The hardest thing about a post like this is limiting the number of ignorant, inane, narcissistic examples. There are simply so many to choose from.

1. She almost managed to kill her 3rd child attempting an HBAC, so the obvious thing to do was to try for another HBAC with her 4th child. Because really, what’s more important: whether her baby lives or dies or whether she can brag about “her” homebirth?

From My Journey to Home Birth after 3 C-sections – Part 1. At her attempted HBA2C, she pushed for 6 HOURS with an anterior cervical lip and then transferred to the hospital:

… I had to just take the OB on call. I didn’t care. I needed it to end. In the hospital they treated me like a leper. When I was getting the spinal I tried to lean on the OR nurse for support. She pushed me and said “don’t touch me!” Upon entry into my abdominal cavity they discovered a 10 cm by 8 cm uterine dehiscence. The only thing keeping my baby in my uterus was peritoneum…

2. The hospital had a negative view of homebirths? Maybe it’s because babies DIE at homebirth, just like hers did:

Thomas Freemantle had no heartbeat and was not breathing when he was delivered near Bendigo in October 2010…

The boy’s mother, Katrina Freemantle, gave evidence about why she decided to have a homebirth, despite complications with a previous child.

She told the inquest, Bendigo Health had been unable to assure her that she could have a natural birth in hospital with minimal intervention.

She also criticised hospital staff for having a negative view of homebirths.

3. Homebirth advocates are always whining that no one takes them seriously. Perhaps it is because of stuff this this:

The dictator/oppressor is the “Medical/Obstetrical Industrial Complex” and the oppression is massive human rights violations and the systematic destruction of choice for childbearing women in the world. We are hopeful that this will give us a focus and a way to rally together for real change for birth on our earth!

Sometime over the week I spent at the Midwifery Today Conference I started to ask myself WHY. Why are so many midwives being arrested at this time? Why are states midwifery laws being challenged? Frankly, the political activist in me started to smell a plot! …

4. The Narcissist Breeder is at it again, inflating her credentials:

As a maternal child health scholar, Certified Childbirth Educator, and Certified Doula, I now teach and guide women on their birth journeys and specialize in helping women working toward a VBAC. I also train doulas and other birth workers on how to help VBAC mothers.

Earth to Gina:

You are not a scholar of anything. You are a student, one who is nowhere near graduating. No doubt your professors and classmates will have a good laugh at your expense if they ever read that.

At the heart of every alternative health movement are two critical attributes, defiance and denial.

The denial is easy to recognize and can be summed up in one sentence: Bad things aren’t going to happen to me.

I’m not going to get cancer/die of cancer/have children who contract vaccine preventable illnesses/have childbirth complications because I eat right/waste money on useless supplements/waste money lining the pockets of alternative quacks/have a strong immune system/chant affirmations.

In other words, it’s nothing more than wishful thinking, because it is too scary to contemplate anything else.

The defiance is also pretty easy to recognize, particularly in natural childbirth, and I don’t just mean the immature defiance of authority.

As is obvious to anyone with basic critical thinking skills, in the world of NCB, every day is Opposite Day. If the doctor says one thing, the NCB advocate says the opposite, without any research, or indeed, any attempt at research to back up the increasingly absurd claims.

Since every day is Opposite Day, there are never any complications, only “variations of normal.”

Since every day is Opposite Day, labor isn’t agonizing, it’s orgasmic.

Since every day is Opposite Day, birth in water, although unheard of in any other primates, is “natural.”

Since every day is Opposite Day, the umbilical cord shouldn’t be cut immediately, it should simply be allowed to rot off.

Since every day is Opposite Day, newborn baths and hats are evil.

I’m hardly the only one to note this. According to Ellen Annandale and Judith Clark, authors of the widely quoted paper, What is gender? Feminist theory and the sociology of human reproduction published in Sociology of Health & Illness, going so far as to accuse proponents of the “new midwifery” of unreflective defiance:

… the lived experience of midwifery … is revealed only as the largely unresearched antithesis of obstetrics… [I]ts central precepts (such as ‘women controlled’, ‘natural birth’) are vaguely drawn and in practical terms carry little meaning.

Simply put, contemporary natural childbirth advocacy (particularly homebirth midwifery) is nothing more than an extended childish temper tantrum.

