Head over to the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine blog and watch Melissa Bartick, MD put on a master class in motivated reasoning in her post Worldwide study on sudden infant death finds factors associated with poverty and racism are more important than bedsharing.
What is motivated reasoning?
Motivated reasoning is confirmation bias taken to the next level. Motivated reasoning leads people to confirm what they already believe, while ignoring contrary data. But it also drives people to develop elaborate rationalizations to justify holding beliefs that logic and evidence have shown to be wrong. Motivated reasoning responds defensively to contrary evidence, actively discrediting such evidence or its source without logical or evidentiary justification…
In this case, Dr. Bartick is desperately trying to rationalize her belief that bed sharing must be safe for babies in the face of copious evidence that it is in fact deadly.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Does the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine have the will to promote infant health above breastfeeding?[/pullquote]
It’s hardly surprising that the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine encourages motivated reasoning. They essentially announce it in their motto: “A Worldwide Organization Of Medical Doctors Dedicated To The Promotion, Protection and Support Of Breastfeeding.”
Call me old-fashioned, but I was taught that doctors are ethically obligated to promote the health and wellbeing of PATIENTS, not the protection and support of specific processes:
As a practicing obstetrician, I strove for safe pregnancy, but understood it was my obligation to provide contraception for women who didn’t want to be pregnant.
I strove for safe childbirth, but not when a woman requested a termination.
And although I strove for safe childbirth, I gave way, as I was legally obligated to do, when patients chose a more dangerous course such as Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing blood transfusions in the face of massive hemorrhage.
Why? Because it wasn’t my job to promote anything beyond a patient’s health and wishes.
The members of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine apparently don’t see it that way. They have committed themselves to promoting the process of breastfeeding regardless of whether it is what women want, what is safe for babies or what the scientific evidence shows. Like many doctors before them, they are up front about their paternalistic belief that they know what is good for patients better than patients themselves.
Dr. Bartick and her ABM colleagues have been stunned by the growing number of scientific papers highlighting the dangers of bed sharing. I was too … at first. When I initially saw the evidence about the deadly risks of bed sharing, I wrote posts to debunk them. I had bed shared with my own babies and it was difficult to contemplate that I might have put them at risk. Over the years, however the evidence has become overwhelming and I have accepted that bed sharing nearly triples the risk of sudden infant death syndrome.
Dr. Bartick has engaged in motivated reasoning instead.
Last year she published Babies in boxes and the missing links on safe sleep: Human evolution and cultural revolution, making the absurd claim that bed sharing must be safe because it is a product of human evolution.
Recommendations enforcing separate sleep are based on 20th century Euro‐American social norms for solitary infant sleep and scheduled feedings via bottles of cow’s milk‐based formula, in contrast to breastsleeping, an evolutionary adaptation facilitating the survival of mammalian infants for millennia…
No, Dr. Bartick, recommendations for avoiding bed sharing are based on 21st Century scientific evidence that shows that it nearly triples the risk of SIDS!
That “argument” apparently didn’t persuade anyone beyond the ABM so Bartick now offers a new one, Sudden Infant Death and Social Justice: A Syndemics Approach.
It sounds fancy, but it is basically a plea to ignore the role of bed sharing in sudden infant death.
Employing syndemics theory, we suggest that disproportionately high prevalence of SUID/SIDS is primarily the result of socially driven, co‐occurring epidemics that may act synergistically to amplify risk. SUID must be examined through the lens of structural inequity and the legacy of historical trauma. Emphasis on bedsharing may divert attention from risk reduction from structural interventions, breastfeeding, prenatal care, and tobacco cessation.
In other words, let’s ignore the role of bed sharing, which is easy to modify, and focus on structural inequality, which is extroardinarily difficult to modify.
That makes no sense … unless you are committed to promoting breastfeeding above preventing infant deaths.
In her ABM post, Dr. Bartick offers this deadly nonsense:
While the issue of improving overcoming the world’s worse SUID rates may seem daunting, some of these problems are low-hanging fruit. Bedsharing combined with smoking is extremely hazardous, and while it’s difficult to change bedsharing behavior as it’s a strong biological imperative, we can affect smoking by raising tobacco prices.
Do these folks ever listen to themselves? Smoking, despite being pharmacologically addictive, is “easier” to prevent than bed sharing? A strong biological imperative? Where’s the evidence for that claim? Oh, right; there isn’t any.
Dr. Bartick asks:
The question is, does the US have the political will to prevent its own infants from dying?
Yes, we have the political will to prevent infant deaths. That why we counsel women not to bed share since bed sharing KILLS!
The real question is: does the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine have the will to promote infant health above breastfeeding? When you consider their sluggish to non-existent responses to scientific evidence showing aggressive breastfeeding promotion is injuring and killing infants through dehydration, kernicterus and smothering, the tragic answer is “no.”
