he had explained this to Tuteur.

Gina seems to go to great lengths to make this point. The only problem is, it’s not true. This is the email that Nick Esposito, the owner of Daringhost, sent to me on 1-25-13:

Amy,

I spoke with the lawyer I’ve used with my businesses earlier today about the situation with your website and it being targeted. He informed me that hosting your website is a liability on a few different levels which is a risk to my business. While I support your cause and understand the situation you are in, I will no longer be able to host your website due to the risk and liability it poses to my business.

I do not want to leave you and your website out in the cold because I can understand that fighting against the people who are targeting you is not an easy task. I have done some research for you and found a couple of different businesses that should be able to host your website better in terms of dealing with it being targeted.

The first host I’ve found is called Alibabahost.com. On their website they state “AlibabaHost provides freedom of content and speech. Regarding the DMCA complains, we forward them to you and you decide how to proceed next.” …

The second host I’ve found is called safeandsoundhost.com. They have servers located in the Ukraine which has been known to host freedom of speech web sites before…

The third host I found is called urpad.net. They offer VPS plans in Iceland. Iceland has recently passed a law that allows for freedom of information, speech, and expression…

I sincerely apologize that I have to turn you away. I value your business however I’d like to keep the risk and liability as low as possible for myself and the business. I hope you understand where I’m coming from.

__
Regards,
Nick Esposito
Daring Host Owner

The email makes it absolutely clear that I was forced to leave Daringhost because of Esposito’s concerns of legal liability related to the DMCA notices.

****

Yesterday I posted a screenshot of Gina exulting that Bluehost (my original host) had taken down my website for copyright violation. That wasn’t just wishful thinking on her part. That’s what actually happened.

Here’s the email I received from Bluehost on 12-21-13 at the same time as the shutdown:

Your web hosting account for skepticalob.com has been deactivated, as of 12/21/2012. (reason: terms of service violation – copyright violation)

This deactivation was due to a Terms of Service violation associated with your account. At sign-up, all users state that they have read through, understand, and agree to our terms. These terms are legal and binding.

Although your web site has been suspended, your data may still be available for up to 15 days from the date of deactivation; if you do not contact us during that 15 day period, your account and all of its files, databases, and emails may be deleted…

Thank you,
Bluehost Terms of Service Compliance

This email makes it clear that I my website was taken down specifically because of the original DMCA notice filed by Gina.

****

The Motion Picture Association of America has also entered the case (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27713670/MPAA%20brief.pdf). They have offered support of Gina’s interpretation of the DMCA. This is not a surprise, merely additional confirmation that the issues raised by my lawsuit are of weighty public importance.

In my view it helps everyone understand what is at stake here. Gina’s position is supported by an organization whose members send a lot of DMCA notices and who would find it harder to do so if they had to determine whether copyright had ACTUALLY been violated before they sent the notices.

My position is being supported by two organizations that champion the right of free expression on the internet.

I’m good with that.

 

Addendum 5-14-13: I’ve filed a motion with a brief attached, responding to Gina’s claims, presenting the actual correspondence with my webhosts.

“Defendant Crosley-Corcoran’s Response to Plaintiff’s Memorandum of Law To ShowCause purports to feature a compelling story about how Dr.Tuteur’s webhosts (Bluehost.com and DaringHost) never actually removed or disabled anyaccess to materials on her website (The Skeptical OB) – and “certainly” did not do so “inresponse to Crosley-Corcoran’s DMCA takedown notices . . . .”
Needless to say, all of these allegations – falling, as they do, outside the pleadings – are out of bounds at the motion to dismiss stage, and Defendant knows it. But worse still, like many of the most compelling stories, Defendant’s tale is simply a work of fiction.”

You can read the rest here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27713670/Tuteur-20130514_Reply_iso_show_cause_brief_%26_request_for_leave_to_file_-_as_filed.pdf

Yesterday Gina’s lawyer filed a brief in response to my Memorandum to show cause. You can read the full brief below. In it Gina asserts that my original host, Bluehost, never took down my blog:

Tuteur’s failure to allege that BlueHost took down her site is not inadvertent. As Tuteur is well aware, once she sent BlueHost her counter-notice, BlueHost told both parties that it would take no action. See Exhibit 1 (“The copyright claim regarding this domain has a counter claim issued. If a counter claim is submitted, it will be up to the two parties to pursue legal action.”)

