The Skeptical OB

Vaginal birth may be natural but it can also be very damaging. It has long been known that C-section reduces the risk of subsequent urinary incontinence. Now a new study provides evidence that C-section also protects the nerves responsible for pelvic sensation. The study is The impact of pregnancy and childbirth on pelvic sensation: a […]

Natural childbirth advocates profess confusion that the promotion of “normal, physiological” birth is disrespectful to women who make different choices. To help them understand why their rhetoric is hurtful, hateful and utterly self referential, I offer a thought experiment. Let’s apply the philosophy of “normal” birth to sex. Below is a paraphrase of a natural […]

Breastfeeding rates have risen dramatically over the past 50 years and NONE of the predicted benefits for infant health have come to pass. Why not? Because breastfeeding is SOCIALLY patterned (breastfeeding is closely associated with higher socio-economic status) and most of the purported benefits of breastfeeding are actually benefits of maternal wealth, education and access […]

I’ve been writing for years about the way that science has been misused to support ideological movements like natural childbirth, lactivism and attachment parenting. I’ve been writing most recently about the way that science is being misused to support ideological movements like gentle parenting and neuroparenting. Both are scientism, not science. What’s the difference? Science […]

One hundred years ago the people who Americans now refer to as the “Greatest Generation” were children and young adults. That was the generation that lived through a massive financial depression and grew to fight an existential war against Nazi Germany. In contrast, if we were to characterize the contemporary generation of children and young […]

A joke: First Fish: “How’s the water?” Second Fish: ”What the hell is water?” What applies to fish and water also applies to humans and culture. When you’re surrounded by it, you are often unaware that it is there. Hence most of us are oblivious to the culture of therapeutic parenting within which we have […]

Tongue tie surgery (frenotomy) is the new tonsillectomy. It’s a surgery that is necessary for certain narrow indications but has become extremely popular to treat conditions that don’t need treatment. Even members of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine have been forced to conclude that it is often poorly done, often wrongly done and harms babies. […]

Is attachment parenting ”best”? It’s critical to interrogate the dominant philosophy of contemporary parenting to understand whether it is truly the best way to parent children or merely a reflection of unexamined beliefs about the role of women, market culture and subconscious racism and classism. The ‘good’ attached mother: An analysis of postmaternal and postracial […]

Attachment parenting has become the dominant parenting philosophy in Western countries in the early 21st Century. The ostensible reason is because it’s good for babies, making them more securely attached, happier and ultimately more productive citizens. That has been the justification for government promotion of policies that are based on AP recommendations. Such policies include […]

Do the purported benefits of breastfeeding really exist or are they merely artifacts of wealth, health and privilege. A new paper dramatically demonstrates what happens to the benefits of breastfeeding when you take confounding variables into account. The paper is To what extent does confounding explain the association between breastfeeding duration and cognitive development up […]