Earth to homebirth advocates:
Have you noticed that you are being treated like gullible fools?
It appears that everyone in the universe knows that the MANA homebirth statistics paper shows that homebirth with a non-nurse midwife has a horrific death rate except for you.
Melissa Cheyney, Wendy Gordon and other MANA executives presented the data but simply told bald faced lies about what it means. They figured you are so gullible that you’d willingly lap up the lies and pretend they were truth.
MANA itself cannot find a single obstetrician, neonatologist, pediatrician, epidemiologist, or ethicist who is not directly affiliated with the homebirth movement to support their claims. But they imagine you are too stupid to notice.
Lamaze is so convinced the study is a piece of utter crap that their “references” to support it are The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post, as well as their own blog, Science and Sensibility.
No problem. They figure you guys are such morons that you will Facebook and tweet these links as if they are actual reference.
Now Aviva Romm, MD finds herself in a bind about these MANA statistics.
Dr. Romm is no fool. She received a prize for graduating at the top of her class at Yale Medical School. No doubt she values her reputation for academic achievement and isn’t about to risk it by lying to support MANA in their own prevarications. So when I asked her point blank about analyzing the MANA paper and the Grunebaum abstract, she dithered:
Awww. Statistics are too hard for Aviva. And if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
I jumped on her “inability” to analyze the statistics for herself (although I restrained myself from pointing out that if she doesn’t understand statistics, how does she know homebirth is safe?):
It’s not easy to find someone willing to go along with this little charade since, as a variety of math and stats people pointed out to me, there are no statistics involved in the analyses. It’s all elementary school math.
Fortunately, a math PhD did come through and volunteered to analyze the papers. I promptly notified Aviva on Facebook and Twitter and prepared to be ignored. No professional homebirth advocate can afford to be part of an independent analysis of the data because they KNOW the MANA paper shows that homebirth has a perinatal death rate at least 450% higher than comparable risk hospital birth. I never believed that Aviva would go through with an independent analysis and the only reason I suggested it is to show other homebirth advocates the truth … that American women are being taken for chumps and fools by people who know that homebirth kills babies and don’t want them to find out.
After being ignored for more than 24 hours I sent a tweet this morning and got a prompt reply, weaseling out of the agreement, just as expected.
Actually, Aviva, the title of the piece is Stupid is the new black and, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not interested in papering over the preventable deaths of babies at homebirth with faux “courtesy” even if you are.
And I hardly think that lying about whether you can analyze the MANA paper, which you KNOW shows that homebirth kills babies, was showing me courtesy in the first place.
So thank you, Dr. Romm, for doing exactly what I always expect you quacks like you to do. No self-respecting quack homebirth advocate would ever be caught in a position where she couldn’t delete the truth. It’s nice to know that for professional homebirth advocates, their ability to fool the gullible public is more important to them than whether innocent babies live or die.
So professional homebirth advocates will continue to lie about deaths at homebirth. The only outstanding question is whether lay homebirth advocates will continue to believe them.