…Because neither BlueHost nor Daring Host removed or disabled access to any materials on the Plaintiff’s site at all (and certainly not in response to Crosley-Corcoran’s DMCA takedown notices), Count I of her Complaint must be dismissed as a matter of law.

Really? Really??!!

What about this?

Let me quote in case it isn’t clear enough to read:

… I simply armed myself with bigger cannons. I went straight to her hosting provider.

Within a week, her host responded to the copyright violation by taking down her ENTIRE BLOG.

(Later, her blog was restored after my image was taken off her site.)

So not only did Bluehost take my site down for copyright violation, Gina BOASTED that it took my site down for copyright violation.

Oops!

Stay tuned for more developments.

Gina’s brief:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27713670/CC_Brief_re_Order_to_Show_Cause.pdf

Joseph Thurgood didn’t have to die.

Tate-Spencer Koch didn’t have to die.

Jahli Jean Hobbs didn’t have to die.

Charlotte Rodman didn’t have to die.

All four died preventable deaths at homebirth.

Joshua Titcombe didn’t have to die.

Nittaya Hendrickson and her unborn son Chester didn’t have to die.

Sareena Ali and her daughter Zainab didn’t have to die.

All 5 died preventable deaths in the hospital.

These 9 deaths, and dozens of similar deaths that I have written about over the years are distinguished by one common factor: all involved arrogant midwives; midwives who thought that they knew more about childbirth safety than doctors; midwives who were utterly, tragically, negligently wrong.

Let Joseph Thurgood’s death be a clarion call for an all out effort to reform midwifery. First world midwives, regardless of educational background, regardless of international location, regardless of the location at which care is provided, are desperately in need of better education about childbirth, greater understanding of their own limitations, and above all, administrators and thought leaders who understand that midwifery is about saving babies and mothers and not about extending the employment opportunities of midwives.

What happened to Joseph Thurgood? According to The Age:

A coroner has found a baby’s death after a home birth went wrong could have been prevented if the labour and delivery had been carried out in a hospital…

[The Coroner] said midwife Fiona Hallinan had indirectly contributed to the baby’s death by failing to tell the mother of the risks of home birth which had “sustained the misguided views of the mother, contributed to her disregarding the advice provided by obstetric medical clinicians and facilitated in her a level of confidence that she may safely proceed to home birth”.

The Coroner correctly identified that Joseph’s mother naively and erroneously thought that she was educated about homebirth because she had done “research” on the internet:

…Ms Thurgood’s use of the internet to research home birth was “sadly an example of the danger of untrained users utilising raw data or statistical information to support a premise as to risk, without knowledge and understanding of the complex myriad of factors relevant to the risk”.

“To disregard the obstetrician’s advice on the basis of a mantra founded in … data obtained from the internet is a dangerous course to follow,” the coroner said.

The coroner recommended the Health Minister consider regulating the practice of providing home birth services and develop a source of information to help prospective parents be fully informed of the issues associated with various birthing options.

That’s good as far as it goes; homebirth advocates pride themselves on what they know, but most of what they know is factually false.

But that only protects women who choose to deliver at home. How about women who choose to deliver at the hospital and then lose their babies or their lives because midwives deny them access to obstetricians and pediatricians? It doesn’t do anything for them. These same midwives are desperately in need of comprehensive education reform.

Unfortunately, obstetricians in first world countries have left midwives to their own devices, reasoning that they ought to be able to handle uncomplicated childbirth and call for help when complications occur. I suspect that most obstetricians have no idea that contemporary midwifery has been highjacked by a bunch of post modernists who appear to think that midwifery autonomy is ever so much more important than whether babies and mothers live or die.

I’m not talking about the clowns of the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA) who aren’t really midwives at all, just lay people with a pretend “credential” that they awarded to themselves. I’m talking about supposedly adequately trained midwives who spew nonsense, like:

Australian midwifery professors Jenny Parratt and Kathleen Fahy, responsible for the criminally inane “paper,” Including the nonrational is sensible midwifery.

