The Hidden Dangers of Hospital Births
Many traditions throughout history have come to view the prenatal period and childbirth as one of the most important moments in a human’s life as it sets the stage for all that follows
Unfortunately, much in the same way we desecrate the death process by over-medicalizing it (to the point research has found doctors are less likely to seek end of life care at a medical facility), the same issue also exists with childbirth.
Many physicians I know who are familiar with the hospital birthing process chose to skip it and give birth at home (along with many more doctors featured in a 2016 documentary).
Conversely, a minority of childbirths do need advanced medical care, and for those mothers, access to a hospital greatly benefits them, particularly if actions are taken to mitigate the most dangerous aspects of hospital birth.
As such, childbirth occupies a similar place as many other medical controversies; neither side of the issue is entirely correct. However, the discussion remains perpetually polarized because advocates on either side will not acknowledge the valid points raised by the other side for fear of weakening their own position.
Since I feel strongly about the dangers of hospital birth, it is my hope in this article that I will be able to portray both sides of the issue fairly.
Note: I feel one of the most destructive trends in our society has been the devaluation of motherhood (e.g., when I last visited China, it was striking how much more respect and consideration they gave to pregnant women) and children. Beyond new life being necessary for the viability of our society, it often ends up being the most transformative and fulfilling experience in a parent’s life. Yet, so much of our societal messaging encourages us to shun that path and put our hearts into other things. In parallel, a general disconnect has been fostered upon this entire process where it is treated as a sterile, lifeless, and mechanistic event we need to be separated from and entrust to someone else—which I believe is the ultimate problem that underlies many of the issues that will be discussed in this article.
The History of Midwifery
A lot of the dysfunctional things that have come to characterize the birthing process (e.g., unnecessary hospital interventions that create complications begetting more hospital interventions) make much more sense once you understand the history behind them and how childbirth was transformed from a natural human life-event to a medical emergency requiring those interventions.
From the start of America, midwives were highly valued in colonial communities, receiving housing, food, land, and salary for their services (particularly since they also served as nurses, herbalists, and veterinarians).
Then, during the 1800s, midwives played a key role in the westward expansion, particularly in the Mormon migration to Utah, but by the early 1900s, a variety of social factors (e.g., economic pressure and societal prejudices) caused midwifery’s reputation to decline.
Much of this was due to male doctors (who had initially been averse to delivering babies) displacing midwives. This began in the late 1700s when it became fashionable in Europe to have doctors attend deliveries, after which an influential Harvard professor (and its first profession of obstetrics) convinced his American colleagues to enter, for example in 1820 stating:
Women seldom forget a practitioner who has conducted them tenderly and safely through parturition they feel a familiarity with him, a confidence and reliance upon him which is of the most essential mutual advantage. . . . It is principally on this account that the practice of midwifery becomes desirable to physicians. It is this which ensures to them the permanency and security of all their other business.
Once doctors entered the field of midwifery, it quickly became necessary to justify their “expertise” and a gradual medicalization of childbirth began.
Dr. Joseph DeLee (who later became known as the father of obstetrics), in 1895, opened Chicago’s first obstetric clinic, and since it was successful, opened an obstetrics hospital which also trained doctors and nurses and developed lifesaving innovations (e.g., incubators for premature infants) which lowered the childbirth mortality rate.
Simultaneously however, because DeLee observed so many complications and deaths from childbirth, he was of the opinion that natural childbirth was extremely dangerous for both the mother and child, and hence needed to be medicalized.
In turn, he spoke actively (e.g., at a 1915 professional meeting) against the use of midwives, arguing they lowered the standards of the profession, and were childbirth to be seen as a more dignified profession, higher fees could be charged, and more doctors would be willing to replace midwives.
Following this (like many zealots), in 1920, he argued that the approaches he had developed for challenging pregnancies (e.g., forceps, episiotomy, toxic anesthetics) should be used for most of them, while other doctors argued these approaches were too aggressive in many of the situations where DeLee advocated for them.