And like most childish temper tantrums it is a defiance of authority for its own sake, involves deliberately disregarding harms, has no basis in objective reality and is all about how the individual having the tantrum wishes to view herself as opposed to the ostensible subject of the tantrum.

Natural childbirth and contemporary midwifery theory discounts the value of education, since scientific evidence does not support objectives of the tantrums. It valorizes “intuition” which is just a fancy way saying “we make it up as we go along,” and it gives primacy of place to magical thinking.

Childish temper tantrums are amusing and irritating when they occur in children. However, they can be downright deadly when they occur in adults.

Natural childbirth and homebirth advocacy get goofier and goofier as the years go by, but that is entirely predictable. If all they are is unreflective defiance, it stands to reason that every aspect of modern obstetrics, from serious issues like pre-eclampsia all the way down to trivialities like hats will represent an opportunity to have a tantrum.

In the world of natural childbirth and homebirth, every day is Opposite Day, not because the opposite is true, but because oppositional behavior for its own sake is the hallmark of the immature behavior at the heart of temper tantrums. And natural childbirth and homebirth advocacy are nothing more than childish temper tantrums writ large.

The Alpha Parent is at it again. In her never ending quest to boost her own fragile self esteem, she commented on the HuffPo piece Food For Thought: How I Feed My Baby Is None of Your Business.

The author, Darlene Cunha, is spot on in her observations:

One of the most startling discoveries I made upon becoming a mom is that parenting is a competitive sport in which there are no winners. Something as simple and necessary as feeding your child is cause for judgement and snobbery from parents who do it differently…

There are many reasons that people might formula feed; necessary medication that doesn’t mix with breastfeeding being one of the biggest. To me, though, it doesn’t matter if one woman is feeding her infant formula because she couldn’t produce enough breast milk, and another is doing it because she’s on medication that could be harmful to the baby, and a third is doing it because she doesn’t like the feel of the baby at her breast. It’s simply not my business.

Allison Dixley, “The Alpha Parent,” the self proclaimed avatar of  “the snobby side of parenting” commented because she recognized that she was the prime target of the piece. Her comment, now removed, directed readers to her notorious post Why the way you feed your baby is my business:

“My baby, my choice”.
“It’s got nothing to do with you how I feed my baby”.
“Live and let live”.

These are classic lines you’ll hear from some defensive formula feeding mothers whenever a breastfeeding advocate points out the flaws of formula. The message from those who give formula to their babies is clear: “It’s none of your business”. Yet I argue that the way a mother chooses to feed her baby IS my business…

Dixley attempts to justify her obnoxiousness with the usual concatenation of stupid reasons (“breastfeeding prevents autism,” “breastfeeding prevents appendicitis”) and actually tries t0 justify biological essentialism (reducing women to breasts, vagina and uterus) as liberation. In addition, Dixley creates a few moronic “reasons” of her own: formula is apparently responsible for the “distorted” view that breasts are sexual objects (Earth to Dixley: a body part can have more than one function), the decrease in the IQ of the population (average IQ increased as breastfeeding decreased), and the claim that formula feeding causes child abuse and crime (clearly she hasn’t heard that correlation is not causation).

Like most quacks, she suffers from projectile verbosity. It seems that the more idiotic your claims are, the more words you must vomit upon the rest of us to explain them.

Dixley is a classic sanctimommy. Sanctimommies suffer from overwhelmingly 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 your children are going to end up abused, autistic, criminals with low IQs, all because you didn’t breastfeed like Dixley does.

I’d like to offer a few words of advice to Allison:

The way other women feed their babies is NOT your business. This may come as a tremendous shock, but the rest of us exist for reasons other than to boost your pitifully fragile self-esteem by mirroring your own choices back to you.

I don’t care that you breastfeed your child(ren); it’s not my business, but your sanctimony certainly is my business. I’m a healthcare provider and as such, I feel responsible for both the physical AND mental health of others. Your goal is to make other women feel bad. I recognize that is because you feel bad about yourself, and like most people with poor self-esteem, tearing others down makes you feel better.

It is important for the women you target (emotionally vulnerable new mothers) to understand that you are nothing more than a classic “Mean Girl.” According to Urban Dictionary, mean girls are:

…[g]irls who are bullies and use “girl agression” (nasty comments, trickery, deceit, … etc.) to manipulate other girls.

