Some people are willing to suffer for their medical delusions. They refuse conventional medical treatment and that is their right.

Some people are willing to let their children suffer for their medical delusions. That’s child abuse.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]No mother has the right to make her child suffer for her medical delusions.[/pullquote]

How much to those children suffer?

Last year I wrote about Heather Dexter, the mother who boasted about her children’s near deaths from pertussis, whooping cough.

It’s not surprising that Dexter’s children got pertussis. It’s a relatively common bacteria that causes mild illness among older children and adults. It can be deadly to infants and small children and killed many before the advent of vaccines. Now it’s made a comeback and threatening children because their parents are in the grip of a medical delusion that vaccines, one of the greatest public health achievements of all time, are purportedly harmful.

And now courtesy of a different mother, Genna Graham Stead, tetanus is back. According to the mother’s GoFundMe page:

“Remy” is a 9 year old sweet and caring girl … She contracted tetanus, her case is a medical anomaly, she had no wounds, scratches or injuries of any kind. Initially, she was misdiagnosed with TMJ and tetanus was dismissed by 5 other doctors, before finally there was a confirmed diagnosis by the pediatric infectious disease specialist. Tetanus cannot be tested for, it is a clinical diagnosis and with its rarity and only showing minimal symptoms it was difficult to properly diagnose.

No, Remy is NOT a medical anomaly. Everyone is routinely vaccinated against tentanus, with boosters every ten years in adulthood PRECISELY because everyone is at risk of exposure at all times. Chlostridium tetani, the bacteria that causes tetanus, lives in the soil. Although tetanus is typically associated with puncture wounds, the bacteria can get into the body from abrasions that are too small to see.

Early tetanus is a difficult diagnosis in the best of times; it’s made even more difficult by the fact that most doctors have never seen a case of tetanus. It was nearly non-existent before parents were gripped by vaccine delusions. That’s why when Remy developed “lockjaw,” she was thought to have TMJ, joint pain in her jaw.

Tetanus is a terrible disease.

Tetanus … is an infection characterized by muscle spasms. In the most common type, the spasms begin in the jaw and then progress to the rest of the body. These spasms usually last a few minutes each time and occur frequently for three to four weeks.Spasms may be so severe that bone fractures may occur.Other symptoms may include fever, sweating, headache, trouble swallowing, high blood pressure, and a fast heart rate. Onset of symptoms is typically three to twenty-one days following infection. It may take months to recover. About 10% of those infected die.

Remy’s suffering is intense. She is awake but paralyzed.

Remy is on a ventilator to control her breathing, as the muscle spasms can restrict her airway. She is in a twilight paralyzed state, she is conscious and can hear everyone around her. She can squeeze our hand to answer questions and nod yes or no. The spasms are triggered by bright light, loud talking or excitement so she wears an eyemask and earplugs to subside the surroundings. She has a “projection” of 6 weeks in this state depending upon the control of the muscle spasms. When the doctors determine they can wean her off of the sedation, they will determine if she is still having the muscle spasms, if she is not then we can remove the ventilator and proceed with recovery and rehabilitation.

And that’s just the acute phase of the illness. She will probably need 6 months of rehabilitation to fully recover.

How is Remy being treated?

The treatment is extensive, they administer Tetanus Immune Globulin to isolate the toxin …

In other words, Remy is receiving antibiodies made by someone else; she can’t make enough of her own antibiodies fast enough because her mother wouldn’t allow her to get the tetanus vaccine. So much for natural immunity.

Her stepmother is furious.

…[I]f she would have been vaccinated like we asked and we’re battling you on she wouldn’t be in this position. None of us would. Now her father who has a 5 day old baby has to make a decision on whether he sits in the hospital and watches his precious, innocent daughter suffer a preventable disease or be at home helping his wife and bonding with his brand new baby… I’m devastated for my husband and step daughter. Yet you haven’t even shown any remorse and declined the vaccine they recommended as part of this treatment. Sorry but people need to know the truth. Yes Remy is the main focus here and we want to get her better. Thanks for everyone’s prayers. She’s in God’s hands which is the best place to be. We love you Remy. ❤❤

Anti-vaccine advocacy is a form of child abuse. Ignorant adults suffering from the delusion that they are “educated” about vacciness deprive their children of basic health care and those children suffer and die as a result.

There should be no exemptions for vaccination of children except if the children themselves have a medical contraindication. No mother has the right to make her child suffer for her delusions.