However, due to his growing influence in the profession and success in making childbirth a part of the medical curriculum (in part due to how many doctors he trained) by the 1930s, his standardized invasive approaches became increasingly popular, particularly since society had become enamored with advanced technology improving things.
Finally, near the end of his career (in 1933), due to increasing maternal deaths and complications from hospital infections, he became an advocate for cleaner maternity wards, which met significant resistance from his colleagues (although not as severe as what Ignaz Semmelweis faced almost a century in Austria for pointing out that doctors not disinfection their hands was routinely killing mothers).
From one perspective, I can greatly sympathize with where DeLee came from, as significant issues needed to be addressed (e.g., in 1913, the infant mortality rate was 13.2%). However, he failed to recognize many of them were due to the abhorrent living conditions of the time (which as I show here were also the primary driver behind the incredibly high mortality from infectious diseases).
At the same time however, some of his approaches (e.g., making women partially unconscious during labor and then pulling the babies out with forceps) were abhorrent (and explicitly detailed within his classic 1920 paper), and set the stage for a variety of other harmful and unnecessary interventions to hijack the childbirth process.
Worse still, he seeded the idea within the medical profession that childbirth was inherently pathologic and required a doctor to save the mother and child—despite the fact for most of human history, we had not needed them.
Likewise, the maternal death rate was actually the highest between 1900-1930 (when DeLee’s practices came into vogue), and it was only after years of deaths and mistakes that the standard of care began being improved and maternal deaths declined.
Nonetheless, even now, over a century later, the United States still has a significant issue with these deaths (which is particularly noteworthy as during the period below, those deaths were declining in the other wealthy nations).
Note: another controversial doctor James Marion Sims, who in 1845 began experimental gynecological surgeries on black slaves (without anesthesia—and operated on some individuals up to 30 times) and after roughly 4 years of work, perfected the surgeries enough to use them on white women (with anesthesia) after which, in the 1850s, he opened the first women’s hospital (which was mired in controversy due to how barbaric some of his procedures were, their high fatality rate, and some of the unnecessary brain surgeries he did on black children). Nonetheless, he became one of the most famous doctors in the country (e.g., he was the 1876 president of the AMA) and is considered to be the father of gynecology.
At the exact same time DeLee’s work occurred, a variety of federal and state initiatives recognized that the incredibly high infant and maternal mortality rates were connected, and that appropriate prenatal care could prevent them (e.g., Mother’s Day was created at this time to provide maternal support to prevent those deaths).
Simultaneously, a debate known as the “Midwife Problem” unfolded, with some (e.g., doctors) advocating for the abolition of midwifery (largely to shield themselves from competition) and others supporting it with proper training and licensing (as they felt midwives could play a critical role in preventing deaths if utilized correctly).
Laws were passed in some states (e.g., those that simply did not have enough doctors to attend childbirths) to regulate midwifery, and schools were created to improve midwifery standards. However, by the 1930s, the increased use of hospitals for deliveries made it possible to close many of these schools.
However, a 1921 Federal law provided for training nurse midwives, and in 1931 (owing to the increasing recognition of the failures of American obstetric care), a successful nurse midwifery school emerged (which amongst other things, had a maternal mortality rate of one-tenth that of the country).
Their graduates then created numerous schools and created the modern discipline of nurse midwifery.
Note: in parallel, the Frontier Nursing Service (founded in 1925 by a British trained midwife) trained nurses and provided extensive midwifery (and medical care) to the woefully underserved inhabitants of the Appalachians, which ultimately resulted in a far lower maternal death rate (roughly one third as much as the rest of the country). In turn, when many of its nurses returned to England at the start of World War 2, they also created a successful nurse midwifery program there as well.
Following this, in the 1940s and 1950s, due to limited existing opportunities to practice clinical midwifery, most of the graduates of these programs had to fill other obstetric related roles, and ultimately only a quarter served as midwives.