British midwifery professor Soo Downe who invokes quantum mechanics, which she does not understand, to explain why midwives can ignore scientific evidence.

Cathy Warwick, head of the Royal College of Midwives, who thinks the solution to every problem, including the problem of preventable deaths at the hands of midwives, is to give midwives more autonomy.

Hannah Dahlen, spokesperson for the Australian College of Midwives, who has callously asserted that perinatal mortality is a “kindergarten” view of birth.

Dutch midwifery leaders who have yet to take any responsibility for the appalling fact (which they acknowledge to be true) that Dutch midwives attending low risk births, home or hospital, have higher death rates than Dutch obstetricians attending high risk births.

These women, and many of those that they teach and represent, have become infected by a toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance and obsession with autonomy at the expense of the lives of mothers and babies.

The Coroner is correct that women can benefit from greater and more accurate information about the risks of childbirth and homebirth, but even more women will benefit by overhauling midwifery education to reflect scientific evidence, as opposed to the midwifery fantasies that are currently killing women and babies.

Homebirth is just the tip of the iceberg. International midwifery has become infected by the rot of midwifery arrogance and self-interest. It’s time to start improving the education and accountability of midwives. Mothers and babies deserve no less.

Well, not my breasts; my breastfeeding days are over.

Hands off the breasts of all women of breastfeeding age!

It’s time wake up to the obvious fact that women have the right to control their own bodies. That includes EVERY body part. That includes breasts. It is amazing to me that in 2013 anyone could believe that they have the right,or even the obligation, to tell women when, how and for how long they should use their breasts.

Yesterday, KJ Dell’Antonia of the NYTimes Motherlode blog published the post Similac’s Dubious ‘No Judgment’ Marketing:

Similac, maker of infant formula, sponsored a “StrongMoms Empowerment Summit” on Tuesday as part of the introduction of its StrongMoms campaign, which the brand describes as a “Call-to-Action to Stop ‘Mom-Judging.’” …

Mothers … find the public-service message “Don’t judge one another for feeding a baby formula” a little laughable when “brought to you by Similac.” We get it. We may not want to judge one another. The very-lovely-I’m-sure marketing people at Similac may hope to help mothers bypass that judgment stage. But Similac itself, in whatever corporate form it has, wants people to buy more baby formula. When the message is from a marketer, it’s never just about the message.

That’s why Ms. Allers is right to encourage us to look harder at what it means when a company with a financial interest in our infant-feeding choices tells us not to “judge” them. That there is a line between judging and talking is something Similac has no interest in our thinking too hard about.

My comment:

You are absolutely correct to point out that Similac has an ulterior motive, but you are remiss in failing to point out that lactivists have an ulterior motive, too.

The truth is that while breastfeeding has real benefits, they are quite small. Why, then, have lactivists become obsessed with pushing women to breastfeed and engaging in ever more ludicrous practices (locking up formula in hospitals) in an effort to enforce the orthodoxy?

Lactivists have a very specific view of women and their bodes. Instead of respecting a woman’s right to control her own body, they insist that mothering be defined by how women use that body. It is no one’s business how a woman uses her breasts, just like it is no one’s business whether she uses contraception, chooses to carry a pregnancy to term, or chooses to terminate it.

Lactivism is not about benefiting babies. In the first place, the benefits are trivial. In the second place, most lactivist efforts are utter failures because they fail to take into account the real reasons why women choose not to breastfeed: the pain, the difficulty, inadequate milk supply, and the inconvenience.

Lactivism is about promoting the parenting standards of privileged white women to an ideal that all women are supposed to follow. It is about deliberately making some women feel guilty so other women can feel superior to them. It is about defining women by their body parts and how they use them, not by their needs, beliefs and desires.

There followed the typical judgmental comments, but my comment is the most popular comment, suggesting that while they may not be vocal, a large proportion of women feel as I do.