Everything about you from your moniker (as subtle as a sledgehammer), to your fabricated claims, to your nauseating sanctimony is about one thing, and one thing only: beating down other women so you feel better about yourself in comparison.

How women feed their babies is nobody’s business but their own. How some women use sanctimony to belittle vulnerable women is everybody’s business, and since it is my business, I feel free to say:

Get a life, get into therapy, and stop trying to feel better about yourself by making other women feel bad about themselves.

I have an announcement:

I’ve decided to start my own school for homebirth midwives. I’m concerned that birth has strayed far from what nature intended and part of the reason is improperly trained midwives. Dr. Amy’s College of Raw, Orgasmic, Totally Crunchy Homebirth (CROTCH) will train a new generation of homebirth midwives with greater respect for the animal process of birth than even Carla Hartley and her ilk could imagine.

The motto at Dr. Amy’s CROTCH is nothing so mealy mouthed as “trust birth.” Our motto is “Worship Birth … or your baby will get autism” and we do that by faithfully imitating the other members of the animal kingdom.

In the first place, the term “homebirth” merely represents the fact that it takes place outside the hospital. Obviously it does not take place at home. Our animal sisters give birth in dens and under dense foliage; therefore, a CROTCH birth takes place in a burrow excavated from dirt by the mother in the days leading up to the birth.

In addition:

At CROTCH, we teach our midwives that birth is not simply orgasmic; it is multi-orgasmic. Study of the female orgasm demonstrates that it is typically accompanied by uterine contractions. Therefore, it only stands to reason that birth as nature intended involves an orgasm with every contraction. We feel sorry for those women who merely have an orgasm at the moment of birth. If they had truly worshiped birth, they would have had hundreds of orgasms.

Obviously, clothes are not natural. In addition to prohibiting hats or clothing of any kind on babies, we at CROTCH impress upon midwives the need for THEM to be naked at birth. Clothes interfere with the midwife’s healing aura.

Privacy, of course, is critical. That’s why the mother must be unattended in her burrow. The naked midwife and the mother’s naked partner must always remain downwind of the birthing mother to prevent her labor from stalling by interference with birthy smells. They cannot approach any closer than 100 yards, regardless of how much the mother screams and begs.

If the midwife can’t approach the mother, how can she monitor the labor? She can’t, and she shouldn’t. Monitoring and vaginal exams are evil. They are based on the hegemonic, patriarchal medical model of birth that presumes all mothers and babies have a right to live. Any homebirth midwife with even minimal training knows that some babies aren’t meant to live and that mothers die in the hospital, too.

Prenatal care is totally unnecessary. Do animals have prenatal care? No, they don’t, and if prenatal care were necessary, they wouldn’t be here now.

The moments after birth are critical for the mother and baby to imprint upon each other. That’s why at CROTCH we teach midwives that mothers must lick their babies clean, and midwives must lick the mother’s perineum clean (unless, of course, she is a contortionist and she can lick her own perineum).

The cord must not be severed. The placenta must be left attached until the cord starts to shrivel. Then the mother must eat the entire placenta and cord just like the Khaleesi in Game of Thrones ate the horse heart. At CROTCH we recognize that dehydrating and encapsulating the placenta destroys the very hormones that prevent postpartum depression. All those placenta encapsulation specialists are pathologizing the placenta and stealing the money of innocent mothers for doing so.

Immediately after birth, the mother must place the baby at her breast … and leave there for the next 7 years.

At CROTCH, we recognize that the key to an empowering, spiritual birth is the Holy Trinity. No, not the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, silly; the Mother, the Baby, and the Midwife, or as we prefer to call it: the motherbabymidwife triad. The mother’s body nurtures the baby; the baby knows how to be born; and the midwife knows how to hold the space in the mother’s bank account, previously held by multiple thousands of dollars.

So look for Dr. Amy’s CROTCH, coming to a website near you, and prepare for an empowering birth (raw, orgasmic and totally crunchy) just as nature intended!

This piece is satire, but I fully expect its tenets to be adopted by birth lunatics as their own in 3 … 2 … 1 …

It keeps getting harder to parody homebirth and natural childbirth advocates because they continue to do and say things that are ever more outrageous.

I offer the following for your entertainment pleasure. And no, sorry to say, this is not satire.

