Keywords

home birth

hospital birth

C-section rates

breech birth

twin birth

medical interventions

birth

trauma

informed consent

maternal autonomy

high-risk pregnancy

induction of labor

fetal monitoring

epidural

pitocin

VBAC

hospital gown

midwives

birth centers

physiological birth

birth safety

natural birth

obstetricians

pregnancy complications

continuous fetal monitoring

cascade of interventions

obstetric carebirth plans

midwifery model

postpartum depression

NICU admissions

birth outcomes

Transcript:

Speaker 0

Have you ever wondered why a woman planning a natural birth ends up in a surprise c section? And can you guess the six high risk things being done to pregnant women every day in almost every country that have actually never been tested or proven to be safe and effective. Today, I'm joined by a friend, leader, and pattern disruptor, doctor Stuart j Fishbein. He is a community based obstetrician and an associate of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, published author of the book Fearless Pregnancy, Wisdom and Reassurance from a Doctor, a Midwife, and a Mom, as well as the author of many peer reviewed papers. After completing his residency at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, doctor Stu spent twenty four years assisting women with hospital birthing, and for the last thirteen years has been a home birth obstetrician who works directly with midwives. Since retiring from attending home births in twenty twenty two, doctor Stu has turned his focus to traveling the world as a lecturer and an advocate for reteaching breach and twin birth skills, respect for the normalcy of birthing, and honoring informed consent. Thanks for joining me on Born to Know, the podcast that brings you conversations with world renowned experts and thought leaders in every field to peel back the layers of this epic world we live in and to see where choice really resides for each of us every day. Alrighty. It is a pleasure and an honor to be hanging out with you today. Thank you so much for being here, doctor Stew. 

Speaker 1

You're you're welcome. I'm sorry for laughing, but we've actually been hanging out for about forty minutes already working on working on tech, but we got we got it settled. So that's why I'm wearing these goofy headphones. 

Speaker 0

Yeah. Right. They say you get to know someone through travel, and I guess now you get to know them through tech experiences. 

Speaker 1

That's right. Hi. How are you? 

Speaker 0

Oh, good. Good. Everything is great. And, you know, just I feel like I'm already we're already at the end of twenty twenty four. So much has happened. 

Speaker 1

That's a very positive thing for you to say as you have a category four to five hurricane bearing down on your state again. Second one in, in what, ten days? 

Speaker 0

Second one in ten days. I trust this process. I treat life like I treat birth. What's meant for me is meant for me. I can take inspired action, and the rest, I leave it up to the divine. So that's where I'm at today with this cat four hurricane or cat five. We'll see. What's going on in your neck of the woods? 

Speaker 1

Well, it's autumn, but it's still really nice here. We're in the the high eighties at night. I mean, in the daytime and down in the fifties at night. I'm in southern Utah, as people may know, and the weather's been great. 

Speaker 0

Yeah. And you're about to speak at a conference there? Did I see that? 

Speaker 1

Oh, oh, there's a couple things going on. There's a local one here in Kanab. I'm speaking at the public library, which is gonna be kind of fun for me, small group. And then, the Birth Expo is a thing they have annually in Saint George, for Utah. But I just finished a long speaking tour where I spent, four and a half weeks in Australia and I taught six seminars, two day breach seminars to a very receptive group of wonderful birth workers there in Australia and I learned a lot about what's going on in the world. In Australia is the same as what's going on in a lot of other places with the birth tyranny that's going on and the midwives who want to help women with their autonomy and decision making are getting, you know, deregistered and getting their decision making are getting, you know, deregistered and getting they're fearful and afraid because of Big Brother coming down on them, and the statistics of Big Brother's machinery is terrible. You know, they have forty percent c section rates here and they have, a thirteen percent VBAC success rate here and they have thirty percent episiotomy rate here in Australia and that so I learned a lot of stuff and then I spoke at the, Convergence of Rebellious Midwives, which was a wonderful, gathering put together by Melanie Jackson. And some of my favorite people were there, like Sarah Buckley and I don't wanna leave anybody out, but Kirsten Small and Rhea Dempsey and Hannah Dolan, were all there. And then after touring, my daughter came for a little bit and spent seven days with me as we rented a car and drove on the wrong side of the road and enjoyed ourselves driving up the Gold Coast and then ended up in Melbourne where I got to see the Melbourne birth community. I got to see the penguins come in at night, and I got we got to pet kangaroos and koala bears, and so that was it was a it was a great trip. And then from there, I went to Montana, and I taught taught with the Go Midwife group there, which I've done for about ten years now in Bozeman. And then I went on to what's that? New faces every time. Pretty much a couple of the old faces are are around. And then off to, London, Ontario where I got to speak at the Reclaiming Birth Conference with 

Speaker 0

How was that? I got invited. 

Speaker 1

Gloria Lamay and Billy Harrigan. 

Speaker 0

So awesome. 

Speaker 1

It's great, but what's what's there's a commonality going on that that birth is under attack, and our outcomes are awful, and the people that make the outcomes awful think that they should be the ones telling people with good outcomes like midwives how to practice and how to do things, and there's a battle going on and people are gonna have to stand up and some people are gonna get persecuted for that. I mean, they already have, obviously, like Gloria LeMay going to jail. But if you believe in something, you have to stand up. The time to try to collaborate with people who don't wanna collaborate with you is over. It just it's over. And, you know, if our outcomes were good, if babies were healthier than they've ever been, if mothers were happier than they'd ever been, if our c section rates were closing in on what they were fifty years ago, if our birth trauma rates were in thirty and forty percent, with these meetings that they're having in the United Kingdom and Australia, and even Canada are having these, gatherings to talk for women to express themselves about the trauma they've experienced. If those things were all better, you could say okay, this model works. But this is the definition of insanity, is to take a model that's not working and then say we're just gonna do more of it. So, that's what I learned, and, I'm just my job is to essentially try to keep the skills of breech and twin birthing alive. And I've got a lot of experience with that over the years, both in the hospital. I have that unique perspective, as you know, that I spent twenty eight years working as a hospital based doctor, and then a little over twelve and a half years as a home doctor. And so I have this unique perspective of how things go in both worlds, and most of the time those two worlds are like siloed, they never meet, And the doctors in the hospital don't pay much attention to what goes on at home other than they think it's awful. Never, by the way, having no self reflection and looking in the mirror and seeing how their statistics in their hospital are doing. And then we have hospital midwives who are sometimes overzealous about their condemnation of the hospital system. And we have to find a way to work together, but ultimately that's not the way it works. What's what's happening is it's the golden rule, but not the one that you and I grew up with. It's the golden rule is the, them that has the gold, makes the rules. And, right now the medical model is delivering in my country. Ninety eight and a half percent of women are delivering in the hospital, and you can't blame the horrible, you know, the what I think are terrible statistics and outcomes on the fact that one percent of women are giving birth at home. And yet that seems to be the focus because no one wants to be, self reflection is not one of their strong points. 

Speaker 0

No. It's not. And, I mean, this is actually a question I was gonna say for later in the conversation, but we're we're diving in now. And I, you know, I've I come into contact with so many women and couples who start out with the perception that birth is safer in the hospital. They perceive the hospital as a place where death can be prevented. Right? But they don't consider that although there are the resources to prevent death, there are a lot of interventions that make the experience, in my perception, highly dangerous. Right? Heart access to hard drugs, fentanyl, pitocin, magnesium sulfate, those are hard drugs. They have serious side effects, vacuum instructions, c section. These are all things, just a a small handful of examples that leave women feeling disempowered, traumatized, disconnected from their experience. So because of their definition of safety being avoiding death, they then sacrifice what could be an empowered, safe, non traumatic experience. So how do we redefine safety? Like, how did we arrive at the definition of safety that we have now? Because most women say, well, at least I made it out alive. Like, I should be grateful. Right? 

