The Skeptical OB

I wrote a piece that appeared on Slate on Friday. Will the Tide Ever Turn on Breastfeeding? highlights the fact that most of the promised benefits of breastfeeding have never appeared. Worse, aggressive breastfeeding promotion is harmful. There has been an increase in babies falling from their mothers’ hospital beds or suffocating [due to forced […]

Why are natural childbirth and breastfeeding advocates relentlessly looking for a physical cause for a mental health problem? As part of their ongoing effort to demonize both C-sections and formula feeding, they seem desperate to show that mode of birth or “failure” to breastfeed are risk factors for postpartum depression. But why would anyone think […]

Every time I read the term ‘mother-baby dyad’ I cringe. Inevitably what follows is an admonition to the mother or her providers to sacrifice her needs, desires and comfort for the “good” of the baby. The mother-baby dyad is used to justify forcing women to room in with their infants in hospitals, the closing of […]

NPR recently published a chilling piece. She Wanted To Be The Perfect Mom, Then Landed In A Psychiatric Unit details the horrifying experience of a woman who suffered from postpartum psychosis. Lisa wanted to be the perfect mom. She was ready to be the perfect mom. She and her husband lived in San Francisco, and […]

I’ve heard from quite a few women that they initially found my website when they were googling “am I a bad mother for not breastfeeding?” or something similar. They write with gratitude that I reassured them that breastfeeding has nothing to do with it, that the benefits of breastfeeding have been exaggerated, and that their […]

We can thank the Editors at Scientific American for illustrating the famous H.L Mencken quote: …[T]here is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. The U.S. Needs More Midwives for Better Maternity Care is a truly execrable piece lacking common sense, scientific support and historical accuracy. It’s neat, plausible […]

Yesterday I wrote about Meg Nagle, the Milk Meg, and her strenuous efforts to normalize infant starvation and maternal exhaustion. She’s hardly alone; nearly all lactation professionals have been desperately working to normalize infant suffering. It’s integral to the ongoing effort to promote breastfeeding regardless of the increasing rate of neonatal dehydration, starvation, brain injuries, […]

I have an advantage over most of you, including most lactation professionals. I’m old enough to remember when neither infant starvation nor maternal exhaustion were touted as “normal.” I did my medical training — and I breastfed my four children — before promoting breastfeeding was deformed by lactation professionals into dystopian efforts to force women […]

Natural childbirth advocates and lactivists like to claim that I hate vaginal births and breastfeeding. Never mind that I had four vaginal births and breastfed all four of my children. It seems beyond their powers of reasoning to imagine that someone could choose something for herself without insisting that everyone else ought to choose it […]

This is public service announcement on how to protect yourself from misogynistic mothering bullshit (MMB). Sadly, too much of what passes for parenting advice in 2019 is MMB. Consider the latest example. Why it’s actually a good thing if your baby doesn’t sleep through the night is misogynistic mothering bullshit of the highest order, involving […]