Like most sanctimommies, Jen Kamel of VBAC Facts is ostentatiously suffering from sadness:

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]There’s a sucker born — hopefully vaginally —every minute.[/pullquote]

It breaks my heart when I hear of a first time mom having a cesarean at 9cm simply because she went two hours without cervical change. Such a waste…

Kamel follows with a parade of horribles, including:

Will she have an easy recovery?

Does she have friends and family to support her emotionally, physically, and maybe bring her a warm meal?

Will she mourn her cesarean? If so, will she stuff those feelings deep down because, as she is told over and over, it doesn’t matter how the baby gets here?

Will her partner be a safe place or will they, too, tell her it was “for the best?” …

Kamel is grooming women to believe that a C-section means they are defective. To wit:

Will she believe her body is broken? …

Kamel hopes so, because she plans to profit from women’s despair.

You can mitigate your sad fate by simply sending Kamel $330 — 3 easy payments of $110/no refunds — for Kamel’s insights about VBAC at VBACFacts Academy, Kamel’s version of Trump University.

It’s Marketing 101: convince people that they have a problem they didn’t know they had, then sell them the “solution.”

Who is Kamel and why would you care about what she thinks? As far as I can determine, Kamel’s professional education and experience is limited to commercial real estate. She has no medical, nursing or midwifery training. She’s cared for ZERO pregnant women; she’s delivered ZERO babies.

Kamel comes from the “Seen on TV” school of marketing:

Kamen apparently thinks her potential clients are morons. A  PDF of her slides is worth $30? Her handouts are worth $60? Membership in her Facebook group is worth $100? They are worth nothing because the exact same “insights” are available FOR FREE on any natural childbirth website including VBAC Facts itself.

I bet I can save you the $330 by summarizing the entire 6 hour video series in a few sentences:

Kamel believes vaginal births are best. If you had a C-section it was unnecessary. Regardless of your personal health history you are an ideal candidate for a VBAC. Ignore anyone who tells you otherwise.

In other words, VBAC Facts Academy is a scam on par with Trump University.

Who’s foolish enough to pay for this crap? Beats me.

Like hucksters everywhere, Kamel seems be channeling the ultimate huckster, PT Barnum. Her motto appears to be:

There’s a sucker born — hopefully vaginally —every minute.

If there’s one thing that anti-vaxxers are sure about it’s that natural immunity is better than vaccine induced immunity.

They’re wrong. Claiming that natural immunity is better than vaccine immunity is like claiming that walking to San Francisco from Boston is better than traveling by airplane. Yes, if you walk you can be sure you won’t be in a plane crash, but the odds are extremely high that you would never get to San Francisco.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Vaccination produces immunity faster and far more safely.[/pullquote]

What’s wrong with natural immunity?

Visit any cemetary from the pre-vaccine age; it’s filled with people who died precisely because natural immunity couldn’t save them. Pre-vaccine cemetaries are filled with people who died of influenza, of diphtheria, of measles, of tetanus, of pertussis. But they’re also filled with people who died simply because they got a minor cut that became infected and, in the absence of antibiotics, the infection continued to spread unimpeded until it entered the bloodstream (sepsis) and killed the unfortunate individual. Natural immunity couldn’t save them.

Consider the Black Death. Literally 2 out of 3 people died because natural immunity could not save them.

Consider the leading causes of death in the US in 1900. Pneumonia and influenza led the list; tuberculosis was second, diarrhea and enteritis were third. Diphtheria was tenth.

Today, pneumonia and tuberculosis can be treated with antibiotics and influenza, infant diarrhea and diphtheria can be prevented by vaccines.

The situation for children was even more dire.

Life expectancy around 1888 was less than 50 years, infant mortality approached 200 per 1000 births, and neonatal mortality was about 50 per 1000 births. The infant mortality rate in 1880 in New York City, a particularly crowded urban area, was as high as 288 per 1000 live-born infants, primarily related to various infectious processes. Infectious diseases such as diarrhea, diphtheria, scarlet fever and tuberculosis dominated as the major causes of morbidity and mortality among children…

But wait, you say: didn’t basic sanitation measure contribute to a decrease in mortality from infectious diseases? Of course they did, but that’s just another acknowledgement that natural immunity was insufficient; preventing exposure in the first place — NOT natural immunity — was the best way to save lives.

Why is vaccine induced immunity so much better than natural immunity? For the same reason that taking a plane to San Francisco is better than walking: it’s faster, safer and far more convenient.

Speed is the key advantage. Individuals who have been vaccinated can produce an immune response much faster than those who must wait for natural immunity to develop.

We’re not born with natural immunity; we make antibodies in response to a threat. For example, we are not born with antibodies to the chickenpox (varicella) virus. When exposed to the varicella virus, though, we can learn to make antibodies to it. It takes time, but gradually we can produce enough antibodies to fend off the disease.

