The Skeptical OB

Nearly all studies on the purported benefits of breastfeeding over formula feeding are meaningless. Why? Because the choice of the comparison groups is beset by a disabling flaw. Nearly all breastfeeding studies compare two groups of infants, those that have been breastfed and those that have not. Babies who were breastfed but failed to thrive […]

Natural childbirth advocates like to say that “there’s more to birth than a healthy baby.” Duh! No one ever said otherwise. That’s why epidurals and maternal request C-sections should be available to anyone who wants them. They’ve chosen a specific birth experience because there’s more to birth than a healthy baby; there’s pain relief and […]

It’s confusing. The UK, with an elaborate system for studying maternity care, publishes reams of statistics about stillbirths, perinatal mortality, infant mortality and maternal mortality through MBRRACE-UK, Mothers And Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries. Here’s the latest publication UK Perinatal Deaths for Births from January to December 2017. In 266 pages, with […]

It is a sad fact that women are the biggest fans by far of contemporary charlatanism. It’s true for astrology and tarot cards, and equally true for health quackery like reiki and homeopathy. In the paper The appeal of medical quackery: A rhetorical analysis, pharmacists Widder and Anderson note that believers in quackery are likely […]

What do you do when you desperately want to believe in something and there is no scientific evidence to support it? You call it “other ways of knowing”! What do other ways of knowing look like in practice? They look like this: Including the nonrational is sensible midwifery, by Jenny A. Parratt, and Kathleen M. […]

A piece in today’s Guardian asks the intriguing question: Is breastfeeding incompatible with American capitalism? And while it reaches the right answer — yes, it is incompatible — it fails to note the right reason: breastfeeding is promoted so aggressively precisely BECAUSE it is incompatible with capitalism. La Leche League, the engine of contemporary lactivism, […]

The New York Times Op-Ed Who’s Afraid of Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop? by Elisa Albert and Jennifer Block is offensive for a variety of reasons. It’s offensive because it is another example of a prestigious news outlet publishing alternative “facts.” It’s offensive because it sugar coats the rabid consumerism promoted by a profit driven corporation. And […]

It pretends to be transgressive but it promotes a thoroughly capitalist, rabid consumerism. Because it’s really about money. It venerates romanticized “traditional” wellness practices that not only were never practiced by our foremothers, but are thoroughly modern. Because it’s really about money. It stresses feminist empowerment by perpetuating the misogynist belief that irrational thought is […]

The US maternal mortality rate has become a scandal. Too many women, particularly women of color, die of pregnancy related causes or in the year after giving birth. But a comparable scandal, in my view, is how we let maternal mortality rise so high. We deliberately ignored the actual data about maternal mortality in favor […]

Another day, another scandal in UK midwifery care. This time it’s not dead babies and dead mothers, all though there are far too many of those. This time it’s the sadistic behavior of midwives. According to The Telegraph: Women in labour are being denied epidurals by NHS hospitals, amid concern that a “cult of natural […]