Speaker 1

Yeah. I'm sorry I'm laughing at that. But if if that's if that's how they view childbirth, we've we've really done a number on on women. The medicalized birth model over the last century has really done a number on women thinking that their bodies cannot function without medical intervention. Safety's a tough question, Ayla, because everybody, safety is, there's no such definition, there's no single definition of safety. And in a minute, I'd like to get into the fact that there's no single definition of high risk either. But let's just talk about safety initially. So safety is dependent on most people's life experience and what they've been exposed to. And if you grew up thinking that the doctor always knows best and you live in a world where you think that modern medicine has created miracles, which it has, then you extrapolate that to mean that everything that a doctor tells you must be the best choice for you. And that's where the mistake is made. And if that's your definition of safety, then who am I to try to talk you out of that? But you are going to find that actually just based on what I said earlier, the fact that the outcomes in hospitals are not good. They're far worse than they were fifty years ago. So why is that? And the medical system would like to say, well, it's women are older, women are sicker, women are fatter, women are you know, it's, like, really easy to just blame the victim for the problem, but that's not the case. Birth, birth is a very safe thing. Nature designed a system that works very well most of the time. If you don't meddle with it, the problem is the medical model does not know how to leave a woman alone in labor. They or in pregnant well, yeah, in pregnancy too. Yeah. From the moment you conceive, you're you're sort of based in this could go wrong or that can go wrong. You have what's called a problem list on your prenatal record, and you know, the very first problem on your prenatal list is what? It's that you're pregnant. How do I know that? Couple reasons. One is that the American College of OB GYN says that in in some of their guidelines, they say pregnancy itself is a high risk condition. And I'm not taking that out of context, but if that's the prison by which they see pregnancy, then you understand that. So, the other way you know that is something that's subtle that happened to me one time when I was taking a history, and when you take a history, you ask ask about why they're there, and then you go into meds and allergies and past medical history and past surgical history. And when I got to past medical history, I said to her, like I'd said a thousand times before, do you have any other medical problems? And she looked at me and she goes, what's the first one? And I realized that even after thirty some years of practicing and probably five or seven years at home birth already, that I was still considering in my brain that pregnancy was the first medical problem. And it isn't. It's a normal bodily function like breathing or digestion, and you don't have to think about it. Thank God. 

Speaker 0

I always say it's a symptom of sex. Pregnancy. It's 

Speaker 1

a side effect. Yeah. It's it's a it's a symptom of sex. No. It's a normal bodily function to grow a baby. You don't have to think about it thing, you know, be and when you start to think about breathing or digestion, you can mess it up. You can hyperventilate, you can have diarrhea because you have to give a speech or go to court or or, you know, you have a meeting that your, you know, boss is going to be, you know, look at look, you know, give you a review. And you're nervous about all that, and so your stomach gets upset. That's your higher brain screwing up your lower brain. So where do where do you feel safe? Well, I would say for the general population, most people feel safest in their home. That's why people even in a hurricane don't want to leave their home. They feel they feel like they wanna defend their home. It's my safe spot. It's my it's my sanctuary. It's where I wanna be. And that's where people feel safest. Now when it comes to giving birth, some people will say, well, that's I don't wanna do that. It's too messy. I I what happens if, and so they go to the hospital thinking that the hospital is safe. And for me, it's not it's not to convince them that that's not true. But what you said earlier is is true, is that when you go to the hospital, you are no longer able to labor physiologically. It's not possible because you will be interrupted for protocol dictated procedures that have to be done. You will have questions asked of you. You will have to answer them. You will have you will be put on monitors and in a bed, thus the bed becomes the center of attention in the labor room. If you ever walk into a hospital labor room, what's the center of attention? The bed. If you ever do go to a home birth and a woman's in active labor, how often do you find her laying in bed? Almost never. Yeah. Almost never. So that's a big difference right there. And they're they're constantly watching you for something to go wrong, whereas in the midwifery model, they're constantly not watching you. They're constantly sort of, like, my friend calls them ninja lifeguards. They're off listening and quietly not intervening upon you, and they're listening for things or checking for things that might go wrong. And then if they do, then they will step in. But otherwise, they're assuming that everything is gonna go assuming that everything's gonna go right. And in the hospital, they assume that things are gonna go wrong at any moment, and therefore, we have to do all these things. You need an IV just in case. You need your blood sent to the lab just in case. You just sign a consent form on admission for c section just in case. I mean, think about how this sets the mindset of the pregnant woman when she comes in. You change into a hospital gown in most hospitals. Some are get some are waking up. But what does a hospital gown signify? It signifies you're a patient. Why do you have to change into a hospital gown? Why can't you wear your own jammies? Why can't you wear nothing? You're in labor for God's sakes. You know, you don't need an IV. You should be able to eat and drink. We, you know, I, when I talk about this, I often go off into the, talking about mammalian birth and how what we do to the human female is antithetical to nature's design in every fashion, and we would not do any of these things to our own pet if they were in labor. So and people say, well, we're different than than pets. Well, not really. The only thing that's different is we have a higher cognitive brain which is actually a a detriment to labor. 

Speaker 0

Right. Holding all the unexpected fear. 

Speaker 1

Gets in the way. Right. So it shuts it down. When an when an animal senses fear or is interrupted, they put out a hormonal cocktail that causes their labor to stop so they can get up and they can run away. So when a woman senses fear or anxiety, her labor often becomes dysfunctional. And then in our, you know, moving along society, if your labor slows down and you're already at the hospital, they're going to want to do something for you. Because the job of the hospital is to get you in, get your baby out, and get you out. And how that happens and the story that it tells that you experience while you're there is not their concern. It might be the concern of your individual nurse or your individual doctor, but it's not their concern overall. It's not the concern of the system whatsoever. So safety is one of those things where, like, a lot of men, you know, partners will say, well, you know, they're worried about safety and cost generally. That's what men worry about. I've learned this over the years. And so but men think that safety is because you have an operating room down the hall. The problem, of course, is that even if you have an operating room down the hall, it doesn't mean you have the necessary personnel to staff that operating room readily available for you should there be a problem. And it doesn't mean that the problem that they're worried about having to take you to the operating floor isn't something that they themselves caused. What's that famously called the cascade of interventions, where you show up in labor and your contractions were three minutes apart at home and now they're five minutes, eight minutes apart because you've been stressed out by going through triage and going to asking all these questions and getting in your car and all that stuff, and so now they say, well, you're here anyway, and we're gonna do a vaginal exam on you, which is unnecessary, and they check you and you're four centimeters, and they say, well, you're four centimeters. We might as well keep you because you're, you know, you're two days away from your due date or you're two days past your due date, so there's no point in waiting any longer, and they'll probably sweep your membranes or maybe break your bag of waters and then they'll start an IV and then they'll, your contractions will space out, and they'll wanna start pitocin, but you'll say, I I I'm I'm too uncomfortable, and they'll say, well, we'll give you an epidural, and then this the contractions space out even more, and then they give you pitocin, and then your baby doesn't like it anymore, and your baby doesn't like and then doctors don't like the pattern of the baby's heart rate, and they do a c section, and they get a baby that comes out that's perfectly fine. But everybody thinks they did a great job by rescuing a baby. Yeah. 

Speaker 0

Thank god they were there. Right? 

Speaker 1

But the whole thing, you know, makes me breathless to to go through this because I try to say it without taking a breath, because it becomes that sort of panic scenario. And and here's the thing though, hospitals with newborn intensive care units often have a lot of seven pound babies in them that came into the hospital inside their mother perfectly healthy, and somehow they ended up in the NICU. And there's no explanation for that. But I 

Speaker 0

mean, there's gotta be. Right? I mean, what would you say? Is it is it the No. 

Speaker 1

They're yeah. I mean, they're saying there's no they're they're saying they can't figure out why that happened. 

Speaker 0

Right. Right. 

Speaker 1

It's it's obvious to you and me. 