Carla (“Trust Birth”) Hartley bemoaning a birth video she watched:

Why is the midwife wearing scrubs? Using a Doppler? Why is she dangling her hand in the water? (Water has energy and reacts!) No…she doesn’t need a vaginal exam to see where she is……Why are they all talking? Why the hat????????????? oh for the love of all that is holy, this is their THERE YOU ARE….get out of it….NO NO NO get those scissors away from the cord…..get your hands off the cord…please….I cannot believe what I am seeing…..stop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NO! Don’t tell mamma to take a shower or an herb bath! Baby and mamma need their birthy smells for each other….and don’t clean that blood off the perineum it is healing….Don’t take baby away from mamma….Please…all that measuring and weighing can wait til tomorrow……….get that hat off that baby, take all those clothes off and let baby and mommy be skin to skin PLEASSSSSSSEEEEEEEEE

Oh, the HORROR!!!!!! Ohmygod, Ohmygod, Ohmygod, the HAT!!!!!! Ahhhhhhhh, the midwife’s hand in the water and water has energy and reacts!!!!!!!

Lest you think that Hartley is mere a lone nitwit, consider the 115 “likes.”

They are a veritable who’s who of birth idiots including:

Lori Carr, LM, CPM (Highland Midwife)
Jeanice Barcelo, founder of the forthcoming “Birth of a New Earth Preparatory School for Conscious Procreation.”
Elizabeth Noble, author and self-proclaimed ENNOBLER

Consider the comments.

From Placenta (“Rowan”) Bailey, currently awaiting prosecution in connection with a homebirth death:

I can hardly believe what folks do to themselves sometimes.

Jasmine Krapf:

I do the same thing when I watch birth videos. Lots of yelling and frustration and sometimes punching the couch….yeah, I admit it.

Meredith Ryan:

I only ever search for “unassisted birth” videos but its amazing what passes as that. Suddenly vaginal birth is “unassisted”?! Pissed me right off.

And according to others who can see it, Janet (her dead baby not as traumatic as birth rape) Fraser says in one of her comments that her daughter has been “heckling” birth videos since she was 4 years old.

Her other daughter can’t watch birth videos since she’s dead, as a result of Fraser’s hideous narcissism.

And what precipitated this faux anguish?

According to Sheila Stubbs:

Carla’s rant was triggered by this video I posted. I thought it was very moving to see her squeals of joy and huge outpouring of love while this birth occurred in the midst of everyday family life, though I thought they cut the cord too quickly. I didn’t notice everything Carla ranted about. http://www.cecijane.net/shes-a-girl-just-like-me/

So we have a bunch of birth activists criticizing the video of another birth activist giving birth. Nice!

All I can say is keep those blog entries, Facebook posts, and comments coming.

I could make you look like fools without your help, but it is so much easier to have your assistance!

I am so angry I could spit.

In a gesture so cruel, so mean-spirited, so vicious as to defy comprehension, the Boy Scouts of America have banned obese boys from their National Jamboree:

The Boy Scouts used the CDC’s body mass index (BMI), a screening tool for obesity, in deciding whether adults and youth could join the jamboree, which is held every four years. For past jamborees, attendees filled out health forms, received a physical and got a doctor’s release, but the BMI was a factor added for this year’s event, Smith said.

BMIs of 25.0 to 29.9 fall in the overweight range, while those 30.0 or higher are considered obese, the Boy Scouts said.

Those applicants whose BMI was greater than 40.0 were not allowed to participate. Jamboree medical staff had to review all applicants in the 32.0-39.9 range, including checking their health history and the recommendation of the individual’s medical provider.

The stupidity of this is nearly as mind boggling as the viciousness. Do they think that children with a BMI over 40 WANT to be morbidly obese? Do they think these children aren’t miserable enough without being excluded from a rite of passage within the organization? Do they think even a single child will lose weight that he wouldn’t have lost in order to avoid exclusion from their Jamboree?

They don’t know, and I suspect they don’t care. This isn’t about obesity. This isn’t about helping children. This is about hate, pure and simple. Hatred of others who are different is exhilarating for some and for the haters in the Boy Scouts, times have been tough lately.