Unfortunately, we don’t always get the time we need. We can make antibodies to smallpox, for example, but many individuals are overwhelmed and killed by the virus long before they could make enough antibodies to fend it off. Those who do win the race and manage to produce enough antibodies to survive are now permanently protected. That’s because the immune system retains the ability to make the specific antibodies against the smallpox virus. Whereas it may take days to produce smallpox antibody when first exposed, a second exposure will be met with rapid and massive production of antibody, generally preventing the individual from getting sick at all.

So for natural immunity to work, you have to get the disease, and you might die before you are able to make enough antibody to protect yourself. What if you could learn to make the protective antibodies without actually getting sick? That’s the theory behind vaccines.

In order to make antibodies to a virus (or bacterium) the body needs to “see” the virus. In other words, it needs to have direct exposure to the virus, but that virus doesn’t have to be functional, and it doesn’t even have to be whole. A virus can be inactivated (live attenuated) or killed and still produce an immune response. It can also be broken down into its constituent parts and the parts can produce an immune response. Any future exposure to the live virus (though contact with others who have the disease) will be met with rapid and massive production of antibody, preventing the individual from getting sick at all. A vaccine is merely an inactivated or dead form of the virus, letting you learn to make antibody without getting sick in the process.

Vaccines do not produce perfect immunity. The dangerous part of the virus might be the part that evokes the most powerful immune response. Rendering the virus harmless by inactivating it, killing it or breaking it up, may remove that part and the immune response to the less dangerous parts might be weaker. So actually getting the disease may produce a better immune response than the vaccine … but ONLY if you survive the disease.

Natural immunity is great in the same way that walking across the country is great. Theoretically everyone could walk across the country, but in reality most people cannot. Theoretically natural immunity can protect people from infectious diseases, but in reality it often cannot. Of course vaccines have risks just like airplane flight has risks, but the risks are minuscule and the benefits are enormous.

Natural immunity is very important, but rather imperfect. Vaccine immunity is better. As with airplane flight vs. walking, you end up in the same place, but you are far more likely to get where you want to be (immune and alive) and you get there much faster.

There’s often a lot of backlash to my posts, but the recent post, Vaccination is far more baby friendly than breastfeeding, has drawn a particularly vituperative response.

Consider this tweet from Amandha Dawn Vollmer:

Dr. Amy Tuteur is a well know [sic] evil CUNT that continuously promotes the satanic medical agenda …

Apparently both anti-vaxxers and lactivists are experiencing such profound distress in the form of cognitive dissonance that their heads are exploding.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Coming face to face with the fact that vaccines save far more lives than breastfeeding ever could is mentally excruciating.[/pullquote]

What is cognitive dissonance?

Leon Festinger proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior.

According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement).

Why are anti-vaxxers and lactivists wrestling with such profound cognitive dissonance over the fact that vaccines have far greater health benefits than breastfeeding? It’s because anti-vaxxers and lactivists often share beliefs. They are 100% certain both that vaccines are dangerous and that breastmilk is magically protective.

Coming face to face with the fact that vaccines have saved far more lives than breastfeeding ever could is mentally excruciating.

Although there are some who believe (without any scientific or historical evidence) that vaccines don’t work, the majority of anti-vaxxers acknowledge that vaccines work to save lives from vaccine preventable diseases (VPDs). They assert that the risks of vaccines outweigh the benefits of vaccines. That’s because they fabricate and grossly exaggerate the risks of vaccines and they minimize the benefits on the theory that if they haven’t seen diphtheria/pertussis/polio/etc. then diphtheria/pertussis/polio/etc. are no longer a threat to health.

Most anti-vaxxers extoll the benefits of breastfeeding for “strengthening immunity” and thereby preventing the same diseases that vaccines prevent. They often see breastfeeding as a substitute for vaccination, failing to understand that most maternal antibodies to vaccine preventable diseases are ImmunoglobulinG (IgG) antibodies and are too large to pass in breastmilk. Not only are vaccines better at preventing VPDs, breastfeeding literally CANNOT prevent against most VPDs.

Moreover, most anti-vaxxers believe that breastfeeding should be promoted with all possible public health measures, up to and including pressuring and shaming women into breastfeeding. They view women who can’t or choose not to breastfeed as selfish, ignorant and lazy. If that’s true, and the benefits of vaccination are greater than the benefits of breastfeeding, that makes anti-vaxxers even more selfish, ignorant and lazy, a simply intolerable thought.