Speaker 0

It's obvious to you and me. I mean, anything from, like, let's just pick a handful, right? Immediate cord clamping, perhaps exposure to fentanyl and lidocaine for an extended period of time, the mother's, you know, being under a stress response for an extended period of time, not natural, normal labor stress response, but something heightened. What else? What else can we think of that would cause 

Speaker 1

Hyperstimulated with synthetic oxytocin. Mother starved. 

Speaker 0

Mother starved. Because 

Speaker 1

she's a little basically, loud popsicles and clear liquids, and she's been in labor for twenty hours. So baby's and baby's not getting the same nutrients and stuff coming across that it normally would. Baby being disconnected from mom when she gets her epidural. There there, you know, there are theories about how that happens. We see it not uncommonly that baby's heart rate patterns change after mom gets an epidural. Again, immobilizing a mom, not allowing her to help her baby in any certain way. Laying on your back can affect how your blood flow is to your pelvis. So there's lots of reasons why that happens. And then the baby comes out with a little bit of floppiness and because they have a NICU team or pediatric team available, they hit the button on the wall and the team comes down and the baby turns out to be fine. But now that they've had to intervene on the baby, they say, you know what? We need to watch the baby for a while. So we're gonna take the baby to the NICU or to the nursery and keep an eye on your baby for a while. It's like, we can keep an eye on our baby. Best thing for your baby is to be connected to its umbilical cord, getting its own auto transfusion, skin to skin with mom's temperature, mom's voice, mom's skin, mom's bacteria. Those are the things that babies need, and the hospital model for decades was clamp the cord immediately, which is stupid, and then show this beautiful thing that mother just delivered, show it to her, and then walk it across the room and set it down in the warmer so that the nurses can dry it off and rub it down and, you know, put goop in its eyes and sometimes even give it injections. 

Speaker 0

And aspirate it and bruise the back of its throat. 

Speaker 1

Right. That's right. Do all those things and then wrap it up like a burrito and put a hat on it. And then, of course, that towel is a is is is covered in hospital based bacteria, and the hat is unnecessary. And then they put the baby on the mom's chest for a little while, and then they say, okay, we have to take the baby to the nursery now, and the baby goes I mean, again, these things are changing, but this is the stuff that people think is safe. And, you know, you may. But I'm just saying that just because you're in a labor room does not mean that you can get a baby out emergently when it when it when there is a bradycardia on the fetal heart rate, possibly iatrogenically caused, and that they run you down the hall and you're thinking that, you know, there's an anesthesiologist there, a surgeon, an assistant surgeon, a scrub nurse, a circulating nurse, all just standing around waiting for you for this disaster that's happening. And that's not the case. And sometimes you don't have a lot of time. So the best thing to do is to avoid that situation in the first place. What's the best way to avoid that situation in the first place is for most women is to stay out of the hospital. Stay out of the hospital. Have a skilled, knowledgeable practitioner, usually a midwife, occasionally a doctor like me, be on your team at your home or birth center, wherever you feel most comfortable being, and letting labor go as it normally does. Because when you don't mess mess with mother nature, you rarely see the rapid deterioration of fetal status that you sometimes see in the hospital setting. Midwives are really good at normal birth and therefore when something abnormal is starting to happen, they recognize it right away. And most of us live in areas where we do have access to a hospital that's not more than fifteen to thirty minutes away, and that's plenty of time when something's not emergent. And almost all transports from home are not emergencies. They're sent because either things aren't progressing or mom's exhausted or baby's developing a a rising heart rate or something where you can get in the car and drive to the hospital. And then that's when the hospital has use. And the problem is, of course, that's maybe fifteen percent of the time. But if we took eighty five percent of births away from the hospital, which I would love to see happen, then hospitals couldn't keep their doors open anymore as far as their obstetric things. So there's a there's this there is this dilemma where we need to figure out a plan to work together with these people to try to come up with a better way of doing things. But if you think you're gonna get a physiologic birth by going to the hospital and saying just leave me alone, that's not possible. 

Speaker 0

Yeah. It's it's a strange sort of collusion that women get into with their medical providers because they'll say, oh, I, you know, I showed my doctor my birth plan and, you know, he agrees with most of it, but there are some points where he rolled his eyes, you know, there's something I can do about it. I'll just show up and, you know, kind of when the time comes, I'll just put my foot down. Right? And I'm like, well, he might not be there. It's nurses you've never met before. And being in, you know, being in labor is not really, like, the time where you wanna put your foot down. You wanna be completely surrendered to your environment. Right? And so this is not the time to get into a back and forth about, you know, bathing the baby or not bathing the baby. The IV or not the IV. The heplog or not the heplog. So why go into a situation where you're going to have to fight for your autonomy? You know? And if you are, then do you have an equipped part partner husband with you to do that on your behalf because it really shouldn't be the role of the woman to do that in that space. You know, I think so many women from my experience as a doula and a a birth educator and doing a lot of prenatal planning and and all that with my clients, They want this natural physiological experience. However, they've heard so many stories of lives getting saved in hospitals. And once we go through this whole, you know, explanation of how they were caused by the environment itself. Right? These complications were actually caused by the environment themselves itself. They start to see that those stories really come from electing an epidural, electing an induction, electing things that were not necessary, but that birth actually is a lot safer when you're out of the environment. So I think it's just an unlearning and a relearning that has to happen. You know, it has to come from the woman. I don't know that these institutions are ever gonna, like, collaborate with us. I think it's more about the woman on a ground level changing her perspective, you know, one woman at a time. Right? So what are everyone's big questions are what are the emergencies? Like, what are the things you can detect, right, towards the end of the pregnancy, for example, or even in the pregnancy midway that would qualify a woman to work with a high risk specialist, which is what I've always considered an OB to be is a high risk specialist. There are very I don't even know if there are more than one of you doctors do in the world because you're one of the few people I know who, you know, you're a physician and you see women in the home and you're assuming everything's gonna go right until it doesn't. Right? That's your perspective. But I don't know anybody else like that. Maybe doctor Bradley who, you know, I studied the Bradley method over ten years ago, but he believed that too. So I'm like, you know, but how do women build that discernment within them? You know, how do they how do they you know, they're at a crossroad right at the beginning of the pregnancy. I've been told I have a condition. I've been told that I'm, you know, thirty seven. I have a geriatric pregnancy. I need to watch things more closely. How in that moment do they develop that internal what I call the internal masculine, that discernment to say, I'm gonna try something else. I'm gonna get another opinion. I'm going to unlearn this. I'm go you know, like, where how can they do that? 