In the good old days, you could hate on Black Scouts:

In the South, with the “separate but equal” mindset of the times, black [scouting] troops were not treated equally. They were often not allowed to wear scout uniforms, and had far smaller budgets and insufficient facilities to work with. The BSA on a national level was often defensive about its stance on segregation. “The Boy Scouts of America] never drew the color line, but the movement stayed in step with the prevailing mores.” Even so, there was only one integrated troop before 1954 in the Deep South compared to the frequent occurrence of integration in the North. Also, the Scouts in the South did not support social agencies that were allies of the BSA. The YMCA was historically one of the BSA’s strongest supporters, but in Richmond, Virginia, blacks were not allowed to use the Y’s facilities to earn merit badges, specifically for swimming.

But unfortunately for those who love to hate, racism is now officially repudiated.

No problem. The haters could switch to gay Scouts. For years they kept them out of Scouting, but, alas, 2 months ago,the Boy Scouts of America were forced to acknowledge that homophobia has gone out of style, and voted to “allow” gay Scouts, though not gay Scout leaders.

Thank goodness for the fat boys. Now the Scouts can hate on them. And the best part? The haters can self-righteously proclaim they are doing it to improve the health of American children.

The national jamboree is a “physically demanding experience” being conducted at a “high-adventure site,” the Boy Scouts said on its website. “For that reason, physical standards have been set unique to the jamboree. These standards help highlight some of the challenging terrain at the Summit and types of activities that will take place, all with the goal of keeping participants safe.”

Bullshit!

Are they going to exclude the disabled, too. Maybe that will encourage the paralyzed boys to walk again, just like this is going to encourage the morbidly obese to lose weight. Not!

There is no justification for this policy. It is an expression of the last bastion of hate that is officially tolerated in this country, hatred of those who are overweight.

No doubt the vicious people who thought this up (all with “normal” BMIs) are patting themselves on the back for finding a new way to humiliate children who are already the target of teasing and hurtful words. How good it feels to hate on someone who is different, no matter what the source of that difference!

The Boys Scouts of America should be ashamed of themselves for their unspeakable cruelty. They owe an apology to the boys they have gleefully shamed, humiliated and excluded, for no better reason that they are running out of people they are allowed to hate.

One of the central conceits of the philosophy of attachment parenting is that is recapitulates parenting in nature and that it mimics child rearing among indigenous peoples.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In indigenous societies, “it takes a village to raise a child.” In attachment parenting, it takes only a mother following a rigid set of behaviors, that, in truth, have little or nothing to do with raising healthy, well adjusted children.

Attachment parenting, far from representing the way children were traditionally raised, reflects three very modern notions

1. Attachment parenting is very much an affectation of liberal, democratic societies that place primacy on radical individualism. In attachment parenting, only a mother can raise a child, and not just any mother: only a mother who fetishizes proximity to her young child.

2. Attachment parenting, though an affectation of liberals, actually reflects conservative values. The burden of raising children falls very heavily on women, at the expense of their ability to pursue intellectual endeavors or to achieve financial independence through working outside the home. The wider family has no responsibility to share the burden with the mother. The government has no responsibility for creating conditions that aid mothers in raising children or for supporting families in any way.

3. Attachment parenting is anti-feminist and fundamentalist. At its heart, with its emphasis on vaginal birth, extending breastfeeding, baby wearing and the imperative to be with a baby every moment of every day (including while sleeping), it is about policing women’s bodies to keep women in traditional gender roles and to make it impossible for women to pursue intellectual and economic equality.

Furthermore, attachment parenting has been marketed in ways that confirm its recent origins. Like any successful marketing campaign, the marketing of attachment parenting relies on exploiting insecurities (in this case, insecurities of mothers), encouraging competitiveness (between mothers), and selfishness (encouraging mothers to choose a parenting method that is all about them and their needs, as opposed to what is good for babies).

In “nature,” the central unit of human society is NOT the nuclear family; it is small bands composed of extended families.

In nature, the burden of childrearing is shared with grandmothers and older siblings. Indeed, some researchers believe that menopause confers an evolutionary advantage for humans because women who can no longer bear children turn to nurturing their grandchildren, providing them with significant benefits.

Children benefit by being nurtured and educated by an extended kin group.

Birth and breastfeeding, far from being manifestations of maternal love, are tests of evolutionary fitness. Baby too big to fit through the mother’s pelvis? Too bad! Both mother and baby die. Mother doesn’t make enough breastmilk to fill the baby’s needs? Too bad! Baby dies. Get pregnant quickly and have another one.

