There are times when I could almost feel sorry for Wendy Gordon. Her desperation to fool her followers has become thoroughly pathetic. But then I remember that it takes a special kind of unethical to trick people into ignoring a growing pile of tiny dead bodies for no better reason than that she and her cronies make their money from it.
How desperate is she?
As I’ve noted before, Wendy’s efforts to discredit the Grunebaum study that showed that homebirth increases the risk of 5 minute Apgar score of 0 by nearly 1000% are not going well. As I pointed out, the Grunebaum study comports quite well with the data from Oregon that showed that homebirth increased the risk of death by more than 800%. Others have pointed that out to Wendy, and she has tied herself into a knot trying to explain why we should ignore the correlation.
Here is her pathetic effort:
The Grunebaum study does not examine deaths, so there is no correlation to be made here.
What breathtaking bullshit! The Grunebaum study most certainly looks at deaths since only a vanishing percentage of babies with 5 minute Apgar scores of 0 will survive. Think about it: a 5 minute Apgar score of 0 means that the baby had NO HEARTBEAT for at least 5 minutes. Moreover, the Grunebaum study excludes babies who died in the hours or days after birth so it actually UNDERCOUNTS early neonatal deaths.
A 5 minute Apgar of 0 is a terrible outcome regardless of whether in rare circumstances the baby might survive with significant brain damage and/or cerebral palsy. Wendy is insisting that the two studies have nothing to do with each other because one looks at the almost certainly dead and the other looks at the definitely dead.
The Wendy proceeds to recycle her original crap:
A misclassified death in the homebirth group causes the mortality rate to swing dramatically, while a similar misclassification on the hospital side has essentially no effect.
You’ll get no argument from me that homebirth midwives are ignorant clowns, but even I don’t think they are so incompetent that they can’t tell the difference between a dead baby and a live one.
I believe that midwives are eager to understand what the evidence has to say about the safety of our model of care and the location of birth …
Oh, please, Wendy. You won’t even acknowledge that the studies are true, let alone understand why the events described actually happened.
And guess what? You know those articles “in press” that will reveal the MANA death rates next year. Well it turns out they’re not really “in press” at all.
… When I say “in press”, that means that the research articles are in the hands of the editors and reviewers of the journal to which they have been submitted.
That’s bullshit, too. “In press” means just what it sounds like: the article has been accepted for publication and is being formatted and printed. The MANA “articles” aren’t in press; they haven’t even been accepted for publication and they may NEVER be published.
But Wendy, like the rest of MANA’s homebirth stooges, is so desperate that she is willing to say ANYTHING in order to direct your attention away from the growing pile of tiny dead bodies. The entire executive board of MANA are breathtakingly unethical. The stooges who publicly lie and mislead on behalf of MANA are more concerned about protecting the income they make from pretending to be midwives than whether babies live or die. They literally do not care WHO dies in order to preserve their ability to make money from their birth junkie hobby.
Wendy and MANA’s goal appears to be making stooges out of their followers. They don’t expect to be taken seriously by anyone in the mainstream medical or scientific communities. They’re merely hoping to provide plausible deniability so their gullible followers will continue to pay them for risking their babies’ lives.
Wendy Gordon and the other MANA executives should be embarrassed at their profoundly unethical behavior, but, apparently, nothing embarrasses them. They are stooges, attempting to preserve their income in any way they can, dead babies be damned.