Speaker 1

Today's culture, it's not easy to do. You've you've you've painted a a a real dilemma that it that truly exists out there because our culture has taught women that pregnancy is is a very potentially high risk. And it's very unlikely for any woman in who goes through an obstetrical model of care to to come out of her pregnancy without some label at some point that there's something wrong with her pregnancy. Whether it's pregnancy itself, or whether, as you said, she's over thirty five, or she's short and her husband's tall, or she goes beyond her due date, or she has mild hypothyroidism for which she's taking low dose levothyroxine, or an ultrasound, everything looks fine, but the baby's a little on the small side, or the baby has one isolated left ventricular echogenic focus and and this is something that doesn't really mean anything, but we want to see you back in six weeks and then we're going to follow you. Or you're over thirty five, that means your placenta could give out, so we're gonna start testing your baby at thirty five weeks every week, which of course makes no sense because the testing isn't set up to be every week, it's set up to be twice a week. So when some doctor tells you you need testing once a week, they're telling you you don't need testing is what they're telling you. But they don't see it that way because they see pregnancy as high risk in general. But high risk is not a number. A woman over thirty five is not high risk. Right. A woman who's forty weeks and seven and six days going on forty one weeks is not high risk. A woman who has mild hypertension or well controlled diabetes does not have to be called high risk. Right? High risk is not and again, I wanna emphasize this. High risk that I've determined in in all my meanderings through is is not really a number. High risk is something that makes the doctor uncomfortable Because the doctors will be more comfortable with things that carry more risks than other things which they will label high risk. For instance, which is riskier? Having a woman be over thirty five or inducing her labor at thirty nine weeks? Which carries more risk? Yet they'll think the thirty nine week thing is fine, but the woman over thirty five is high risk. Which carries more risk? Having a V back or having a repeat caesarean section? Think about it. Which carries more risk? They'll tell you the V back carries more risk. I would tell you that the c section carries more risk, especially if that woman wants a third baby or a fourth baby, but they won't, you know, they don't look at it like that. And here's one that I that somebody sent me or I saw it on a meme once, which makes me laugh hysterically. The The American College of OB GYN thinks that it's safer to give a woman six vaccines while she's pregnant, none of which would that have ever been tested for safety in anyone, let alone in pregnant women. Violation of the precautionary principle, which is you never give experimental substances to pregnant women. We're talking about the flu vaccine, the COVID vaccine, the DTaP vaccine, which is three three vaccines, and the RSV vaccine in at thirty two to thirty six weeks. So they think it's safer to do that, but they tell a pregnant woman that she should probably avoid any alcohol, sushi, or raw milk. So I got you laughing about that one. I mean, think about it. Let's inject at least at least I know that the DTaP and the, it has four hundred micrograms of aluminum in it. I know that the mRNA has who knows what kind of damage it's doing. Alright? The flu vaccine hardly works at all, and if it's from a batch flu vaccine, it has mercury in it. If it's a if it's a singular dose flu vaccine, then it doesn't have mercury generally. You can check with that if you're you're going to get a flu vaccine. I'm not telling you not to do it, I'm just telling you don't, I would never do these things while I'm pregnant because there's no safety testing. I mean, there's no safety testing when you're not pregnant either, but if that's a choice for your own body, but putting this stuff in your body when you have a fetus developing inside of you, and that's okay, but but, drinking raw milk or having some sushi is not okay. You gotta you gotta be careful with that. 

Speaker 0

Or, like, avoiding going to the nail salon. Like, I mean, there's so many like, who like, how are we gauging the level of safety? Right? Well, I 

Speaker 1

hate going to the nail salon anyway because it because that the you know, I I used to go with my daughter, and I'd have to sit outside because these these it wasn't very strong. There's a strong smell in there. 

Speaker 0

It is. It absolutely is. You know? And it's interesting. I was just talking to Lily Nichols, and she was explaining to me how, explaining to me how, selenium actually binds to the mercury in fish. So it's actually better to eat raw fish. She did not I'm not quoting her. She did not say it's better to eat raw fish, but we were making allusions to the possibility that eating raw fish actually has more health benefit than the cooked fish because once you cook the fish, the selenium is gone, apparently. And so it's you know, what are all these even the mercury remains, there's nothing for it to bind to for it to leave your system. So what what are these women in Japan do? Like, what have they been doing for centuries? And what have, like, the the 

Speaker 1

They're having mutant babies constantly. 

Speaker 0

And the woman in France eating the raw cheese and the raw honey and 

Speaker 1

Yeah. And drinking wine and drinking wine at every dinner meal, stuff like that. Again, these are the same people that are telling you that the the the food pyramid was right when it was upside down, and the same people that told you to take Vioxx and thalidomide and diethylstilbestrol and put mercury in baby's teething powder and tell you to take statins and SSRIs and the COVID vaccine, and you're getting in. The CDC is still recommending the COVID vaccine down to six months of age, the new booster, and recommending that that pregnant women get the respiratory syncytial virus vaccine to prevent RSV in babies zero to six months. They don't tell you, by the way, because I looked into this. And like the d like the pertussis vaccine, alright, they want you to have it ahead of time in case your baby would get pertussis before it can get its first vaccine against pertussis. So the question is for many things like this is, like, okay. So we wanna prevent RSV or pertussis in newborns. How many pay how many unvaccinated newborns get pertussis and RSV to the point where they need to be hospitalized and or die? Wouldn't that be a number that a parent should wanna know before they decide to give all pregnant women this? But no. Because you know why? Because there's no money in not giving vaccines. If if there was an RVS code, which is a billing code for not giving vaccines, then doctors would probably be more likely to not give vaccines, but they can't bill for that. The you know, for some people that what I that what I just said will just sound, outrageous, but I'm telling you it's true. Doctors are given incentives to give these vaccines. They they have to know that there's no safety testing. If they don't know there's no safety testing, that's on them. Right? We weren't taught about vaccines other than what a miracle they were in medical school. That's what we're taught. I think that's probably still what's taught now. Because medical schools, by the way, are are pretty much run by who? Big pharma. 

Speaker 0

Big pharma, of course. 

Speaker 1

Big pharma supports them. Right. So that's where the money comes from for medical schools. 

Speaker 0

Pediatricians are functioning within this model as well, just so that that's clear. It's not just the physicians who are supporting. 

Speaker 1

Some pediatrician offices get incentives from insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies for having a higher percentage of their children vaccinated. And we know this because it's come out through FOIA and other other possible ways it's been, disclosed. And And then I get letters from people all the time saying my pediatrician was kicking me out of my practice because I won't vaccinate my kids. Now think about this for a second. If you're if you get a a bonus for the num percentage of kids that are vaccinated in your practice, then one of the things you can do is vaccinate more kids. The other thing you can do is kick out kids from your practice that aren't vaccinated. It's very sinister what they're doing. They're kicking you out not because they don't wanna respect your right to do that. They're kicking you out because your child is hurting their numbers. It's awful. 

Speaker 0

Well, there's a pediatrician here locally who said that there's periodic audits with records of patients to see who how many unvaccinated patients there are. And there's like a threshold. Basically, you're not supposed to pass a certain number. You can have a handful of unvaccinated patients, but there has to be some sort of reason that they're not getting the any vaccines, right, childhood vaccinations. 

Speaker 1

And who's doing this audit? 

Speaker 0

I don't know who's doing this audit. 

Speaker 1

Yeah. I I it's probably the it's probably the insurance company. 

Speaker 0

Right. And he said the you know, he said, I'm I'm hoping to retire soon, but I'm gonna do some good. But towards the end of my career, and he said, you know, I have ninety percent of my patients are not vaccinated. You know? And so he said, and so one day it'll just all come down. But for now, I'm doing my part. Right? He woke up. 

Speaker 1

Yeah. Well, my colleague, Paul Thomas, published his data on that, and and, you know, I think it was in nineteen different categories of of health from anything from, like, eczema to asthma to to autism to Crohn's disease to, you know, childhood diabetes. They looked at kids that had no vaccines at all versus kids that were fully vaccinated according to the CDC schedule. And in all nineteen categories, the healthier kids were the ones that had no vaccines. And for that, he lost his medical license, and they they put his paper that was published was pulled, and yet it's all true. Same thing happened to Andy Wakefield, who I had the, privilege of interviewing on our podcast, a couple months ago, who just pointed out that, jeez, these little black mostly little black boys who were getting the MMR vaccine were coming in with GI problems, intestinal problems, and also had associated autism. And because Andy was a, gastroenterologist, he published a paper saying, this is a very interesting finding. We ought to look into it more. And for that, he was published. He didn't say MMR causes autism. He said there must there might be a link and it should be investigated, and that was enough to trigger this. And this was twenty some years ago, and it's only tyranny's only gotten worse now. 

Speaker 0

Just shining a little light. You can't do that. 

Speaker 1

Back to safety, back to high risk. Neither one of them is objective. They're both subjective, and so they the bar can change. It can move depending on who you, who, who you're talking to. So we have to respect that that for some patients, safety means hospital. And for many, it means not going to the hospital and the same thing for high risk. If you are somebody who, maybe you're, you know, again, in my practice, if you're a breach baby, you're breach at term, that is not high risk. It's high risk to the obstetrician who doesn't know how to do breach delivery. 

