The Skeptical OB

I’ve written before about the tribalism of natural parenting advocates. According to sociologist Jan Macvarish: The idea of ‘parental tribalism’ … [is] descriptive of a tendency among individuals to form their identities through the way they parent, or perhaps more precisely, through differentiating themselves from the way some parents parent and identifying with others … […]

Sometimes I wonder if lactivists think what they say before they say it. Consider this tweet from Dr. Alison Stuebe of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine. Parallels between big tobacco tactics and big formula tactics – look how doubt it being peddled to mother That tweet is offensive on so many levels that it is […]

Is it ethical to lie to patients when you are doing it in their best interests? I suspect most of us would answer ‘no.’ Lying to patients deprives them of moral agency, impairs their ability to give informed consent and is shockingly paternalistic. The liar imagines that he or she knows better than the patient […]

What natural childbirth advocates like Milli Hill don’t know about the neurophysiology of pain could fill a book — or several. Hill recently wrote The myth of the painful birth – and why it’s not nearly so bad as women believe. It is a typical paean to ignorance and disrespect — implying that childbirth pain […]

The title of her piece is the first giveaway, The myth of the painful birth – and why it’s not nearly so bad as women believe. You might have thought that the hours you spent in labor were agonizing, but Milli Hill knows better. Most pregnant women are very scared of labour. But by putting […]

In a fascinating paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics, philosophers Fiona Woollard and Lindsey Porter conclude that mothers do not have a moral duty to breastfeed. The paper is Breastfeeding and defeasible duties to benefit. The authors begin by quoting colleagues Lee and Furedi who deftly summarize the current moral milieu. A process of […]

It is both sad and ironic that the natural childbirth movement, which is supposed to empower women, has ended up disempowering them. Organizations like Human Rights in Childbirth and the Orgasmic Birth movement imagine that they are liberating women to experience the fullness of natural birth. In truth, they are imprisoning women in a view […]

I recently wrote about the way that lactivists, including lactation professionals, invoke “lack of support” as a rationale for ignoring women who can’t or don’t want to breastfeed. Tell lactivists that you don’t want to breastfeed and they’ll insist that you would want to breastfeed if only you received support. Tell lactivists that breastfeeding is […]

Contemporary breastfeeding promotion is based on two lies. The first lie is that breastfeeding is critical to infant health when it isn’t and, in fact, can actually be harmful or deadly. The Fed Is Best Foundation has been doing tremendous work in exposing the lack of scientific evidence for this lie and the injuries to […]

Lactation professionals are beside themselves with fear. The story of a baby Landon who died from dehydration as a result of exclusive breastfeeding has become a tipping point. For years they have been exaggerating the benefits of breastfeeding, denying the risks and contributing to a wave of newborn deaths from both breastfeeding complications and deaths […]