The Skeptical OB

I recently came across a slide from a UK healthcare conference that offered a truly horrifying fact: The UK National Health Service is now spending more on maternity negligence claims than on maternity care! It’s hard to imagine a greater indictment of UK midwife led maternity care. If you want to understand why this tragic […]

The headlines are chilling: Dramatic’ rise in babies dying in their sleep: Harvard study warns safe-sleep guidelines have done nothing to reduce infant deaths in 25 years. Sudden deaths in newborns have not fallen in the last 25 years despite safe sleep guidelines, according to new research. In fact, the rate of babies dying from […]

The deadly UK midwifery Campaign for Normal Birth has been thoroughly discredited by harrowing reports of dozens of perinatal and maternal deaths, nearly £2 bn in liability payments, and the shocking admission that the UK is paying more to support the babies injured by maternity providers than to actually provide care. In response to the […]

I’ve written a great deal about midwives’ reflexive demonization of C-sections, but even I didn’t think they’d stoop to this. Ginger Breedlove, CNM, former President of the American College of Nurse Midwives, and current Senior Vice President of Clinical Operations at Baby+Company, a birth center consortium, posted this tweet on Feb. 9. We lost a […]

Yesterday I wrote about the way in which bullying can masquerade as science. I used the example of the now discredited “science” of eugenics to draw parallels with the contemporary “science” of natural mothering. Today I’d like to draw several more parallels between eugenics and contemporary breastfeeding research. [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Both […]

Its leaders have always felt that they are using science to improve society. Nature is a brilliant arbiter in ordering the natural world and can rarely be improved upon. It should, however, be supported by policies that give deference to the natural. Defenders claims that it’s not matter of ideology. Countless studies have shown the […]

Pardon my profanity, but what the fuck is wrong with people? That was my thought when I read a paper published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics. The paper is Association of Rooming-in With Outcomes for Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome; A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis by MacMillan et al. [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]It sounds like […]

Midwives are panicking over a new study. According to the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine, where the data was presented last week: [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Interventions improve birth outcomes and letting nature take its course in pregnancy is far from the best decision.[/pullquote] In a study with more than 6,100 pregnant women across […]

In a brilliant deduction, lactivist Prof. Amy Brown has come to the amazing conclusion that women who are bullied by lactivists are harmed by the bullying. There’s a simple solution to the problem: lactivists could stop using lies about breastfeeding — specifically the claim that insufficient breastmilk is rare and the massively exaggerated claims of […]

O tempora, O mores! Oh, the times! Oh, the customs! Cicero famously wrote these words more than 2000 years ago to deplore the breakdown of traditional values. He was referring to the political corruption of his day, but it has been used repeatedly since then to deplore any departure from the supposedly “good old days.” […]