Speaker 0

Could you pause a moment and for everyone listening, explain briefly what breech is and the various types of breech? 

Speaker 1

Yeah. Okay. So a breech baby is a baby that instead of coming head down, which is what ninety six percent of babies will be at term, it comes butt first Or the legs first with the butt. There are four major categories of breech. Again, everything is nuanced. But there's frank breech, where the baby is in what's called like the diving pike position, where the hips are flexed and the knees are extended and the feet are up by the baby's face. That's the most common type of breech. Probably seventy five, eighty percent of breeches are going to be frank breech at term. Second most common is complete breech. That's where the baby's sitting with his legs folded underneath it, sort of like yoga position or used to say Indian style, you know, that way. Yeah. And that's and that is, you know, probably fifteen percent or more. And then there's incomplete breech, which is where one of the legs is folded underneath and one of the legs is sticking up like a Frank breech. And then there's footling breech, which is where both legs and, both knees and hips are extended, like the baby is standing up. It's that's extremely rare at term because there's not room for a baby to do that. And it's unfortunately named as a footling breech because if you have a complete or incomplete breech and you're in labor, sometimes the foot will drop out as it as they come baby comes down, and people who don't know anything will call it a footling breech, and they'll panic. Well, they'll panic with any breech, but they'll panic more so because footlings, you know, theoretically are harder to deliver because they can fall through an incompletely dilated cervix. But that is not the case at term, Yet, yet my colleagues know very little about breech birth. They've basically learned in the last twenty five, thirty years that breach is dangerous and should all breaches should be done by c section. The data does not support that. There was one outlying paper that did, and that's the one they chose to do, and that's something we call confirmation bias. They chose the paper that supported the way they wanna practice. Why do they wanna not do vaginal breach delivery? One, because they're worried and they're scared and they're untrained, and two, it's it's easier to do a c section. You can be in at seven thirty, out at eight fifteen. The pay is a little bit better, possibly, but the pay for the hospital is a lot better. And they're not and, again, they're not they're not training doctors, so they're very nervous about it. And if they're nervous about it, they're gonna project their anxiety onto the women of our country, and then the women of our country are nervous about it. And so it's gotten it's gotten labeled as something that's dangerous when it's not. The Royal College of OB GYN has the best statistics on this, and the the instance of neonatal death with a breech birth at term is about two per thousand. And the instance of neonatal death with a head down baby at term is about one per thousand. So in other words, for every thousand babies you deliver vaginally that are breached, you'll have one extra neonatal death than you would if you had a head down baby. So what the medical model is telling you is that we should section a thousand women to save one baby because they're not telling you to section a thousand women to save one head down baby. So you compare the two. What often happens is compared to the risks at c section, and the risks at c section are are less. They're about one in two thousand babies will die from a c section, but so will one in two thousand mothers will die from a c section. And then if you do a c section on a breech baby, if it's a mom's first baby, and you want a second baby, you've now done nothing but pass the risk that you saved on the first baby to that second baby and all the mom's future babies because now they have the scarred uterus issue and the whole V back issue and the ruptured uterus issue and that whole issue. So reach what used to be when I was training, and I trained in the early eighties, it used to be just a variation of normal. And a matter of fact, we used to like them. We used to fight for who's going to get the lady in room six with the breach baby. 

Speaker 0

Who dropped that? 

Speaker 1

Because they were fun to do. 

Speaker 0

Who dropped this idea in? Like, who decided that train that was gonna be removed from your training? 

Speaker 1

Well, it's blamed on a paper that came out in two thousand called the term breach trial, but it had already been on the way out. I think the term breach trial was just a was just a paper that someone said, we need a paper to convince everybody to do what we wanna do, and that's what they did. I think the ARRIVE trial for the thirty nine week thing was the same thing. I have I mean, I have evidence for that, but with that's another topic for another day. But Yeah. 

Speaker 0

I would I would love to have that conversation. But do you think this was all just a push kind of like getting everything into the corner to be classified under the umbrella of necessary for a c section? I mean, just if we're gonna say, like, these are the conditions for allowing a normal you know, a vaginal birth, and then everything else is slowly gonna get pushed into the umbrella of requiring a c section. 

Speaker 1

Yeah. I think what happened was there are probably some bad outcomes with breech babies that didn't that that that scared that scared academicians and and scared insurance companies and risk managers. And probably because the people doing the breech deliveries didn't know what they were doing. So it wasn't the fact the baby was breech, it was probably the fact that the people that were attending them were unskilled. And so they had a bad outcome. So they just said, well, let's just section all breaches, and we'll we'll get them out before the, you know and and what really was frightening about that, and if and there are stories abound that women who came in with the baby starting to come out with the butt or the feet coming out of the vagina, and they push the baby back up inside to do a c section on the baby where they still have to deliver the baby breech. They're just doing it through the abdominal incision instead of the vaginal opening. Again, the logic behind this just escapes me. I think they think they can, whatever they cut open, they can make bigger, and they can get a baby out, and they can always sew back, sew the mom up. And again, there's no concern for what the mother's feeling or mother's thinking. There's only fear. There's only these are these are fear responses. Get the baby in a get a live baby in the bassinet is my signature statement that I say that's all that matters to them, and how the baby gets there is not their concern, and what happens to that mother and that mother's future babies is not their concern. And again, I'm not saying the individual nurse or doctor doesn't feel that concern, but the individual nurse and doctor now is just a cog in a wheel. They're no longer I mean, most one of the one of the worst things that happened in in my lifetime was seeing doctors become employees. I mean, doctors can be could have been arrogant son of a bitches, you know, thirty, forty, fifty years ago. You know, there was a they God complex, and that was true. But at least they were responsible for the women, the the women that they were taking care of. And the consumer, you know, went to that person, and that person they they made a transaction, and that person was then their therefore their their practitioner. And that person was only responsible that doctor was only responsible to that woman. When doctors became employees of hospitals, they now were a salaried position, working a shift, and they had an overlord who could now tell them, you know, our policy is we're not letting anyone go past forty one weeks. So you need to counsel all the women that need to be delivered before forty one weeks. Even though that doctor may have known that there's no reason that this woman needs to be delivered before forty one weeks. If that doctor honors what that woman wants to wait, he's gonna get in trouble. He's gonna lose his Christmas bonus. He's gonna get yelled at. He could get fired. Or she. So doctors now had their fiduciary duty conflicted because, am to my patient or am I responsible to the person paying my salary? And that's a big issue, and the and the unfortunately the patient loses most of the time because they're the because courage is the least common trait in humans in twenty twenty four. We all so many of us lack the courage to stand up and fight. It's very easy to put a hashtag up and say, you know, hashtag this or that or the other thing to all your sync offense on Instagram and feel like you've done something virtuous. But it would be much more virtuous for you to to go to a group that doesn't disagree with you excuse me, that doesn't agree with you and have that same conversation. Yeah. And the problem is is that those people generally won't let you come. Like, I'd be willing to speak to anybody. You know, I I look at the political system right now. I look at RFK Junior will is willing to speak to anybody who will listen. Whereas you have the other part of the Democratic party who basically kicked him out, They don't wanna speak to anybody who's unless they're a sycophant. Wouldn't it have been nice, and wouldn't it have been nice back in two thousand twenty and two thousand twenty one, when COVID first hit, if president Trump and then president Biden had said to Fauci and to Deborah Birx, you know, I'm I've just got ordered, two hours of national television time, and we're gonna put you two on with, Peter McCullough and Jay Bhattacharya or or Robert Malone, and we're gonna have a national debate monitored by, you know, somebody from CNN or from Fox or whatever, it doesn't really matter, or monitored by the press secretary or something, and we're gonna have a national debate so that people can hear your side and the other side, and then they can make a decision for themselves. Wouldn't that have been the presidential thing to do? So wouldn't it be nice if if if the people who are think that the hospital model is so great were to be able to sit and have a conversation with people who think the hospital model isn't so great and and have a point counterpoint discussion. But the people in power will never do that. They will not sit because because quite frankly, their positions and their outcomes are indefensible. They are they are indefensible. If you look at the outcomes of where we're at right now with with more chronic illness in children than we've ever had before. Now there could be many reasons for that, but one of them is how we start in life. It does parallel the rise in c section rate. The rising placenta accreta rate, the rising postpartum depression rate, the rising rate of well, the, you know, the effect on the microbiome, the fact that that, you know, inductions are now thirty, forty percent of all pregnancies. Less than fifty percent of women go into labor spontaneously in twenty twenty four. In our country, in in Australia, in England, you know, that's crazy that less than fifty percent of women can go into labor as nature intended. And in some countries, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty percent up to are having cesarean section. And a 