Lactivists come at this issue from a slightly different angle. They, too, believe that the benefits of breastfeeding require public health measures to promote breastfeeding by pressure and shaming. That’s why they strongly support The Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative, which is designed to do just that. But if vaccination has far greater benefits than breastfeeding, their efforts are misplaced. Instead of pressuring women about breastfeeding, we should be pressuring them about vaccination.

In addition, a substantial proportion of lactivists are anti-vaxxers, making the cognitive dissonance particularly debilitating.

That explains the vociferous response accusing me not merely of being empirically wrong but insisting that I am being satanically evil. I have made them feel bad and foolish about their core beliefs regarding vaccination and breastfeeding by showing them how truly incompatible they are with each other.

And that makes me very happy indeed!

What does it mean to be educated in a particular discipline?

Whether that discipline is architecture, anthropology, or law, being educated generally means years of study, thousands of hours of experience, and intimate acquaintance with the specialist literature.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]When a layperson claims to be “educated” about vaccines you can be sure that a stream of absolute nonsense will follow.[/pullquote]

Medicine is like that, too. It involves four years of college, four years of medical school, 3-5 years of hands on training for 80+ hours per week, countless textbooks and intimate knowledge of the relevant medical literature. No layperson is educated in medicine. A PhD in immunology or a related science involves four years of college, 5 years of postgraduate work, a dissertation and intimate knowledge of the relevant scientific literature. No layperson is educated in immunology. The idea is simply ludicrous.

When a lay person proudly and arrogantly claims to be “educated” about vaccination, she certainly doesn’t mean that she went to medical school or graduate school, has hands on experience caring for thousands who have been vaccinated and unvaccinated, or has read the immunology literature.

So what does she mean?

She means that she has adopted a cultural construction of “education” that has little if anything to do with actual knowledge of the topic. It means that she has ignored those who have actual education and training and crowd sourced her decisions by reading books, blogs, websites and message boards written by other lay people who are often equally ignorant.

Why have anti-vaxxers confused defiance for education?

The paper ‘Trusting blindly can be the biggest risk of all’: organised resistance to childhood vaccination in the UK explores cultural construct of being “educated.” When an anti-vax advocate claims to be “educated,” she is not talking about actual scientific knowledge. Rather she is referring to her defiance of professionals are educated.

Clear dichotomies are constructed between blind faith and active resistance and uncritical following and critical thinking. Non-vaccinators or those who question aspects of vaccination policy are not described in terms of class, gender, location or politics, but are ‘free thinkers’ who have escaped from the disempowerment that is seen to characterise vaccination…

This characterization of anti-vaxxers can be unpacked even further; not surprisingly, anti-vax advocates portray themselves laudatory and other parents as fools and “sheeple.”

…[I]nstead of good and bad parent categories being a function of compliance or non-compliance with vaccination advice … the good parent becomes one who spends the time to become informed and educated about vaccination…

…[Anti-vaxxers] construct trust in others as passive and the easy option. Rather than trust in experts, the alternative scenario is of a parent who becomes the expert themselves, through a difficult process of personal education and empowerment…

In the anti-vax world, trusting experts is a mark of credulity, while ignoring expert advice is a sign of independent thinking and self-education. But, of course, since anti-vaxxers don’t really know anything about the topic, they are inevitably forced to rely on the advice of charlatans and quacks.

The person who proudly claims to be “educated” on vaccination offers as proof the fact that she ignores the expert advice of pediatricians, immunologists and virologists and embraces the teachings of … washed up Playboy Playmate Jennifer McCarthy. In her delusion, she fail to appreciate the irony: far from being “educated,” she is shockingly credulous. Consistent with the Dunning-Kruger effect (described in the aptly named paper Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments), the anti-vaxxers who think they know the most about vaccines actually know the least.

If the goal of being “educated” isn’t acquiring knowledge, what is it? The ultimate goal is to become “empowered”:

Finally, the moral imperative to become informed is part of a broader shift, evident in the new public health, for which some kind of empowerment, personal responsibility and participation are expressed in highly positive terms.

So anti-vax is about the parent and how she would like to see herself, not about immunology, medicine or public health. In the socially constructed world of anti-vaccine advocates, parents are divided into those (inferior) “sheeple” who are passive and blindly trust authority figures and (superior) anti-vaxxers who are “educated” and “empowered” by taking “personal responsibility”.

A lay person’s claims to be “educated” about a health topic is nothing more than defiance. When someone tells you she is “educated” about vaccines, beware! There is no surer mark of ignorance on the topic of vaccines than the arrogant claim of being “educated.”

 

Adapted from a piece that first appeared in August 2009.

