About
Amy Tuteur, MD is an obstetrician-gynecologist. In 1979, she received a BA in Biochemical Sciences cum laude from Harvard College in 3 years, at the age of 20. She received her MD degree from Boston University School of Medicine in 1984. Tuteur completed her internship and residency at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital (currently Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center). She practiced obstetrics at both the Beth Israel Hospital and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and held an appointment as a Clinical Instructor in Obstetrics at Harvard Medical School.
She is the author of How Your Baby is Born (Ziff-Davis Press, 1994), the first illustrated guide to labor and delivery. She is also the author of numerous articles on women’s health in medical encyclopedias and on websites.
Dr. Tuteur started her writing career on the web in 1994, running a question and answer message board for Moms Online called “Ask the OB-GYN.” She ran a similar message board for iEmily, a healthcare website for teen girls in 2000.
She started the blog Homebirth Debate in 2006, which transitioned to The Skeptical OB in 2009.
Dr. Tuteur is well known in the mainstream press for questioning the received wisdom on natural childbirth and breastfeeding and has been interviewed widely on topics ranging from homebirth to breastfeeding to feminist theory. She has written for Time.com, The New York Times, The London Times, The Boston Globe, the online magazine Salon, and the website Science Based Medicine. She has been quoted in The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, and the medical publications Medscape, American Medical News and Contemporary OB-GYN among other publications.
Dr. Tuteur has been interviewed on National Public Radio (NPR) and HuffPost Live video, and the “Fox and Friends” TV show, as well as numerous local radio programs, and she has been the subject of podcast interviews on the websites Parenting Beyond Belief, Point of Inquiry, and Feminist Currents.
Her readers include everyone from laypeople to professionals. Though most readers are mothers of infants and small children, many are physicians. She was invited to address the American College of Obstetrician Gynecologists (ACOG) Regional Conference in Maui in September 2013, on the subject of homebirth.
Tuteur notes:
“I’ve learned over the years that claims like mine require a presentation of my bona fides. No, not my college and medical school training, nor my years of internship, residency and private practice. I’m talking about my bona fides as a mother, since opponents try to dismiss my presentation of the scientific evidence as sour grapes from someone who couldn’t muster the requisite “achievements.” It is assumed that where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit, but that doesn’t apply in this case. I have four children (adults and college age now). All were born vaginally after easy labors, two with epidurals and two without. I breastfed all four children until they weaned themselves. I carried them around all the time and my husband and I had an “open bed” policy that resulted in many nights of a small child splayed in the middle of our bed and the two of us trying to sleep while clinging to the edge and hoping to avoid falling out.
But if I’ve learned anything from practicing medicine and from more than 25 years as a mother, it is this: what works for me and my family is not necessarily what is best for anyone else. The experience of practicing medicine allowed me to meet people from every walk of life, every ethnic group, and every culture. I learned that there are a lot of ways to successfully raise children. That conviction has only been strengthened by watching the children of my friends, and the friends of my children grow up. Many were raised very differently, and they turned out to be happy, confident, accomplished young adults.
My observations led to me to a fundamental conclusion: the most important thing for children is the sense that their parents love them. The specific method of birth, infant nourishment, and how many hours they were held each day is irrelevant.”
Dr. Tuteur’s new book PUSH BACK: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting will be released on 4/5/16.