Speaker 0

lot of people say to me, well, what's wrong with this? We have a live baby. They're healthy. They're functional. Right? But then we you know, our definition of a healthy child is so subjective, you know. And we have women who aren't functional and just underneath the surface, highly traumatized and barely getting by, don't wanna have any more children. And if they do, they don't wanna be a participant in the process because of the previous experience they had. So when people say, well, what's wrong with that? So what? So what if women are medicated? So what if babies are medicated? So what if the woman is induced? Everybody's here now. 

Speaker 1

Yep. And we're sicker than we've ever been. 

Speaker 0

And we're sicker than we've ever been. We're more disconnected, dissassociate than we've ever been. Right? The addiction to everything is on the rise to technology, pornography, foods, certain foods, certain behaviors, right? The nuclear family is completely disconnected. And for me, it's the way that we're birthing. I mean, we have the power to shift that. We have the power to make a different choice. And you've been on the other side of the of the consultation desk for so long. Right? What is it in a woman where she puts all what is it in her that wants to put all the power in her doctor's hands? Where does that come from? Is it something from childhood wanting to people please, wanting to get that love and connection from an authority figure? What is it in her that says, I'll do whatever you say, and I will shut down my intuition to do whatever you say. Whatever you think is best. 

Speaker 1

It isn't one thing, and each person has a different life story. But the, but the leading motivator is fear. And again, fear is something that's a, it's a, there are innate fears that we have. We know instinctually, we don't have to be taught that if, if we're being chased by a lion, we should run. I think that that's an instinctual thing, but a lot of fear is is learned behavior. And we have a culture that benefits from scaring people because once you scare people, you can manipulate them to do anything you want. We've again, we just went through that. So in our culture, when you see childbirth, when you hear people talking about it, when your mother-in-law tells her story, you know, sometimes they're glorious stories, but most of the time they're not. Most of the time, the the stories of this happened and this happened, and then I went to the hospital, and this happened, and this happened. And thank God I was at the hospital because this happened and this gets passed down as something that that that that is dangerous. But you know how I know it's not? And it's not just from sitting across the table because I again, as I got more into the home birth world, I got a skewed population. I got people who are already thinking like, like minded. You didn't, you know, people who are very scared are not going to be looking for home birth options. It's just not the case. But you know how I know this is because there are cultures around the world where where where the things that you just described are not true. There there are cultures like the Amish population for instance. The Amish population don't have social media. They don't read newspapers. They talk to women talk to each other, they tell stories. It's a rite of passage for them. An Amish woman may even know the, somebody in their community who passed away, from childbirth, yet they have no fear of childbirth or very minimal fear of childbirth because they know that it's their bodies are designed for this and it's it's their it's their right. As Rachel Reid writes, it's a rite of passage for them. Same thing goes on in women from third world countries who who live, like, you know, when I used to meet women who came up from, El Salvador or Guatemala or Nicaragua. Right? You know, very uneducated, but, again, very comfortable with the fact they were pregnant and had their babies, hardly ever complained, just went through it. And then you take the, you know, the women from the upper west side of upper east side of Manhattan or the west side of Los Los Angeles, and they are freaking out because, you know and then you get the people that say, well, you would never have a tooth pulled without an ovocaine. Why would you have a baby without without an epidural? And there's a good conversation for that, but but, say for face face value, it, it sounds very reasonable, but you're altering nature's design. So the, so fear is the thing that makes women surrender their autonomy. And then you've heard of the, you know, the whole fawning in the face of authority. You know, women will fawn, men will men will fight, women will often fawn. That's just the that's just the way it were built inside, and it and by the way, it's an interesting theory about how vaccine injury tends to affect males more than females. That's a whole another story. It's a book I read by a man named Forrest McGready. It's very I think it's, it's called, the autism vaccine, but it might I've read several of his books. And he talks about, you know, the way the way when you get injected with a needle, your fight and flight response goes on, especially if you're two years old. Right? You're being held down. So a boy, when he's held down, wants to fight back. A girl, when she's held down, may wanna fight back. I'm not saying that. But but most of the time, they'll just surrender. So if this is a neurotoxin, maybe it's affecting the males differently because their their brain and their it's something's different going on in their brain. This is a theory that he has. 

Speaker 0

Chemically different, of course. Doctor Hamer talks about this with German new medicine, which is why there are these full body rashes or different reactions that occur in newborns when they're vaccinated simply because it creates a psycho emotional conflict of being violated. I mean, just the prick, just the being held down even during circumcision as well, it creates the psycho emotional conflict of a violation, and therefore, the skin will react because the skin is the first barrier that we have, the first events that we have between ourselves and the outside world. And so that will get triggered every time that child moving forward feels violated or that their boundaries are overstepped, that same rash, the same outbreak will occur. And then they'll think it's a chronic issue due to God knows what, but really it's from the original violation conflict that happened at the time that that first injection was given, the hep b at birth, or even the PKU prick, the heel prick, anything like that that causes a violation to the skin, to the system, to the body will create that emotional conflict. 

Speaker 1

And I think what listeners ought to understand is that whether whether it's large or small, whether it's visible presently or or maybe ten years down the road, every time you intervene in mother nature's design, there will be ripple effects. There will be downstream consequences. Some of them insignificant. Some of them we don't understand. Some of them may not be determinable for ten or twenty years, but there will be downstream consequences. And when they study a drug like hepatitis vaccine for newborns, they study that drug, I think, for forty eight hours. Right? I might be wrong. It might be five days. But either way, it's either two days or five days. And then they deemed it safe. And when you see that kind of gaslighting, you have to understand that that there's no way that you should trust anything that they're telling you. If they're not standing up and saying that there's something wrong with that that sort of a, a way of testing something because you're not looking downstream, you know. You could give us a bit somebody a medicine today, and you might find that it causes heart disease twenty years later. If they studied tobacco and smoking for forty eight hours, no one would have gotten lung cancer, and they would have said it's safe. Safe and effective. It's what they would have said about tobacco. You know, they looked, you know, eventually they looked downstream and they went after the tobacco companies who then went who then got into the food business. And now think about where that where that has taken us. God, it's all it's all so sinister and intertwined. 

Speaker 0

It's so intertwined. It's such a web. And, oh my gosh, there's so much more to explore in this web. 

