Many women are confused about the safety of homebirth. On the one hand, homebirth midwives insist that it is as safe (or safer!) that hospital birth. On the other hand, obstetricians insist that it increases the risk of perinatal death; that’s why most refuse to attend them. The situation is further complicated by dueling scientific […]
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Lactimidation
What if I told you that in an effort to promote weight loss a hospital refuses to provide food to obese patients? If they want to eat, they’ll have to purchase and bring their own. Disgusting, right? What if I told you that in an effort to promote contraceptive use a hospital refuses to provide […]
Overselling the benefits of skin-to-skin … and ignoring the risks
Pediatrician Clay Jones has a great piece today on The Scientific Parent, Recent Reports of Skin-to-Skin Benefits Fail to Mention Key Infant Safety Risks: The Kangaroo Mother Care concept was introduced in the the late ’70s in developing countries as an alternative solution to incubators, where access to them and more complex healthcare for infants […]
How does having a homebirth compare to not using a car seat?
In the last 30 years we have engaged in a huge public health campaign to increase the use of car seats. Not only have we spent millions, we’ve enacted laws that actually make it illegal for parents to drive infants without buckling them into car seats. The campaign has been spectacularly successful. According to the […]
The increased risk of death at out of hospital birth isn’t small after all
The new out of hospital birth study, Planned Out-of-Hospital Birth and Birth Outcomes, by Snowden et al. is getting a lot of media attention. As I explained in yesterday’s post the authors deliberately soft pedaled the findings: Dr. Aaron Caughey, a co-author who heads the university’s obstetrics department, said the researchers consciously adopted a nonjudgmental […]
Out of hospital birth increases the risk of death! Who could have seen that coming?
A new paper just published in The New England Journal shows — yet again — that homebirth in the US increases the risk of perinatal death. The paper is Planned Out-of-Hospital Birth and Birth Outcomes by Snowden et al. I’m not surprised. I’ve been saying the same thing for nearly two decades. [pullquote align=”right” color=”#000000″ […]
2015: This year in homebirth deaths and disasters
As the end of the year approaches, it is time for the grim task of recapping the deaths and disasters from 2015. The toll of homebirth deaths and disasters, most presided over by homebirth midwives, is, above all, a shocking indictment of the second, inferior class of counterfeit American midwives known as CPMs (certified professional […]
Breastfeeding prevents climate change? Really, Dr. Newman?
I wrote yesterday about the increasing desperation of lactivists in the wake of revelations that they have grossly exaggerated the benefits of breastfeeding in industrialized countries in order to support the breastfeeding industry. Dr. Melissa Bartick stooped to character assassination. Now, another major professional lactivist, Dr. Jack Newman, offers undoubtedly the most creative, albeit the […]
Dr. Melissa Bartick owes Courtney Jung an apology
Well that didn’t take long. Lactivists have faced the first real public challenge to their misrepresentation of the scientific evidence about breastfeeding, and they’ve already sunk to character assassination. I suppose that was only to be expected since they have no scientific evidence to dispute the central arguments in Courtney Jung’s book, Lactivism. Not surprisingly, […]
The gift we can give other mothers for the holidays: support instead of shame
There is a gift that we could give to each other each and every day, and the holiday season would be a great time to start. What is that gift? Replace words of shaming with words of support. I’ve thought a lot about the concept of shame, especially in relation to the package of mothering […]
Amy Tuteur, MD
Dr. Amy Tuteur is an obstetrician gynecologist. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1979 and her medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine in 1984. Dr. Tuteur is a former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. She left the practice of medicine to raise her four children. Her book, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting (HarperCollins) was published in 2016. She can be reached at DrAmy5 at aol dot com... More