There’s a simple thing that every mother can do to keep her baby as healthy as possible. That’s why we should have a ten step hospital based program to support it.

No, it’s not breastfeeding; it’s vaccination, which saves a thousand times more lives in practice than breastfeeding ever could in theory.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]No mother would refuse to vaccinate if she only understood the benefits and got the proper support.[/pullquote]

Therefore, it is a thousand times more important to promote vaccination than to promote breastfeeding. No mother would refuse to do it if she only understood the benefits and got the proper support. That’s why I propose an immediate overhaul of the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative to promote vaccination instead of breastfeeding.

The Ten Steps to Successful Vaccination are:

1. Have a written vaccination policy that is routinely communicated to all health care staff.
2. Train all health care staff in the skills necessary to implement this policy.
3. Inform all pregnant women about the benefits of vaccination.
4. Insist that every mother sign a vaccine contract that emphasizes that anything other than full vaccination on the CDC schedule threatens baby’s health.
5. Mandate frequent visits by a vaccination consultant to provide constant support for vaccination.
6. Help mothers initiate all recommended injections within one hour of birth.
7. Show mothers how to obtain vaccinations even if they are separated from their infants.
8. Accept no refusal to vaccinate unless medically indicated.
9. Encourage vaccination on demand by the pediatrician.
10. Foster the establishment of vaccination support groups and refer mothers to them on discharge from the hospital or birth center.

Wait, what? Some mothers think there are legitimate reasons not to vaccinate their babies? There are no legitimate reasons; it’s just a sign that they haven’t received enough vaccination support from hospital personnel, their peers and society at large.

Wait, what? Some mothers think that vaccination harms their infants? Who cares what they think? Public health officials have spoken on the issue of vaccination and mother’s observations of their own infants are irrelevant.

Wait, what? Some mothers think this is an issue of personal freedom? It most certainly is not. Vaccinating a child does not simply protect that child, but it provides a measurable benefit to society.

Lack of peer support for vaccination is a serious problem in and of itself. There are webpages and Facebook groups that encourage parents not to vaccinate or to diverge from the CDC schedule. Such webpages and Facebook groups must be ruthlessly suppressed along with public shaming of anyone who doesn’t support routine childhood vaccination.

Let’s face it: those who vaccinate according to the CDC schedule love their children more than those who do not. Only a lazy, selfish mother would listen to anti-vaccine quacks instead of the CDC.

I even have a motto for the NEW Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative:

Breastfed Is Good,
Fed Is Better, but
Vaccinated is BEST!

Why waste time promoting breastfeeding when we could be promoting vaccination and saving far more lives?

Anti-vaxxers don’t know much about vaccines. Even worse, they don’t know much about chemistry and biochemistry, which means that they can’t understand why they are so wrong about even their simplest claims.

Consider their erroneous claims about the “neurotoxins” in vaccines including mercury and aluminum. Those claims are based on confusion about the most basic distinction in chemistry, the difference between an element and a compound.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The characteristics water are very different from the characteristics of its two elements hydrogen and oxygen.[/pullquote]

What’s the difference between an element and a compound and why does it matter?

Elements are the building block of all matter in the universe. Each element consists of only one kind of atom.

What’s an atom?

You’ve probably seen a picture like this before.

It shows the structure of an atom. Protons and neutrons are located in the center and electrons orbit around the center. The number of protons in the center determines the identity of the element. All atoms with one proton are elemental hydrogen; all atoms with two protons are elemental helium; and so on.

All the known elements are listed in the periodic table of the elements, in order of the number of protons.

Why are the elements arranged in this way? It’s because elements in each vertical row share important characteristics in how they combine with other elements to form compounds.

What’s a compound?

A compound consists of atoms of two or more different elements joined together and has properties that are different from its component elements.

A compound is different from a mixture. I can make a mixture of two gasses, hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen and oxygen are not connected with each other and the hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms will retain their distinct characteristics.

If I introduce a spark to the mixture a chemical reaction will occur: hydrogen atoms will bind with oxygen atoms to form a compound, H2O or water. Although water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, it no longer has the properties of either hydrogen or oxygen. For example, you couldn’t possibly breathe water and survive, even though water contains large amounts of oxygen. The characteristics of the compound water are different from the characteristics of its two elements hydrogen and oxygen.

But that’s not all. Other compounds can be made from the same elements hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen peroxide has the chemical formula H2O2. Though hydrogen and oxygen are gasses, peroxide, like water, is a liquid, but it’s a very different liquid from water. You don’t need to be a chemist to tell the difference between washing out a cut with water and washing it out with hydrogen peroxide.

