The Skeptical OB

Midwives are desperate for market share. As I wrote in my book Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting: No matter what obstetricians offered, midwives would insist that it was unnecessary, disempowering, harmful, and contradicted by the scientific evidence. Midwives would wrest childbirth back from paternalistic doctors and give it to those to […]

Sadly, this is not satire. Freya Kellet is a self-proclaimed “birth keeper, coach and mentor.” I’m all too familiar with the ignorance, arrogance and privilege of natural childbirth advocates, but Freya sets a new standard for idiocy with her ‘Radical Guide to Postpartum Hemorrhage.’ Hemorrhage is one of the most common reasons why women fear […]

I’ve written in the past about performative mothering, a central feature of contemporary parenting culture. I framed the discussion as comparing a fictional grandmother Myrna to her fictional granddaughter Mira. When it came to raising John, Myrna might have feared the judgments of her mother and mother-in-law but she did not particularly fear the judgment […]