And that includes Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams. In a post entitled Is Breastfeeding “Gross”?, Williams reports on the views of Playboy Playmate Shanna Moakler. In an articulate response to criticism  of her desire to bottlefeed, Moakler explained:

“I understand this debate,” she said. “I’m highly educated on it….  I celebrate breastfeeding. I think women should be able to do it in public. I will stand arm in arm for women’s rights to do it. When I personally tried to do it. It felt wrong. It felt immoral and it felt incestual and it wasn’t a good fit for me. I’m so sick and tired of women who are pro-breastfeeding – which is awesome – putting down other women who either don’t want to do it, don’t like it, have bad feelings about it, or physically can’t do it…. When I tried to do it, it didn’t feel like a wonderful bonding experience. It felt immoral to me and so I chose not to and I chose formula…. You can’t tell me that feelings are wrong.”

Williams sums up her personal view about other women’s choices:

Their breasts are their business.

The sooner we realize that, and stop pandering to the desire of lactivists to shame any women who doesn’t mirror their own choices, the better.

I just finished reading a raw, brutally honest account of parenting a disabled child. The piece, Waiting to love my child, by Heather Kirn Lanier, is about being afraid to love a subsequent unborn child, but has startling insights into how we approach parenting of all children in the US.

Lanier’s daughter Fiona has Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome:

I learned what that missing bit of her fourth chromosome could mean. Developmental delays and cognitive disabilities, yes. But also life-threatening seizures. Potential kidney failure. And a 1-in-3 chance of dying before age 2.

She gains a great deal of comfort and insight by reading Emily Rapp’s book, The Still Point of the Turning World, about parenting her son Ronan, afflicted with Tay-Sachs disease and fated to die in early childhood.

the experience of loving Ronan teaches Rapp lessons, many of which I’m slowly learning myself. For example: “It took this experience to help me see clearly, to understand that the bulk of the popular parenting advice champions an approach to living that completely complies with achieving bogus standards of success.”…

Rapp mentions the mothers who make “products” of their kids, the moms for whom parenting becomes yet another venture at which to succeed. In such a case, the child is not a person but a measurement of one’s success. But the limits of Ronan’s body refuse to offer Rapp the back-patting moments of typical modern parenting. Walked before age 1! Started signing at 9 months! Breast-fed immediately after delivery, that’s how smart he is!

The most startling insight is this:

And the only way to survive this, at least with any joy, was to see what Rapp also had to see: that the desire to approach parenting as a race, as a series of achievements measured by the output of one’s kid, is a cultural sickness…

It’s easy to see how this “cultural sickness” has overtaken parenting of the older child: the endless “enrichment” activities, the travel sports teams, the desperation to have one’s child accepted to an elite college. It’s far harder to recognize that this cultural sickness is the basis of contemporary natural childbirth philosophy, lactivism and attachment parenting.

All are embodiments of the cultural sickness of viewing parenting as a series of achievements to be met, instead of an experience to be had, and a child to be loved for who he or she is.

Childbirth has been transmuted from the emergence of the child from the womb to a race. Did you have an epidural? Did you have a C-section? Did your baby breastfeed immediately after birth? If not, you are a loser.

Why endure excruciating pain without pain relief? Why risk your child’s life in an effort to avoid a C-section? Why shove your breast into the face of a newborn still gasping to fully expand his or her lungs, before the baby could possibly be interested in nursing? Because parenting is a race and if you haven’t done those things, you’ve already been left in the dust before your baby is an hour old.

Advocates of natural childbirth, lactivism and attachment parenting insist that they are “better for the baby.” Leaving aside for the moment that there is no evidence to support those claims, let’s ask a more basic question: What do advocates mean by “better for the baby”? The ugly truth is that they believe the prescriptions and proscriptions to be a wind at the child’s back in the ongoing race in which the mother is competing against her peers.

Why are women “traumatized” after “giving in” and accepting an epidural in labor? Why are they devastated by a C-section? In what way are they “healed” by having a subsequent vaginal birth? Because they have imbibed the cultural sickness that views mothering as a competition, with signal moments that seem to exhaust the story of mothering.

Why are many women wracked with guilt about being unable to breastfeed? Because they believe that they have failed to give their children the edge in the competition.

Why did a woman pose for a Time Magazine cover photo breastfeeding her 3 year old, violating his privacy and exposing him to ridicule among his peers? Because she wanted to show the whole world that she is winning the race of contemporary parenting!