So the elements hydrogen and oxygen have distinct properties but compounds made from them have very different properties from their constituent elements and from each other depending on the ratio of the elements within them.

An even more dramatic example of this principle is table salt. Salt is the compound NaCl, sodium chloride. Sodium is explosive and chlorine gas is poisonous. Either can cause serious harm or death, yet it’s difficult to imagine a less dangerous substance than table salt, a compound of dangerous elemental sodium and dangerous elemental chlorine.

What does this have to do with vaccine safety?

The principle that we’ve just explored, that compounds have very different characteristics than their constituent elements, has critical implications for anti-vax claims. Anti-vaxxers point out correctly that elemental mercury and elemental aluminum are neurotoxins. But that tells us NOTHING about whether mercury compounds and aluminum compounds are harmful or safe. Indeed, the mercury compounds that used to be present in vaccines (and are still present in some flu vaccines) and aluminum compounds in vaccines are quite safe even though mercury and aluminum are not.

This is obvious to anyone who understands basic chemistry, but can be quite mystifying to those who don’t.

Insisting that vaccines contain neurotoxins because they contain mercury or aluminum compounds is like insisting that you can breathe water because it is an oxygen compound. It’s not merely a reasoning error; it’s a sign of ignorance.

In a startling discovery sure to change our perceptions of our distant ancestors, researchers announced the finding of ancient cave writing about natural parenting. Ima Frawde CPM announced the finding and speculated on its implications. The scrawls on the walls of an ancient African cave appear to date back nearly 500,000 years and be written by a tribal “wise woman.” It took scholars nearly a decade to translate them.

Here for the first time is a complete translation:

Ladies, it is time to take parenting back from the patriarchal men who have filled it with interventions. Things are getting out of control.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Some babies are meant to get eaten.[/pullquote]

I’m speaking, of course, about the fact that nearly 40% of all cave dwellers now make fires at the mouths of their caves every single night. The men say that it protects our infants and small children from predators … as if 40% of all babies would be eaten by predators each night if we slept without fire!

I say its just an opportunity to dazzle us with their technical prowess, and then take credit if our babies are not eaten in the night. If predators were really as dangerous as the men claim, we wouldn’t be here.

I’m not against all technology. I respect that some people feel that their lives are improved by stone tools and that hunters believe they catch more game with spears, but fire is going a step too far. We should be sleeping each night as Nature intended, sheltered in caves, whispering affirmations, safe in the knowledge that if we eat right and exercise our children will not be eaten.

I say: Trust carnivores!

Yes, I recognize that babies are less likely to be snatched if they sleep in caves protected by fire, but there is more to sleep than whether the baby survives the night. It may be true that babies who sleep in caves without fire are 10 times more likely to be prey for carnivores than babies who are protected by fire, but the absolute risk of getting eaten on any given night is really very low.

Moreover, in an emergency develops and a lion or jackal is has one of our babies in its jaws, we can light a torch then to frighten the animal away. There’s plenty of time to do that when the emergency occurs; there is no need to have a fire going each and every time darkness falls.

Plus, and this is something that men simply don’t understand, some babies are meant to get eaten.

Ladies, I encourage you to educate yourself about the risks of fire. Overuse of fire can lead to burned clothes, charred cave walls and even burn injuries to children. These risks are simply unacceptable! The fact that a few extra babies may be saved from tigers is a trivial benefit that pales in comparison to the risks.

You think I’m exaggerating? I doubt it. At this rate it is only a matter of time before 100% of cave dwellers sleep in caves protected by fire.

There must be limits to technology! If we don’t call a halt to parenting interventions like fire, the next thing you know all the men will be insisting that we cook our food with fire. Okay, okay, that’s probably an exaggeration, but let’s face it, technology should be reserved for emergencies. For 99.9% of the time, natural is best.

 

This satire first appeared in August 2013.

Imagine for a moment that a new mother has been warned repeatedly not to leave her baby on the bed unattended.

Her “intuition” tells her that the naysayers are wrong and she leaves her baby unattended on the bed, but when she returns to the room she notices that her baby is rolling off the side. She grabs the baby by the arm, preventing the fall to the floor, but breaking the baby’s arm in the process. It takes weeks to heal and the baby is in considerable pain during that time.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]What kind of “God” thinks it’s okay to break a few baby bones so a mother can have the birth of her dreams?[/pullquote]

What would you think if the mother congratulated herself for “proving” that leaving a baby unattended is safe? You’d be disgusted, right?

What would you think if she considered the baby’s broken arm a trivial side effect of her otherwise excellent decision? You’d be horrified, right?

How about if she posted her story to a Facebook group and everyone praised her. You’d think those other women were monsters, right?