In the 1960s, a variety of attempts were made to address this (e.g., having them work at hospitals where 70 percent of the births were taking place), and it was not until 1968 that more opportunities began to emerge (due to one school finding a way to integrate with New York’s medical system).
Shortly after, a variety of rapid shifts occurred (e.g., key professional organizations endorsed nurse-midwifery, feminism came into vogue, the media promoting midwifery, federal funding for it, an explosion of childbirths from the baby boomers coming of age that the existing system could not accommodate) which propelled midwifery into the mainstream.
In turn, many doctors began partnering with midwives, programs became officially recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, and public demand for midwife supervised home births exploded.
This increased demand quickly exceeded the available supply, after which there was a rapid proliferation of non-nurse midwives (lay midwives) with highly variable degrees of training (who had their first national meeting in 1977).
By the 1980s, nurse-midwives were present throughout the healthcare system, and a split developed in the medical community between obstetricians who recognized their value and worked with them versus those who viewed them as economic competition that needed to be eliminated (particularly because there was now an overabundance of obstetricians).
Since then, midwifery has faced additional obstacles from the medical system but has continued to develop. Mixed opinions exist within the obstetrics field towards midwifery, and its accessibility varies.
Since the 1990s, approximately 1% of births have been at home (although recently it suddenly increased to 1.5%).
Note: this abridged history necessarily omits the immense struggles countless incredibly dedicated midwives went through to make midwifery available to the public or just how much that work approved the abysmal obstetric care that existed throughout the country and the human cost that came with it.
Prenatal Ultrasounds
Much in the same way vaccines are believed to be “safe and effective” from the start of their training doctors are always taught that ultrasound is harmless, and its only flaw is that the images it provides are “operator dependent.” This, I believe, accounts for why the most controversial and attacked article I have ever written here was the one on that topic.
My initial doubts about ultrasound arose from an inherent skepticism I have towards absolutist dogmas (e.g., 100% safe), and these early doubts were quickly affirmed after I received a practice echocardiogram that “did not feel good” in my heart (suggesting it was not “inert”—much in the same way numerous forms of [higher dose] therapeutic ultrasound now exist, which by definition are not “inert”).
Later, I learned through Robert Mendelsohn (a maverick doctor who was a key source of inspiration for me) that ultrasound was phased in to replace prenatal X-rays (which had severe health consequences for infants but nonetheless took the medical profession nearly a century to phase out).
Following this, literature and review articles (and then later articles by holistic midwives) gradually accumulated showing that ultrasound (in a dose dependent manner):
•Caused genetic damage and cancer.
•Damaged cellular structures and initiated cell death.
•Caused organ damage, nerve damage, behavioral impairments, and congenital malformations in animals.
In parallel, I:
•Noticed fetuses would consistently move (and sometimes try to move away from) “inert” prenatal ultrasounds (which is well-recognized in the scientific literature).
•Saw a few cases of distraught patients in the ER who were miscarrying who stated “I don’t understand how this is happening, my OB looked at my baby today and said he/she was completely healthy” (and then gradually found literature showing ultrasounds increased the risk of miscarriages).
•Learned (much later) through Dietrich Klinghardt that the uterus concentrates EMFs inside it 20-fold (which, if you ascribe to a spiritual view of embryology, makes sense), again suggesting caution may be required for prenatal ultrasounds.
Note: when I asked Klinghardt for a reference for this, he stated that it came from Wolfgang Maes (the father of the institute of building biology in Germany and Florida) but I was never able to find the exact paper (nor was Klinghardt as the computer it was on was lost).
Sadly, while this used to be a topic of controversy (e.g., in 1983, CNN aired a critical 11 minute program on ultrasounds), due to how large this industry is, the last (tepid) mainstream criticism I ever saw was a brief 2015 segment by USA today.
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here midwesterndoctor.com
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