This obsession with competition forms an interesting subtext to Nicholas Day’s delightful series on Slate, How Babies Work. As Day explains in No Big Deal, but This Researcher’s Theory Explains Everything About How Americans Parent:

Every society has what it intuitively believes to be the right way to raise a child, what Harkness calls parental ethnotheories. (It is your mother-in-law, enlarged to the size of a country.) These are the choices we make without realizing that we’re making choices. Not surprisingly, it is almost impossible to see your own parental ethnotheory: As I write in Baby Meets World, when you’re under water, you can’t tell that you’re wet.

What is the “right way” in the US in 2013? American parents believe that maximizing opportunities for achievement.

… Interestingly, even the attachment parents, who were very adamant about being different in a lot of ways—they still gave the same answer.” And all the parents meant a very particular sort of stimulation. The parents talked about themselves in almost curatorial terms: They’d create a setting for intellectual growth…

Unlike Day, I’m not surprised that attachment parents felt the same way. Attachment parenting, and the related philosophies of natural childbirth and lactivism, are really about achievement and not about parenting.

As Kirn Lanier points out in her Salon piece, “there is a deeper, more transformative way to parent.”

I think it’s to be brought to our knees with a love we have no choice over. To surrender to that love. To say, Yes, yes, yes, I will love whomever we find ourselves holding…

Simply put: love a child for who he or she is, not for how many achievements he or she can garner in your competition with other parents.

Save the Children has issued a report on the State of the World’s Mother’ 2013, entitled Surviving the First Day. This report concentrates on death on the day of birth.

Unfortunately, the analysis of developed countries used deeply flawed data to reach an erroneous conclusion about the first day death rate in the US. What shocked me most, however, is that to illustrate first day death in the US, the organization (?unwittingly) used a photo that I recognized as a CPM attended homebirth death that was almost certainly preventable.

In other words, the face of first day death in the US is preventable death at homebirth.

Why did Charlotte die shortly after birth? Her mother, Angela Rodman, tells the story on her blog.

Charlotte was born at the Bella Vie Birth Center, owned by Desiree LeFave, CPM. It’s not an accredited birth center. Indeed that appellation “birth center” is a misnomer. It is homebirth at a rented house.

In the typically clueless way of American homebirth midwives, Charlotte, unexpectedly dropped nearly dead into the midwives’ hands. And, unbeknownst to the midwives, Charlotte was suffering from intrauterine growth restriction.

When they placed her in my arms, this bloody tiny bundle they kept calling my baby, I knew something was wrong. I felt, with that bone deep Mama knowledge only mothers posses, that my baby was not long for this earth. I could feel her soul struggling to depart even as I held her close for those few precious seconds.

Then my primary midwife took her from me, I heard someone say I need resuscitation now and everything went crazy…

I sat on the birthing stool, rubbed her foot and talked to her. She opened her eyes and looked at me. Jonathan moved next to me and started talking to her. She opened her eyes and looked at him. There was blood being pulled out of her stomach. They were trying to resuscitate her. Everything was very chaotic…

A midwife I had never met was crouched next to me, rubbing my leg, checking my bleeding, and I asked her over and over: “Will she be okay? She’s too small. Is she too small? Will she be okay? What’s wrong?” She rubbed my leg and told me they were doing everything they could.

I was losing a lot of blood. I watched the blood spill onto the floor and roll underneath the board Charlotte was laying on. I don’t do well with the sight of blood; I thought I was going to faint. I kept thinking I should point out the blood loss, but I couldn’t form my thoughts into words.

Someone said, “Hey, where is that blood from?” and Jonathan said, “She needs Pitocin, give her a shot of Pitocin!” I had a midwife crouched on either side of me and I received two shots of Pitocin in each thigh.

… Charlotte struggled to breathe. Her color was terrible, grey and pale. It was obvious her connection to me was helping her stay alive and allowing her to be resuscitated.

Charlotte was transferred by helicopter to the NICU at Salem Hospital. Unfortunately, they could not save her life.