But that’s precisely what happened on the Facebook page for Birth Without Fear … except that the mother didn’t ignore advice about leaving her baby unattended on a bed; she ignored medical advice about breech birth.

He was in the worst possible breech position he could be in and I just couldn’t grasp how my beautiful home water birth that I planned and prepared for, for months, was inevitably probably not going to happen. A water birth, after all, was the entire reason we chose to birth this way.

My husband supported me quite well, but felt confused as to why I was so adamant about avoiding going to the hospital for c-section. It would be quick and both of us would be ok and safe. For me, it wasn’t JUST about the c-section though. It was a big part at first, but that wasn’t all. All the hard work he put into paying for me to have the home birth I wanted for our last child, all the planning, the high hopes, the excitement, the peaceful serenity I desired, all being dashed in an instant.

She consulted her midwife:

She had talked with another midwife friend of hers for advice and that sweet midwife encouraged her to remember that “Birth Works.” We talked more about how she still hadn’t heard from God about trying for breech. And how there had been easier breech birth situations arise and she didn’t feel right about it, resulting in the mama transferring to the hospital. But that wasn’t the case with me and Elias. She kept hearing yes. And the encouragement she received from her midwife friend is something I am also forever grateful for. Glory!

What a coincidence! She wanted to have a breech homebirth and “God” told her midwife it would be okay.

She had the vaginal birth that she wanted:

… With his heart rate where it was, there was no waiting. She had to retrieve his other leg, then both arms because they were up by his face. Once that was done I pushed and I pushed and I pushed and I pushed. It was so different than my other deliveries because it was just his head I was pushing. Totally different. I started running out of energy because I had no break really since everything started only 30 minutes or so prior. There wasn’t time to wane though. I was dripping sweat. Trying to focus but I had so many things running through my head. I KNEW I had to hurry up but couldn’t figure out why it was taking so long… Finally, though……

He was out.

But he wasn’t breathing. No problem!

Midwife had to breathe for him, remember not uncommon for breech … As I watched this precious woman who was trembling, breathing for my baby-lifeless and laying there a purple color, I prayed. My husband prayed. We spoke to Elias to breathe. It seemed longer than it actually was. We trusted. Scared but trusted we had heard from the Lord about everything we decided to do, so we fully expected life in our child. Strong, smart, healthy and whole..

He started breathing eventually, but he wasn’t exactly whole:

…Turns out his clavicle was broken as well as a fracture of the humerus in his left arm during delivery. How awesome is it, that we actually discussed this BEFORE labor started!? Not even two hours prior to him being born! He was in some pain but is doing great now and completely healed at 3 weeks old.

So her child suffered the agony of not one, but TWO BROKEN BONES. And she thinks it’s awesome that they discussed the possibility and went ahead anyway?

This monster of a mother wasn’t the least bit sorry for her decision. In her mind it was a success!

I still can’t believe I did it. And couldn’t have done it without my midwife. A wonderful woman who takes the time pray and really listen to Him and His will for the births she attends for her clients. I won’t ever be able to tell her enough how much I appreciate it. Nor how much I feel like I owe her for helping me succeed!

What kind of “God” thinks it’s okay to break a few baby bones so a mother can have the birth of her dreams? No God that I recognize from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

And what kind of monsters encourage a mother in these hateful delusions? The monsters who are fans of Birth Without Fear. Of course once they found out that I had sharmed it on my Facebook page, they deleted all mention of the story on the Facebook page and blog. Turns out that perhaps they weren’t so proud of her after all.

Here’s what I wonder:

What if the trade-off had been that in order to avoid a C-section the MOTHER would have to endure the midwife breaking HER clavicle and HER arm without anesthesia and without pain relief in the weeks that followed?

Who wants to bet that the mother would have opted for the C-section to spare herself the pain that she was happy to let her newborn baby endure?

There she goes again.

Melissa Bartick has published yet another paper, Suboptimal breastfeeding in the United States: Maternal and pediatric health outcomes and costs, claiming to demonstrate that breastfeeding saves lots of lives and billions of dollars.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Bartick’s claims are based on the assumption that correlation is causation. It’s not.[/pullquote]

Bartick continues to model the impact of breastfeeding rates on death rates and healthcare spending while utterly ignoring the real world data on the impact of breastfeeding rates.

In this paper, she created a Monte Carlo simulation:

This is the first comprehensive analysis of the health and economic burdens of suboptimal breastfeeding rates in the industrialized world, using Monte Carlo simulation models to include maternal and pediatric disease in a single study.