Speaker 1

Just, again, to reiterate those two points about safety and about about high risk, they are very culturally oriented. I, there are certain things that my OB colleagues would consider high risk that I have no, that they're not high risk at all. They do many things, as I said earlier, that are far riskier in numbers than something that they label high risk. Like induction of labor or breech vaginal delivery, which is which carries more risk. And they'll tell you that the breech delivery carries more risk, and I'll tell you that it absolutely does not. So it's based on experience and perspective, and that sort of thing. And so my mission, again, with these last quarter or third of my life is to keep the skills alive, and the people that are interested in learning that are midwives. And I think midwives are the future of women's childbearing care because OB's are creating their own obsolescence. You mentioned something earlier about an OB being an expert in high risk pregnancy, and I would tell you they're not. OB's are trained to not be experts in high risk pregnancy. OB's are trained to be dependent, maternal fetal medicine doctors who are the ones teaching OBs in in medical school and residency. Who are the professors? Who are the they're the MFMs. So what what they're doing is they're creating a a marketing tool. They're sending out OBs out there to find things to send them for referrals to make money. Because when I was a when I was a doctor, I used an, a maternal fetal medicine doctor very rarely. You know, I was trained to do my own ultrasounds. I did my own amniocentesis when it was necessary. I was trained to do all those things. I was trained to take care of a diabetic when she was pregnant or a hypothyroid woman when she was pregnant. That's what you learned in residency. You learned all things pregnancy. Now doctors are taught that if a woman has any of those things I just said, you need to refer them to an MFM. And I don't think that any woman in the medicalized birth model these days gets through her pregnancy without being at least labeled with as something that's high risk or or seeing a maternal fetal medicine specialist, which are supposed to be very narrow specialty. Very, very narrow specialty. Alright. So one of the things that I talk about with about breech birth, which is something that's that goes along this line, is that breech birth is a specific skill that an obstetrician should have. If an obstetrician doesn't have that skill, they are not what I would call a complete obstetrician. So, if you have an internal medicine doctor who finds somebody who's got unstable angina in their heart, that doctor then refers that person to a cardiologist. Right? That make sense? If a pediatrician finds a a kid that has some very weird rash, that pediatrician will send that kid to a dermatologist, probably a pediatric dermatologist. Right? Okay. So an obstetrician has a woman comes into his practice who's got twins or breech. They're not an expert in twins or breech. Why are they keeping those patients in their practice? Why aren't they sending them to an expert in breach or twin delivery? And they're saying, well, we're sending them to an MFM. Well, the MFM isn't an expert in breach or twin delivery either. They're an expert in scaring women that with twins that they have to have multiple ultrasounds, and sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, but they don't differentiate because all twins are put on an algorithm. You know, if you have mono mono twins, you have to be delivered by thirty two weeks. If you have mono di twins, you have to be delivered by thirty six to thirty seven weeks. And if you have die die twins by thirty eight weeks, it's like none of that's true. Zero of what I just said is true. And yet that is the algorithm. That is a standard. That is what comes out of Harvard University, the Brigham and Women's Hospital. That's their standard. And and who's gonna go against Harvard? 

Speaker 0

Right. So twin delivery is also a dying art art form, just like breech delivery. 

Speaker 1

Right. Seventy five percent of twins in the United States are delivered by cesarean section. And by the way, ten percent of the remaining twenty five percent have a vaginal delivery for twin a and then have a c section for twin b, because the person doesn't know how to get reach up and pull out a second twin that might be in trouble. Right. So why are they taking care of twins in the first place? 

Speaker 0

Would that be for a monochorionic twin that they would do that? They would No. 

Speaker 1

It could be any di di twins, any twins. First twin comes out head down, and the second twin turns sideways or breach, and they panic, and they don't know what to do. And this is a skill that I teach in, in my class, how to reach up inside and pull grab the baby's feet and pull the baby out and pull the baby down and out, and having the maneuvers to do it. And you can do that literally in twenty seconds as opposed to taking a woman to the operating room and taking fifteen or twenty minutes to get the second baby out and then scarring the woman and making any future pregnancies more difficult for her, and yet these obstetricians don't know how to do that, and yet they keep these women in their care. If if a doctor who doesn't know how to do breech delivery or doesn't know how to do breech extraction finds out a woman has twins at ten weeks pregnant, here's what he or she should say to them. Wow. This is really exciting. Congratulations. I'm so happy for you. I'm not the person that should be taking care of you, however, and I'm gonna send you to so and so who does, you know, who's really skilled in vaginal delivery of twins. Right? But they don't. That's an ego thing. Or maybe they just never thought about it. Maybe they just think that they're the expert, but they're not the expert because they're afraid. And they send and they'll and they'll they'll they won't they won't scratch their nose without getting, a maternal fetal medicine consult. I was gonna say scratch something else, but I'm trying to be polite. Right? Yeah. It's exhausting, isn't it? 

Speaker 0

I mean, it it is, and it's my 

Speaker 1

I'm sorry to exhaust your audience. I've exhausted your audience before for an hour. 

Speaker 0

It's it's incredibly for me, it's incredibly stimulating. And it's also it's also it feels like one of my students in the doula training say, like, I just feel like we're trying to run water uphill sometimes when we're trying to create a a container or a space for women to be in a more autonomous way of being, you know, and to get them the information that they need to make more informed decisions. It feels like such a battle. And I said, well, it's just one woman at a time. We each have a small petri dish, and it's just about revealing options. And, you know, for women to feel that they're in freedom of choice because they are. Like, we have these self created presence. We feel like we can't choose differently, but we can. We just need to know what's possible. So these conversations are incredibly important. 

Speaker 1

Yeah. You know, I've I've made a list of questions that women should interview when they talk to their OB for the first time. I put it I I'm I'm putting the we're gonna put it on our Patreon segment eventually, but or Patreon page, but, but I I've made a list of questions that are just simple questions. If you want, I can rattle off some of them to you. And again, what I would tell women, who are looking for an OB or an obstetrician or a midwife for that matter, but don't just go there because that person's been doing your Pap smear for a decade. You need to ask more questions than that. And at your first OB visit, it should be an interview, and it should be you interviewing them, not them interviewing you. You should not be going through an entire history with them. You should not be letting them take your blood pressure or draw blood on you. You should be going there, interviewing them, and asking them certain questions to find out if you're comfortable with this person being the one that's taking care of you. And it depends on what your priorities are. And again, my questions kind of lead toward my vision of what birth should be like. But let me pull it up and let me let me just read it off to you here. These are some of them. They're not in any they're not in any particular order. What is your policy if I go past forty weeks? Forty one weeks. How do you feel about induction? Are you comfortable with a breech baby at term? Do you think age thirty five is significant? If so, why do you think that? And then what are the actual risks of me being thirty five? Not the relative risks, the actual risks. Are you comfortable with me declining certain tests, like diabetes screening or GBS, or some, some ultrasounds? What is your policy and concerns if my water were to break at term before labor? What is your habit regarding vaginal exams? Can I labor and deliver in any position? How do you feel about intermittent or continuous fetal monitoring? Are you willing to deliver twins vag naturally? What about if either or both are breach? What's your policy about me eating in labor? How do you feel about me having a doula? How long can I delay cord clamping? So these are just just getting started with the list. 

Speaker 0

I know. We're just getting started. 

Speaker 1

And things to ask your doctor. Now here's a good here's a good red flag, thanks to my Down to Birth podcast friends. If your doctor starts to roll their eyes, if their doctor says, I, you know, I don't have time to do this right now, or looks like they wanna have one foot out the door, take them for what they, you know, they're telling you what they think of you. So believe them, and and go elsewhere. If they're not gonna give you the time of day to answer simple questions like this, they're not gonna give you the time of day to answer more complicated questions as your pregnancy progresses. These are not long these these questions don't require long answers. 

Speaker 0

I think the challenging part about asking these questions is that it might mean there isn't a physician available for this woman. Right? And that might mean coming into contact with something deeper that the woman has to contend with, which is an out of hospital birth. And what does that mean for her? You know? So it's a journey. It's it's a really it's a beautiful journey, but it can reveal a lot to us. Right? 

Speaker 1

Right. But you have to put the effort into it. And I, I, and I would tell women actually to ask these questions of their OB before they're even pregnant at one of your gynecology visits. If you have, you know, you go in for, some sort of, again, routine visits are not necessary either, but say you're still going in for your routine GYN visit, ask these questions, do some research, investigate your community. If you're gonna move, by the way, we always investigate schools, playgrounds, you know, do they have a Costco? You know, that sort of thing. We look, you know, we look. But we we we often don't look at, like, what's the hospital like there? What's the labor do they have a labor and delivery unit? What's their c section rate at the hospital? Maybe even go visit. If you're gonna have kids and you're gonna raise in that neighborhood, maybe go visit the charge nurse and talk to the nurses in labor and delivery as part of your, you know, interviewing process. It's not and and and maybe put some money aside for it as well. You know, everybody's heard the wedding analogy by now where you save money and pay a fortune for your wedding and you get to pick out everything that you want. You pick out the cake, the color of the napkins, you invite, people you like, you pick the venue and all that stuff and, you know, but for your birth, which is the probably more important event in your life, you did relegate that to a third party payer. And you would never do that for your wedding, and so why do we do it for our birth? 