Charlotte’s mother had difficulty getting to her daughter’s side. Because of her hemorrhage, she could barely stand, but eventually, she made it to the hospital.

I don’t remember when a nurse came in with the baby, but I remember her being placed in my arms. I was absolutely freaked out by her weight, the blood around her mouth and nose, the tube that was still in her mouth. I didn’t understand why she had tubes in her when she was dead.

When I next looked up everyone was gone, it was only Jonathan, Charlotte and me. We sat in those awful plastic chairs, he wrapped his arms around us and for a moment we were three, just like we had planned.

Fortunately, for her next pregnancy Angela Rodman was followed by an obstetrician, delivered in a hospital and has a healthy baby to show for it.

Why did Charlotte die? Obviously no one can know for sure, but it couldn’t have helped that Charlotte’s mother gave birth at home (not a real birth center), that her midwives, self-proclaimed “experts in normal birth” didn’t pick up on Charlotte’s probable distress during labor and were incapable of performing the expert resuscitation that may have saved Charlotte’s life. They were in such a panic that they didn’t even notice that Angela was hemorrhaging on the floor.

And now, in a report that will be widely read and make its way around the world, the face of neonatal death in the US is a CPM attended homebirth.

The internet is filled with sanctimommies. You know the type:

The best part about sanctimommy is that she is always ready to share her wisdom with the rest of us. She doesn’t hesitate to point out the deficiencies of your parenting practices (in other words, how your parenting choices differ from hers). She doesn’t hesitate to make dire predictions about what the future holds for your children (“You give him a pacifier? You know he’s never going to be able to …”). She never hesitates to bemoan your lack of understanding of the key issues of childrearing, letting you know that you are not as “educated” as she is.

Apparently the chief occupational hazard of being a santimommy is feeling very, very, very sad:

My personal observation on the behavior of sanctimommies in their natural habitat is that they tend to suffer from overwhelmingly from ostentatious “sadness”. They are so “sad” for you that you don’t do everything their way. They are so “sad” for your children that you are not parenting the way they prescribe. They are just so “sad” that everyone in the world does not recognize their incredible superiority and their expert status on every aspect of parenting at every age.

I was reminded of this when I read the post I’m Sorry We Failed by Tracy G. Cassels on Evolutionary Parenting. What is evolutionary parenting? It’s a the paleo-fantasy version of parenting:

… The goal is to help parents be better parents for their babies by focusing on parenting as it has evolved for millions of years (not the drastic changes we have made to parenting in the last couple hundred years), for which human infants are adapted.

Because for millions of years human beings learned parenting by turning to the blitherings of sanctimommies on the internet.

And those sanctimommies are sooooooo sad.

To the mother who felt like a bystander during the birth of her child, I’m sorry. We failed to make sure you knew that this was your birth, not theirs …

Or:

To the mother whose baby was taken away after birth and kept in a hospital nursery, I’m sorry. We failed to make sure all hospitals have in-room boarding which is best for mother, baby, and family.

And:

To the parents who left their baby to cry to sleep because they wanted to teach their child to self-soothe, I’m sorry. We failed to make it better known doing this actually disrupts the process by which your baby learns to regulate emotions and that your little one is still highly stressed even when he or she is no longer crying.

But my personal favorite is this:

To the parents who brought out the baby training books and treated them as gospel, I’m sorry. We failed to make sure you felt confident enough in your own abilities as a parent that you had to turn to someone who has never met your child and never will, all while ignoring your own thoughts and beliefs.

Instead of reading parenting books, you should be following the advice of sanctimommy Tracy who has never met your child and never will, but feels perfectly justified in providing you with her parenting “insights” that you should treat as gospel.

Apparently Tracy doesn’t do irony.

I don’t know whether Tracy is sorry or not, but I do know this: she is definitely obnoxious, and like most santimommies, her advice has very little to do with children. It is mostly about her, and her need for validation by convincing others to mirror her parenting choices.

I’ve finally gotten my act together to produce a book, entitled Childbirth Without Guilt. While it mentions homebirth, it is mainly about the feelings of guilt engendered by the natural childbirth, lactivist and attachment parenting movements. There is simply no reason why these movements should leave any woman feeling guilty.

