Natural parenting is working. No, not for children, silly! There’s no evidence that it has improved children’s lives. Rates of children’s psychiatric problems, including suicide, have never been worse. It’s working on mothers just as it was designed to do. The holy trinity of natural child-rearing — natural childbirth, breastfeeding and attachment parenting — was […]
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Melissa Bartick and the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine give a master class in motivated reasoning.
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 […]
The UK midwifery empire strikes back
I almost feel sorry for the older generation of UK midwives. They were taught by other midwives that midwifery hegemony was the key to safer outcomes, maternal satisfaction and tremendous cost savings. Faced with evidence of major failures on all three counts, they are struggling with serious cognitive dissonance. There have been a myriad of […]
Are women socialized to fear childbirth or are midwives socialized to pretend childbirth isn’t fearful?
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? That question came to mind when I read an article in today’s Guardian, Growing childbirth terror disorder ‘fuelled by social media’. Catriona Jones, a lecturer in midwifery at the University of Hull, who has studied tocophobia, believes social media is partly to blame for the phenomenon. Speaking […]
UK midwifery, an alternate world of internal legitimacy
Bravo to Milli Hill for being willing (at least temporarily) to engage outside her comfort zone of UK midwives and natural childbirth advocates. She unblocked a number of midwifery critics in an effort to convince them of the rightness of her convictions. But like an anti-vaxxer, Milli appears to be utterly flummoxed that we aren’t […]
Breastfeeding bombshell: Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative declared unsafe!
Four years ago this week I first wrote that the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative posed a deadly risk to babies. I referred to a recently published paper about deaths and near deaths of babies who were smothered in their mothers’ hospital beds. Since that time, evidence of the dangers of breastfeeding have expanded to include […]
We can prevent maternal deaths by recognizing that childbirth is inherently dangerous
Imagine that we set up our system of cardiology care like this: Our bedrock assumption is that hearts are to be trusted. We reduce screening measures since they only lead to more tests. We deny that risks factors have any relevance. We put initial cardiac care into the hands of nurses who have limited training […]
No, breastfeeding does NOT improve maternal health
I’ve repeatedly noted that the evidence for the purported benefits of breastfeeding for babies is weak, conflicting and riddled with confounders. The actual benefits of breastfeeding are tiny, limited to 8% fewer colds and 8% fewer episodes of diarrheal illness across the entire population of infants in their first year. The evidence for purported maternal […]
Breastfeeding, cognitive dissonance and effort justification
Breast is NOT best. Sure, all else being equal, fully fed with breastmilk by a well off, mentally healthy mother with access to high quality healthcare and high quality childcare who has freely chosen to breastfeed and has sufficient breastmilk has tiny benefits compared to formula feeding; but all else is rarely equal. Indeed, the […]
Be afraid, Baby Friendly USA, be very, very afraid!
The single most important thing every prospective mother needs to know about breastfeeding is this: it has serious risks as well as benefits. Baby Friendly USA is petrified that women will find out. Sadly for the babies who have been injured and died and their grieving families, we found out the risks of breastfeeding hard […]
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