Speaker 0

Well, I've noticed that we focus a lot on the conception itself. Right? We many of us go through the entire rigmarole of IVF. We kinda pay some attention to the pregnancy. We wanna check out for the birth, and then we expect that we'll just have a baby, you know, after it's all said and done. And there are so many points in this rite of passage. Right? There's the conception itself. There's preparation for the conception, the conception itself, the pregnancy, the birth, and then the postpartum and going into the beautiful journey of parenting. So there is this desire to wanna check out, can I just get can I just get pregnant and then get the baby? Put everything in between. There's too much self reflection. There's too many choices to make. It's too scary. It's too painful. And so are you saying, you know, over the decades of your of your practice and doing this work, have you seen that there is a direct relationship between the way the woman approaches her pregnancy and birth to postpartum depression and the way she experiences her early parenting journey? 

Speaker 1

Of course. I couldn't quantify that for you, but I I I just know that that how a person is treated, whether it's in pregnancy or whether it's at a restaurant or whether it's a dating app matters. It matters to, to how you perceive things and how you, how you respond when you're treated with dignity and respect. Even if somebody tells you that, they disagree with you, you can have a respectful conversation. I mean, a great example of that is my podcast. Alright. Bliss and I disagree on a lot of subjects, and yet we're able to come together because we have a higher mission deep respect for each other that transcends the pettiness that that can happen between two people who, you know, one watches CNN, one watches Fox, and they can, those people can't have a conversation about anything. So how you're treated matters to how you respond and how you may very well have, you know, suppressed feelings, which may very well turn into depression or anxiety or sleep disorders or whatever else, because you because they, they manifest in many different ways in different people. And everybody deals with those things in their own their own way that we've all grown up with different, you know, influences upon us. And so we there's no one size fits all. And that really bothers, by the way, the medical model, which loves algorithms. They love to put all diabetics into one category or all twins into one category. And they're not. Every individual twin mom is a different story. But the system doesn't give the doctors and nurses the time to investigate that individual story because the middlemen need to make more money. It's always about the money, Ayla. It's always about the money. 

Speaker 0

I see it everywhere I turn with everything that's going on out there right now. So 

Speaker 1

Yep. It is. I mean, why why do food companies take out some of the toxic stuff when they sell food in England or Canada, but they put it in our food here in the United States? Why why don't they just give us all the good food if there is such a thing? You know, why why would they do that? 

Speaker 0

And why is it prohibited in certain countries to advertise pharmaceuticals on the TV? And here, it's like every second commercial during, you know, Olympics or Super Bowl. 

Speaker 1

Well, you know why that you know you know what that is, though. I don't know if you've heard me talk about this, but that's basically money laundering. 

Speaker 0

I haven't heard you talk about it, but Well, 

Speaker 1

let me give you let me let's make this last thing because I gotta I'm gonna have to wrap up. But this is a fact think about this for a second. They advertise on TV on you know, with these drugs, by the way, and the commercial format is always the same. It's some woman or old couple or man, you know, playing tennis with their grandchild. And then suddenly something's wrong and they they grasp their chest and or they, you know, or their breath is bad, or who knows what it is. They got heartburn or whatever. And, then they talk about all the side effects in rapid fire speech about the bloody diarrhea and, and all the things you shouldn't be doing. And then they show the same person now playing Frisbee or tennis with his grandson again, and everything is just great. That's the format. But the drug is a drug that you can't even pronounce. Look at the names of the drugs a business, this vulgar drug. No. They're not gonna remember that drug. And nobody goes into their doctor's office saying, tell me about that drug that I can't pronounce and I can't spell. Now what's happening here is that these drug companies are sponsoring these television shows, these news shows, these sports shows with with advertising revenue, huge amounts of advertising revenue. You watch CNN and you watch every commercial every other commercial is bought from a drug company. And then suddenly you say there's a bad story about a drug, and the company says the pharmaceutical company says to CNN, I'm picking on CNN, but says to CNN, if you run that story, we're gonna pull out our advertising. Now if you make ninety percent of your advertising from big pharma, you can't afford to have that happen. So you kill the story. It's the same thing with journals. Who pays for the journals? Pharmaceutical companies do. You think they're going to publish an article that's anti pharmaceutical product in the journal? Very unlikely to do that. It happens once in a while, I don't know how, but it's really rare. So So you have to find them in these international journals or these online journals or these, these public access journals because the main journals like New England Journal of Medicine or Lancet are not gonna publish articles that go against what their benefactor tells them they don't want. So by putting these things on that's why it should be off the television. It should be that it's it's influence peddling is what it is. And only United States and New Zealand have it. Every other country in the world, you cannot advertise direct to consumer for for drugs. I mean, we we we got rid of hard liquor, advertisements, I mean, for a long time. I think they're back now, but for a while you couldn't advertise hard liquor. But I think I think I think I've seen, like, vodka commercials and 

Speaker 0

I haven't had a TV in so many years. I don't know, but I did watch the Olympics a little bit here and there. 

Speaker 1

I'm just saying that that that there's no way that this television advertising, the way they do it, is to get somebody to go to their doctor and say, I want that unpronounceable drug, and I want it now. 

Speaker 0

This has been incredibly illuminating, and it's always such a pleasure to hang out with you. I I feel like, you know, I feel like you're such a a friend, and we've never even met in person, but that's the that's the the age we're in. Right? So I hope that soon I can make it out to Utah and or we can connect somewhere. And 

Speaker 1

Yeah. Where are you again? I forgot. 

Speaker 0

In Miami. 

Speaker 1

Oh, Oh, yeah. That's right. You're in Florida. 

Speaker 0

I forgot. Yeah. Yeah. 

Speaker 1

Oh, you're in Miami? Not Fort Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale. 

Speaker 0

Yeah. I just yeah. Fort Lauderdale. I've been in Miami for fourteen years, from LA, you know, originally. But, yeah, Fort Lauderdale. 

Speaker 1

Well, come, you know, come to one of my seminars or if I ever get to Florida for one, I'll make sure that we hook up. 

Speaker 0

Of course. Thank you so much. 

Speaker 1

I I love what I'm doing. I I really love the fact that I now have really no masters. I can advocate for what I want. I'm still licensed in two states. I'm still a member of ACOG, you know, it's like the whole thing about that way. I get their emails and I can see what they're doing. And, and sometimes it's really, upsetting. There's a, I got one today that was rather upsetting. I can't pull it up because I can't use my clicker, but, but, yeah. So I it keeps me, engaged with them. But I I think that that we are making a change, whether it's one family at a time or it's one small group at a time or a bunch of midwives that are trained at a time. And and the pressure will have to it will come to the organized medical community. They will eventually see that their product is no longer desirable anymore, and they'll have to do something. And initially what they'll do is they'll push back, because no tyrant ever just decided to get to hang up their shingle and I mean hang up their shoes and quit. You know, they always push back harder at first, but eventually they fail, and the system will fail. Unfortunately, I don't know if it'll fail fast enough to save the next generation of women and children, but we'll we'll see. We're trying. 

Speaker 0

Thank you so much for what you do every day for all the women and families that you are supporting and educating and you're changing lives. So thank you. Thank you so much. And I will share all of your info here in the show notes so people can listen to your podcast, follow you, get in touch with you, do your trainings, which I am still waiting to do, but I will soon, God willing. Thank you. 

Speaker 1

Well, thank you for having me. 

Speaker 0

Bye.