Anti-vaxxers, help me out here. There’s something I don’t understand. You have been aggressively campaigning against California Senate Bill 277 introduced in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak. SB277 would do away with personal vaccine exemptions, meaning that all children would be required to be fully vaccinated in order to go to public or […]
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For Mother’s Day: let’s be more MOM-passionate, less MOM-petitive
On this Mother’s Day, I have a wish for mothers: I wish for a society that is more MOM-passionate and less MOM-petitive. Mothering is a difficult job involving just about every physical and emotional resource a woman can call upon. From the physical pain of childbirth to the emotional pain of leaving a child at […]
Everything wrong with the American enchantment with “natural” in one simple image
A picture is worth a thousand words. People (myself included) have devoted tens of thousands of words to debunking the American love affair with the naturalistic fallacy, but none of us has come close to the unwitting brilliance Briana Santoro* of The Naked Label. Using a quote from Diane Sanfilippo, Santoro created an image that […]
Both natural parenting and religious fundamentalism reflect fear of women’s emancipation
Arguably the greatest civil rights achievement of the 20th Century was the emancipation of women. For all of human existence, women had been relegated to secondary, nearly subservient, status. For the first time ever, some women in some societies were able to take their place alongside men, finally achieving political, intellectual and legal equality. I […]
It’s time for a new paradigm: the materna-centered model of care
The 20th Century was a golden age for maternity care. With the advent of modern obstetrics, childbirth went from a routinely deadly event to a rarely deadly advent. A myriad of interventions, from antibiotics to blood banking, from safer anethestia to safer C-sections, from neonatal ventilators to surfactant led to a 99% drop in maternal […]
Natural childbirth has always been about keeping women in their place
Yesterday I wrote about Sheila Kitzinger’s acknowledgment that many feminists consider natural childbirth to be deeply anti-feminist because of its baseline assumption that agonizing pain is good for women, and its glorification of women’s reproductive organs ahead of their minds, talents and characters. It’s hardly surprising that natural childbirth is deeply retrograde and anti-feminist. The […]
Sheila Kitzinger was right about childbirth and feminism
Sheila Kitzinger was a brilliant and incisive cultural anthropologist and remained so until the very end. Her last piece, an excerpt from her final book, printed in today’s Daily Mail under the title Why feminists HATE natural childbirth …, is an unwitting acknowledgement of what I have been writing for years: Natural childbirth is deeply […]
Why natural childbirth advocates think other women’s births are their business: Duchess of Cambridge edition
Oooh, oooh, oooh, have you heard that the Duchess of Cambridge labored at home for hours? Have you heard that she didn’t have an epidural? Have you heard that she “bonded” with her midwives? Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that the famously private Duchess is unlikely to share the intimate details of […]
Food, sex and the American obsession with purity
Is food the new sex? That’s the question that Mary Eberstadt asked in her 2009 paper in Policy Review. Today, when sexual license is embraced and even glorified, eating is becoming encumbered with ever more rules. Or as Eberstadt notes, our society has gone from sexually puritanical and licentious about food, to sexually licentious and […]
The extraordinary conceit of being an anti-vaxxer
In the past week readers of this blog have been treated to a display of mindblowing egotism on the part of anti-vaxxers. A comment thread on a post dating back to 2009 blew up (1800 comments and counting) when anti-vaxxers invaded, and it’s hard to imagine a crew of people displaying a greater level of […]
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