Tandem nursing, one of the hallmarks of contemporary attachment parenting, in unusual in animals and rare in humans. When the next baby is born, breastmilk is reserved exclusively for the nurturing of that baby and the older child is not allowed to continue nursing.

Baby wearing is not designed for emotional closeness; it is designed to protect babies from predators while mothers work around or outside the home. Indeed, the need for women to work, both around and outside the home, is integral to the survival of the group in nature. It is therefore profoundly ironic that baby wearing basically forces women to stay home with their children and isolates them from the rest of the group.

Similarly, the family bed is a reflection of the need for group protection, not a focus of nurturing.

Attachment parenting has essentially nothing to do with parenting in nature. It is a modern conceit, based on modern notions of radical individuality and conservative social beliefs about gender.

In nature, it takes a village to raise a child, not a vaginal birth.

I’m not the only one who has figured out that natural childbirth is profoundly anti-feminist.

The New Inquiry interviewed film professor Irene Lusztig on her new documentary The Motherhood Archives.

Here’s Lusztig on the philosophy of natural childbirth:

I’m a filmmaker; I’ve worked a lot with propaganda and archives—my background is in communist, post­communist stuff… So when I was pregnant it became immediately, abundantly obvious to me that almost everything I was reading or seeing or being exposed to was telling me how to give birth or how to be pregnant or how to mother or look after my child. It was clear to me immediately that all of this is an intense space of propaganda.

On the “right” way to give birth:

I just found it helpful and reassuring to think through the intense ideological space of “the right way to give birth,” “the right way to mother,” “the right way to do this or that with your child.” There’s a constant idea that you’re failing, you’re doing it wrong—so for me I just found it hugely reassuring to ­understand that these things are completely culturally bound, historically bound. There is no wrong way to give birth.

On the misogyny of Grantly Dick-Read:

Grantly Dick-Read is the British obstetrician who coined the term natural childbirth and wrote the first books about it. His writing is a very explicitly Christian appeal to the experience of being inside the pain as a form of spirituality. It’s a Christian thing to do. That history has also been erased. It’s kind of ironic that the space feminists occupy now is a redeployment of this incredibly Christian and misogynist argument about women’s bodies.

On the history of pain relief in childbirth and the fact that women demanded twilight sleep:

… [T]he pain of labor is an abject experience of very intense pain. The language that’s used in these books and articles that feminists wrote advocating twilight sleep is basically human-rights discourse: Society has the obligation to give us women this thing that will take away this devastating pain that we experience. It’s a human-rights discourse of equality for women in the form of pain relief. Which is incredibly interesting set next to ­today’s feminist conversation which is all about natural unmedicated childbirth being the correct, feminist way of giving birth…

On inherently high rates of perinatal and maternal mortality:

People have asked me about the word pathological. People think of that as a very bad word, but it comes directly out of earlier writings about childbirth… It comes out of doctors struggling with incredibly high maternal mortality rates and high infant-mortality rates, incredibly high rates of vaginal tearing and bad maternal side-effects from birth, prolapse and all these things that still happen, actually.

Lusztig has identified the central ironies about contemporary natural childbirth: it is profoundly anti-feminist; it was created by misogynists who wished to control women; it is both ahistorical anti-scientific, denying as it does both the need for pain relief and the inherent dangers of childbirth.

There is one more point about natural childbirth that Lusztig doesn’t mention, although she alludes to it:

Natural childbirth advocates, who claim to be “educated,” appear to be utterly clueless that they are being manipulated by propaganda.

Ahhh, the power of the press release.

How else to explain the fanfare with with the latest Cochrane Review on delayed cord clamping was greeted despite the fact that it showed almost no benefit?

To see what I mean, I’ve created the following chart listing all the benefits of delayed cord clamping.

As you can see, the authors looked at a variety of possible benefits of delayed cord clamping and found almost nothing … except slightly higher iron stores (a laboratory value), one that has no clinical effect and probably has no clinical significance.

So why did mainstream media outlets like the New York Times wax rhapsodic on the front page?