Her simulation predicted the following:

Annual excess deaths attributable to suboptimal breastfeeding total 3,340 (95% confidence interval [1,886 to 4,785]), 78% of which are maternal due to myocardial infarction (n = 986), breast cancer (n = 838), and diabetes (n = 473). Excess pediatric deaths total 721, mostly due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (n = 492) and necrotizing enterocolitis (n = 190). Medical costs total $3.0 billion, 79% of which are maternal. Costs of premature death total $14.2 billion. The number of women needed to breastfeed as medically recommended to prevent an infant gastrointestinal infection is 0.8; acute otitis media, 3; hospitalization for lower respiratory tract infection, 95; maternal hypertension, 55; diabetes, 162; and myocardial infarction, 235. For every 597 women who optimally breastfeed, one maternal or child death is prevented.

Or, as Bartick told WBUR:

The most surprising thing is that breastfeeding is even more of a maternal health issue than a children’s health issue. It has a bigger impact in terms of medical cost and a bigger impact in terms of lives saved. And most of that impact is derived from encouraging women to breastfeed as long as they can for each child.

Of note, Bartick has already dialed back substantially from claims made in previous papers, in 2010 and in 2013. It seems that even she recognizes that her previous claims were exaggerations.

Unfortunately, with the exception of nectrotizing enterocolitis, her conclusions still have no basis in reality.

Why does Bartick keep modeling the theoretical impact of breastfeeding instead of investigating the actual impact of breastfeeding? Because the actual data, based on 40 years of dramatically rising breastfeeding rates, doesn’t show much benefit at all. In other words, breastfeeding saves far more lives and money in theory than in requity.

There’s a simple reason why Bartick continues to find that benefits of breastfeeding are so much greater in theory than in reality: her theoretical models are based on a desperate wish that correlation is causation. But as we know from Statistics 101, correlation is NOT causation.

Bartick ought to know, too. The WBUR reporter asked her whether her numbers are reliable. She responded:

The numbers themselves are derived from other studies but we took the best studies and used conservative estimates … the ASSUMPTION is that there is a causal relationship between breastfeeding and these diseases based on the published studies.(my emphasis)

So if her assumption is wrong, her numbers are wrong. As they say in statistics: Garbage in, garbage out.

Yes, breastfeeding has an association with heart disease, breast cancer and diabetes. But lots of things have associations with the same diseases, including socio-economic status (SES).

We know for a fact that mothers of higher SES are more likely to breastfeed. Breastfeeding, therefore, could be a proxy for socio-economic status. The purported benefits of breastfeeding aren’t caused by breastfeeding; they’re caused by wealth and access to healthcare. That may be why the dramatic increase in breastfeeding rates that has occurred in the US over the past 40 years has not had any noticeable impact on maternal or infant death rates.

In other words, there’s absolutely no evidence for Dr. Bartick’s ASSUMPTION that not breastfeeding causes disease in women or that breastfeeding prevents disease. Why? Because correlation is not causation.

Dr. Bartick makes the same error with pediatric disease. The one exception is nectrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) in premature infants. There is strong evidence that feeding premature infants breastmilk instead of formula can prevent NEC. The relationship with SIDS is more tenuous.

Of note, Bartick has completely dropped the claims from her 2010 paper that breastfeeding prevents atopic dermatitis, childhood asthma, childhood leukemia, type 1 diabetes mellitus, and childhood obesity. In other words, she implicitly acknowledges that many of the assumptions she made in that paper were wrong.

Sadly, many of the assumptions she makes in this paper are equally wrong.

The WBUR reporter asked Bartick:

There have been several studies and recent books, notably “Lactivism” by Courtney Jung, that suggest the benefits of breastfeeding have been overstated. In a similar vein, Dr. Amy Tuteur argues that there’s just too much “bressure” on women to breastfeed. Obviously, you disagree, but what’s your response to the breastfeeding backlash, in general?

Bartick tries to side step:

We know that most women in the U.S. actually want to breastfeed. Over 80 percent of U.S. women initiate breastfeeding. Yet, data from the CDC show that 60 percent of women aren’t meeting their own breastfeeding goals, even if those goals are modest. So, what we are really seeing is that women are not getting the support they need to breastfeed…

But women claim they want to breastfeed because people like Bartick insist that there are dramatic benefits to breastfeeding. Bartick herself is a source of “bressure” and it is disingenuous in the extreme to suggest that the pressure to breastfeed comes from women themselves.

Bartick’s latest paper is yet another deliberate addition to the “bressure.” The reality is that the benefit of breastfeeding in industrialized countries is trivial.

So Bartick ignores reality and takes refuge in theory.