The book’s publication is at least several months away, but as an adjunct, I’ve created a site by the same name with an innovative format.

I’ve always felt that you, my readers and commentor,s are an amazing resource and have wanted to find a way to showcase you. Childbirth Without Guilt is an innovative blog where YOU are the author, as well as a supportive community for women to discuss their feelings of guilt about epidurals, C-sections, bottle feeding and other choices that may work well for you and your family, but engender scorn from advocates of natural parenting.

You can submit your story about battling feelings of guilt or of overcoming them. After review, it will become a blog post complete with your byline (your real name or a screen name if you prefer). Others can offer advice and support in the comment section.

Stop feeling bad about your birth and start reaching out to others. You may be surprised to find that you are not alone.

I’d love your feedback (and participation!).

The Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA) has to say something. After all, the American Academy of Pediatrics has declared that they don’t meet the minimum standards for providing safe homebirth.

Fortunately for them, they think their own followers are morons, easily tricked by mistruths, half truths and outright lies. It’s been working for them so far.

MANA routinely bandies about the high US infant mortality rate, assuming (correctly) that clueless homebirth advocates have no idea that infant mortality is the wrong statistic. Perinatal mortality is the correct measure of obstetric care and that the US has one of the lowest rates in the world.

MANA routinely compares its members to midwives from other countries, assuming (correctly) that homebirth advocates aren’t smart enough to research and learn that homebirth midwives don’t meet the midwifery standards of ANY first world country.

MANA routinely fobs off the fact that it hasn’t published the death rates from the 27,000 homebirth in its own database, assuming (correctly) that homebirth advocates are so gullible that they will believe that the death rates are going to be published “next year.”

So when basically outed by the AAP as unsafe practitioners, MANA has doubled down on its policy of relying on what it presumes to be the stupidity of homebirth advocates.

As detailed on the Science and Sensibility blog post MANA Response to Recent AAP Home Birth Statement: High-quality out-of-hospital newborn and postpartum care is standard for midwives, MANA thinks it can fool homebirth advocates with this gem:

CPMs are knowledgeable, expert and independent midwifery practitioners who have met the standards for certification set by the North American Registry of Midwives (NARM). NARM is accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) to issue the professional credential of Certified Professional Midwife, which is the same agency that accredits the American Midwifery Certification Board to issue the professional credentials of Certified-Nurse Midwife, and Certified Midwife.

Read it quickly and it sounds as though the NCCA has passed judgment on the CPM credential and found it adequate. But that’s not what it means, because the NCCA does not certify credentials; it certifies the EXAMS used to award those credentials.

According to their website:

The NCCA Standards are comprehensive and cover all aspects of the certification program(s), including administration, assessment development and recertification. NCCA standards are consistent with The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing… (my emphasis)

So, for example, the NCCA certifies the EXAMS administered by the Crane Institute of America required to become a industrial crane operator. Specifically, the exams for:

Certified Crane Operator, Large Telescoping Boom Crane Over 75 Tons
Certified Crane Operator, Lattice Boom Carrier 1 to 350 tons and over 350 tons
Certified Crane Operator, Medium Telescoping Boom Crane 21 to 75 Tons
Certified Crane Operator, Small Telescoping Boom Crane under 21 tons
Qualified Rigger & Signalperson Certification

It does not determine whether certified crane operators are competent. It merely determines whether the EXAM is appropriate to evaluate the skills and knowledge deemed relevant by the credentialing organization.

Similarly, the NCCA does NOT determine whether CPMs are competent. It merely determines whether the EXAM is appropriate to evaluate the skills and knowledge deemed relevant by MANA and its sister organization NARM (North American Registry of Midwives).

Apparently the folks at MANA figure that if their supporters are so clueless that they can be fooled by the deliberate use of the wrong mortality statistic, so ignorant that they don’t know that CPMs don’t meet the same standards as European midwives, and so gullible that even after several years, they still believe that MANA is going to publish its death rates “next year,” they are stupid enough to believe that the NCCA, which certifies EXAMS, has certified the CPM.

So tell me, homebirth advocates, are you as ignorant and gullible as MANA believes you to be?