The Skeptical OB

I’ve been writing for years about how the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) is harming babies. The incidence of severe dehydration, sometimes accompanied by permanent brain damage, is rising. Also rising is the incidence of skull fractures of babies who fall from their mothers’ hospital beds and smothering deaths when mothers fall asleep while feeding or […]

I write a lot about scientific papers, policy and philosophy around childbirth, breastfeeding and mothering. But papers, policy and philosophical principles aren’t very helpful when you are up at 2 AM crying with exhaustion — trying to breastfeed a baby screaming from hunger — and convinced you are a bad mother. That’s why I’ve created […]

Lactation professionals have been successful in their attempt to “normalize” breastfeeding … and the harm has been incalculable while the benefits have been virtually imperceptible. At this point, breastfeeding is the leading cause of newborn hospital readmission. 1 out of every 71 (!) exclusively breastfed newborns is readmitted to the hospital for complications of breastfeeding, […]

Emotional grooming is the practice of manipulating an individual into a position of trust, vulnerability and isolation for the purpose of exploitation. It’s commonly used to describe the tactics preparatory to child sexual abuse, but it applies whenever a powerful person maneuvers another into a situation that benefits the former at the expense of the […]

Lawyer and birth rights activist Bashi Hazard refuses to answer the question I posed: What’s the difference between a doctor who performs a painful exam over a woman’s protests and a midwife who denies an epidural over a woman’s protests? [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The ugly truth is that Hazard and Hill aren’t […]

Yesterday I asked: What’s the difference between a doctor who performs a painful exam over a woman’s protests and a midwife who denies an epidural over a woman’s protests? I was responding to the claim by human rights lawyer Bashi Hazard that an increasing number of women are likening their experience of childbirth to assault […]

It happened 37 years ago, but I never forgot. I was on my medical school obstetrics rotation and had just watched the birth of a baby. The mother had sustained a large second degree tear and the obstetrician was repairing it … without anesthetic. It would have been easy to give the mother local anesthesia […]

You cannot understand the contemporary discourse around mothering in the US without understanding this central reality: Every woman is the hero of her own mothering story. That’s the essence of the mommy-wars. It has nothing to do with children, although children are ostensibly the focus; it has nothing to do with science, although science is […]

Natural mothering advocates like to imply that the natural is political. For example, they absurdly claim “peace on earth begins with birth.” The implication is that because we’ve deviated from natural childbirth, we’ve been punished with an epidemic of violence. It’s nonsensical because for most of human existence, childbirth has been entirely natural and violence […]

I’ve written over and over again about the way that lactation professionals lie to women, promoting breastfeeding over the wellbeing of mothers and babies. Every time a lactation professional claims insufficient breastmilk is rare when it is common, she lies. Every time a lactation professional claims second night syndrome isn’t hunger, she lies. Every time […]