The Skeptical OB

StatNews describes it as a blunder: The global health community is struggling to make sense of a blunder that has shaken confidence in the new director-general of the World Health Organization and given rise to concerns — both outside and within the WHO — about the impact the episode will have on the credibility of […]

Dear Dr. Wen, I just read your piece on NPR, Learning To Care For My Newborn Was A Humbling Experience, and I’m disappointed. You wrote about how your son suffered breastfeeding complications, and it sounds like he really did suffer, screaming desperately from hunger for 48 hours: [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Eli didn’t […]

I’m not often surprised these days, but I was surprised about this. Christie del Castillo-Hegyi, MD and Jody Segrave-Daly RN, IBCLC of the Fed Is Best Foundation recently met with breastfeeding experts at the World Health Organization about the issue of babies starving, suffering brain injuries and dying due to insufficient breastmilk. They were told […]

I’ve been writing about this issue for more than a decade: the stress, shame and guilt of contemporary mothering ideology. Now it has hit the mainstream with the cover of TIME Magazine: The Goddess Myth, How a Vision of Perfect Motherhood Hurts Moms. As Claire Howorth notes in the cover article, Motherhood Is Hard to Get […]

They were announced with great fanfare. In a document entitled Safe Prevention of the Primary Cesarean Delivery, The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine recommended dropping the Friedman curves of labor progress and offered new standards for normally progressing labor: [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Despite delaying the […]

On Sunday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, speaking about his genitalia, declared: “I checked. I’m fully intact.” Tillerson was responding to Senator Bob. Corker’s criticizing President Trump’s public undercutting of his Tillerson on the issue of North Korea: “You cannot publicly castrate your own Secretary of State …” [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]For a […]

Our deepest assumptions often go unexamined. That’s especially true if we live in a culture that takes those same assumptions for granted. One of the central assumptions of modern, Western culture is that raising happy, healthy children requires that mothers suffer. I suspect that this bedrock assumption goes back at least to the Book of […]

Sugh a tragic, senseless waste of life! From The Sun: Rhianne Statom-Barnett, 30, was worried the prescription-only medication might affect her three-month-old son George through the transfer of baby milk. Her mother explains what happened when Rhianne developed a severe ear infection: [pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Cause of death: the culture of maternal self-neglect […]

Heeeee’s baaaaack! Michel Odent is back with another of his wacky, entirely fabricated theories about childbirth. Michel Odent has moved from being the benign natural-birth pioneer to a doomsayer predicting that caesarean sections will increase autism spectrum disorders and change humanity on an evolutionary level. And the doom he foretells? The Birth of Homo, The […]

A new paper, Resisting Guilt: Mothers’ Breastfeeding Intentions and Formula Use by Holcomb, explores what happens when breastfeeding is represented as a “choice” that is an unalloyed good for all babies and all mothers. Although lactivists insist that such a claim is the inevitable result of scientific research, in truth the claim is a cultural construct. […]