Today’s post on Science and Sensibility is an object lesson in everything that is wrong with contemporary natural childbirth advocacy. The post is entitled The Importance of Understanding and Reversing Disparities in Maternal Health Outcomes, and it proports to be a good faith examination of the high maternal mortality rate among women of color in […]
No mother should ever die at homebirth. Maternal deaths in the hospital are unusual; perinatal deaths are 100 times more common. There are so few maternal deaths in the developed world that they are measured per 100,000 and most of the women who die have serious medical complications like cardiac disease or pre-existing medical conditions. […]
If you want to understand the gulf that separates natural childbirth advocates from obstetricians, check out the latest midwifery and obstetric journals. No, none of this month’s issues have a paper about the difference. Rather, it is the type of papers in each that illustrate the difference. Let’s start with the natural childbirth journal Birth, […]
There has always been something Orwellian about natural childbirth, from it inception in a monstrous racist lie (primitive women don’t have pain in childbirth) to its insistence on euphemism (rushes = contractions, vocalizing = screaming). Natural childbirth employs a form of “Newspeak,” author George Orwell’s term for language designed to prevent the thinking of prohibited […]
Earlier this year I criticized a paper that claimed that the Birthplace study showed that homebirth is cost effective. … the study CAN’T tell us about cost effectiveness since it does not take into account the largest costs, the costs of caring for a child injured during birth and the massive costs associated with legal […]
Imagine if someone wrote an article entitled, What is the Evidence for Treating Chest Pain in Healthy Men? and claimed: There is no evidence that hospitalization for chest pain in men improves outcome. Makes it sound like there is no reason for a man to worry if he has chest pain, no reason to call […]
Death at homebirth is becoming such a common phenomenon that I now have to write about homebirth deaths and disasters in groups. Here’s are the deaths and disasters I’ve learned about in the last week. They have a common theme: the insistence that everything is “normal” when it is not. #1 When Intuition Fails (postpartum […]
This piece is not satire. I have complained several times that it is getting harder and harder to parody homebirth advocates and lactivists. No matter how outrageous the parody, there is a comparable example in real life. Several days ago I wrote a satire entitled Natural childbirth is a risk factor for tyranny. I was […]
Imagine that there was a simple, safe and highly effective treatment that prevents the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention cervical cancer and penile cancer. Sounds too good to be true, right? But it is true. It’s not a medication, it’s not a vaccine, it’s … circumcision! I’ve taken […]
In light of the fact that the Echo comment system is being discontinued in a few weeks, I’ve been forced to move the comments to a new system. I also took the opportunity to move to a new server, which allows more options in blog design. The switch is imperfect. Although all the blog posts […]
Dr. Amy Tuteur is an obstetrician gynecologist. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1979 and her medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine in 1984. Dr. Tuteur is a former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. She left the practice of medicine to raise her four children. Her book, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting (HarperCollins) was published in 2016. She can be reached at DrAmy5 at aol dot com... More
The Skeptical OB Copyright © 2024. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Designed by 