But a new analysis has found that delaying clamping for at least a minute after birth, which allows more time for blood to move from the placenta, significantly improves iron stores and hemoglobin levels in newborns …

Um, not exactly. Obviously babies subject to delayed cord clamping had higher hemoglobin levels in the first few days after birth; they got more blood. But that doesn’t mean that higher hemoglobin levels are beneficial and, indeed, the higher hemoglobin levels did not translate to better Apgar scores, less respiratory distress, fewer NICU admissions, or greater breastfeeding success.

Moreover, it did not translate to lower levels of anemia at 3-6 months. Babies in both groups had the same hemoglobin level and hematocrit at that point, suggesting that the initial transfusion of blood from the cord was unnecessary and the baby had to destroy those blood cells to get to a normal hematocrit.

Not surprisingly, babies who had to destroy blood cells ended up with higher iron stores, but there is no evidence that they benefited from this in any way. Indeed, it would be helpful to look at longer term outcomes to determine if the higher iron eventually disappeared, suggesting no advantage to having higher measures of iron stores. The authors actually acknowledge that the apparent difference in iron stores may not be real, and may reflect disparities in the way that iron stores were measure in the individual studies that make up the meta-analysis.

To understand exactly why there are no real benefits to delayed cord clamping, lets do a thought experiment. Let’s pretend that we gave half of newborns a blood transfusion in the immediate aftermath of birth to test the hypothesis that an immediate blood transfusion benefits normal babies. If we measure the same things that the Cochrane investigators measured, we would get exactly the same results. The only “benefit” would be slightly higher iron levels, and even that isn’t guaranteed since the authors are not sure that result is real.

Would we conclude that routine newborn transfusions offered enough benefits to recommend them? Of course we wouldn’t, since it offers no clinical benefits at all.

The exact same thing can be said about delayed cord clamping.

So what’s this paper really about? This paper is about midwives and natural childbirth advocates dissing obstetricians. Indeed the paper was written by midwives who are desperate to find yet another reason to criticize obstetricians. Delayed cord clamping is just a reaction to the fact that obstetricians have traditionally clamped the cord early. As the chart clearly shows (no chart was included in the study since it would have graphically displayed the lack of benefit), there is no clinical benefit to delayed cord clamping and only a difference in laboratory values at 3-6 months that has no bearing on health and may not be really anyway.

Fortunately, delayed cord clamping appears to have no harms, so there’s no reason that we can see (at the moment) not to do it if parents request it. By that reasoning, we could give every newborn a blood transfusion if their parents request it.

So why is everyone jumping up and down about this study?

That’s the power of the press release … and a paper written to maximize clinically irrelevant effects and minimize the absence of clinical benefit.

I wish I were making this up:

From Mama’s Milkies Facebook page:

Fan Share: Hi ! Love your page! I actually did have a midwife at my homebirth and sadly my baby died. He was born still. We couldn’t find his heartbeat and then just didn’t get him out fast enough (had to transfer to hospital and have a csec) it was an attempted vbac. Even after that situation, I am still for home birth. (just not for me) If one of my daughters decided to have a HB I would be all for it…

Demonstrating yet again how common homebirth death is, Tyann chimes in:

I’m so sorry to hear of your loss. My first daughter,Paityn, was stillborn, at home, with a midwife at 40+3. I had my 2nd in a hospital due to preeclampsia but was planned at home and my 3rd at home.

Exactly how many of their own babies have to die before these nitwits figure out the obvious? Homebirth kills babies who didn’t have to die.

As I’ve written in the past (Homebirth and human sacrifice):

“Birth,” like any goddess demands worship. Her power must be acknowledged and her essential goodness must be constantly praised through birth “affirmations.” “Birth” also demands constant evidence of belief. What could possibly be more demonstrative of true faith than the willingness to sacrifice your newborn child?

Unlike the God of the Old Testament in the story of Abraham and Isaac, “Birth” apparently does want and need human sacrifice.

Babies die all the time at homebirth, and the biggest risk factors lead to the greatest number of deaths. As with any religion, believers must then deny that the deity had anything to do with it. Yes, they trusted “Birth” and the baby died, but that was just an incredible coincidence.

It’s easiest to figure out who are the truest believers. They are women who lost babies at homebirth but still trust “Birth.” To demonstrate their continued faith, they immediately being planning for the next homebirth.

It turns out that sacrificing your baby on the altar of “Birth” isn’t the highest form of devotion. That honor is reserved for deliberately placing your next child on the same altar and trusting that the goddess who killed your last baby won’t kill this one, too.